Mid 20s single mum drowning in debt

Mrsn

Trust me when I say no one is judging you. We are human and we all make mistakes, please stop beating yourself up about this and feel encouraged by the fact you are taking steps to make a positive change. The only thing that really jumps out to me from your SOA is the grocery section. We are a family of 2 adults and 2 children and we spend roughly 220 a month. I know things are hard but meal planning, using your left overs and cooking from scratch will save a lot of money. There’s a group on Facebook called feed your family for £20 a week and they are amazing with tips, meal plans and ideas. Hopefully by making tweaks with this it can save you some money to help towards the increased childcare

HampshireH

It would be helpful if your rent was added in.

You say its covered by UC is that before the amount of benefits you have put in?

Also no water bills? No TV licence? Council tax is amazingly low.

Areas you could trim?

£340 for food. For you a primary child (i presume?) And a 1 year old. This is higher than my shopping bill for 2 adults. Use aldi/lidl and you could significantly reduce this.

£45 phone. You could be on a £6 sim only

Contents insurance - shop around and use cashback sites

£10 dry cleaning? Do you really need this?
£60 entertainments - again this could be lower
£15 a month hair cuts. If you stretch this to 6-8 weeks you would have a saving

Your car is your biggest expense and expensive. If you have had it less that a year I am surprised you passed their credit checks for finance. However it is worth exploring the option to downsize/hand it back. Was it brand new? What do you use the car for? A runaround would be cheaper albeit not so shiny on the driveway.

Just make sure if you do get a cheaper car that its sound and isn't going to breakdown on the way home

Re childcare. Do you think your family would be more willing to help if they understood why?

*may have cross posted as took a while to type out*

Valetudo

Dry cleaning seems an unusual experience for someone not currently working. Can you just wear clothes that can be machine washed for now? That's £120 a year saved and nothing sold or gone without.

With kids clothes, because of how quickly they grow out of them, especially under 3 years old, primark/ASDA basics for the kids would save you a lot of money potentially. I've found they make it to the age changeover, with some life left but not much. The designer/expensive stuff could do another year, but there isn't someone to wear it so I've wasted the money.

Your phone bill is big. I have an android smartphone with unlimited minutes, 5gb data and unlimited texts for £22. I had 1gb and 500 minutes for £16 but recently swapped over to paying a bit more for the extra data.

Groceries and petrol seem high. I do 1000 miles a month and fuel costs £150 (I have a diesel). Can you do more things on the same driving trip to save fuel? E.g. combining shopping and outing trips to save a few miles here and there. If it costs 12p a mile or whatever it costs for your car then every mile not driven is 12p saved.

Your gas and electric for example are low though. So it's not all high.

I think also if you're used to spending a lot on store cards, you'll need to adapt to not being able to order those things, because the accessibility of credit and being able to have nice things has been there up until now. But really, it's quite liberating saving money on things and gets quite addictive.

KxMx

I'd suggest keeping a spending diary. Every penny you spend in cash or on card.

After several weeks you can see where money is actually going, as opposed to where you think it is going.

Then you can budget accordingly.