First time renting help needed

Talk

Hi there!
My boyfriend and I moved into our first home in May and I was worried too but if you work out what your income will be, and what your outgoings will be you should be fine.
My boyfriend works full time and brings home about £870 a month after tax, ish. I don't currently work (34 weeks pregnant!).
We moved into an unfurnished 2 bed house which is £375 a month. Our council tax is £70 a month, although our first payment was £100 so you might need to budget for it being a little higher at first.
Our gas and electric is dual fuel with british gas and is £65 a month until something like November where it will then be reassessed. That breaks down into £35 gas and £30 electric.
Our water is just under £30 a month.
We don't watch any live TV so we do not pay a tv license, but if you do you will need to take this into account.
We have fibre optic internet with virgin, without a phone line, and we pay £22.50 a month for that. Although our first 3 months were £17.50. We were also referred by family so we did not pay an installation fee, and the family member received £50 off their bill!
We have netflix which is £6 a month.
What else...hmm..we tend to allow about £200 a month for groceries which includes food for the cat.

In all the time we were looking for somewhere to rent I never once saw anywhere with bills in, and funnily enough none of the places we looked at were furnished either. We picked most things up second hand and didn't spend a fortune so it might be something worth considering.

You'll might be eligible for some LHA and council tax reduction, so that might be worth looking into, there are plenty of online calculators to look at and you can work it into your budget.

How long is left on the phone contract? That would be something I would try to reduce if possible. We use giffgaff where we get free calls and texts to each other for 3 months whenever we top up and £5 a month each is plenty of us on their hokey cokey goodybag, but we are light users.

It's good that you have guarantors because you will probably need them, we did!

Get working on a spreadsheet!

xx