Can't balance the books HELP!

Chrisblue1962

Though most employers paid weekly or monthly straight into your bank these days...

Is there any way you could ask your employer to pay you calendar monthly rather than 4-weekly? If you explained to them that 4-weekly pay causes real difficulties, they may be sympathetic? Just an idea...

jfdi

Chrisblue1962 wrote: »

Though most employers paid weekly or monthly straight into your bank these days...

Is there any way you could ask your employer to pay you calendar monthly rather than 4-weekly? If you explained to them that 4-weekly pay causes real difficulties, they may be sympathetic? Just an idea...

Or alternatively (if you can, financially) use the 4 week income as a monthly figure for your main financial planning (as per the spreadsheet) & work it so the '13th month' falls when a large expense is due? (season ticket etc).

Ben84

The main questions I believe you need to answer are where does your money go and can you reduce some of these outgoings? It might seem odd to ask yourself where does your money go, but everyone I know who has sat down and calculated from memory (even with the help of receipts) what they have bought in the past week for example, discovers a significant unaccounted for gap. We tend to spend in frequent small amounts, but these do add up and we often don't have a real appreciation of the long term costs of spending habits. A couple of pound on a coffee here and there doesn't seem like much, nor does a few bus tickets or takeaways, or even £15 a month on the telephone or your weekly newspapers/magazines, but it all becomes more significant when you ask what do these things cost each year and what percentage of your income are they?

A spending diary that's filled in each day should answer the question, then you can weigh up the value of spending habits and consider ways to spend less on them too.

I'm not against the idea of spending on things we enjoy or value, but how we view these things does change when we look at their total costs over longer periods of time. Counting it all up can seem very fastidious, but it's just a data gathering exercise that means you have a full understanding of how you spend. I'll almost guarantee you that there will be a few times when you think, I spend that much on that one thing each month/year!

ceecee31

I totally agree with everything Ben84 has said in his last post. It's all the little things you tend to fritter money away on that add up to considerable amounts when you total them up.

I was forever leaving my packed lunch at home, or not bothering to make one, thinking I would buy a sandwich at work. When I actually thought about how much I was spending on this every day, it really opened my eyes. £5 a day at least, when I could have brought everything from home, totalled £25 a week, £100 a month!!

Scary!

DrSqueeze

ceecee31 wrote: »

I was forever leaving my packed lunch at home, or not bothering to make one, thinking I would buy a sandwich at work. When I actually thought about how much I was spending on this every day, it really opened my eyes. £5 a day at least, when I could have brought everything from home, totalled £25 a week, £100 a month!!

That's so true!

I once worked out, roughly, that I could make my own sandwiches (with equivalent ingredients) for less than a third of the amount I was paying for supermarket sandwiches.

dancingfairy

Hi - I think 1) I'd do a full SOA to see if you should be able to pay all your bills o.k or not, 2) do a spending diary to identify any gaps but a 4 week month sounds like a pain and I can see why it would cause problems. I think you need to be really organised and plan everything through to see exactly where you will be each month to cope with this- try and plan a few months in advance so you can see where you might have hitches and can plan around them.
Best of Luck
df