Giving every £ a job

Franalamadingdong

Well done. I'm a zero road tax person too. Mostly because it's a toy car. Haha. I do insurance and MOT end of March and service in the winter/late autumn. It does mean I've chucked £200 this month and last month into my car pot, but future months will (thankfully) be less. It'll be good for you to start a car pot now knowing insurance will be in August.

lucielle

I agree pots are the way forwards.
L

Blackcats

Very relieved to be able to log in and also pleased to find my diary on the revamped forum. 

it seems quite hard to actually start the savings pots because of lack of funds, obviously because I didn't have a pot in the first place.  I think I'll start car pot next month .  I will pay my water bill in full at the end of this month and start pots for the next bill by saving over 2 months ready for the next bill which means I will then be ok for future quarterly bills.  Makes sense to me even if I haven't explained it very well.  Any other tips for getting started with saving s pots?

PurpleFairy26

I found just getting started with the pots is the first step. It can seem so daunting when you know your not going to have enough for the bill that it might not be worth starting but once you are a year in, you’ll be glad you did. I started with about 3 pots and now am up to about 10. One of the best things I ever did. 

Blackcats

thank you Purplefairy - very reassuring.  I was in danger of an "all or nothing" approach meaning if I couldn't start with exactly the right amounts in each pots then I wouldn't get started at all.
i have also started to try and develop a new mindset, moving myself from a deficit to a dividend way of thinking.  So instead of thinking that I can't buy shower gel etc and that this is somehow a bad thing, I will re-frame that to being happy that I have so much shower gel that I can divert my money to savings or other things that I do actually need.  On that basis, I've decided to set a realistic but challenging budget for eating out this month.  It's an area that I spend a lot on and it's nice to do but my spending is too high and lower spending over a year will make a huge difference if the money is diverted to savings.  

A task for this week is to look at my tv package and see if I can make any savings.  It's been too easy to just keep using what I've got and paying what it costs but I think I am paying too much and I'm now much more keen to keep as much of my money as I can.  

foxgloves

Hi Blackcats,
I think with Savings Pots, you just need to get started. If it is nasty car bills which would be most likely to make a hole in your budget, then start with a car pot & get that one built up. I used to try & pay set amounts of cash into our 6 pots (I've recently moved to a different Pots system now they're proven to work for us) so Car Pot would get £50, Clothes would get £40, Holidays £40, etc, & when there was sufficient funds in clothing to deal with say, both of us needing DMs or a coat at the same time, I'd divert the monthly clothes cash to a different pot. There were some lean months when I was only able to pay 2 or 3 pots and an occasional really stinky month when I didn't pay any. Even small payments are better than nothing because it all adds up.
When I was Spendy, I repeatedly told myself (& fully believed) that I didn't earn enough to save. Of course that was complete cobblers because if I'd saved just half of what I frittered, I'd have had a very decent emergency fund indeed. Even in very modest saving terms, just £20 a month would have provided a nice little chunk to help me a little over the Christmas spendy season of goodwill & bad sequins.
So I think I'd say just to prioritise the categories where back up Pot Money would be most useful & start to build those.
Agree that diverting money from unnecessary spends on items you already have at home into your Savings Pots would be a Very Moneysaving Idea Indeed. 
F x

maggiem

I'm really interested in the concept of saving 'pots' - apologies Blackcats for hijacking! I had an Intelligent Finance account with different pots which worked brilliantly but the interest rate is now dreadful. Those of you with 'pots' - do you save into one interest bearing account but show the different pots in a spreadsheet or have others worked out a better method with less derisory rates of interest?  

Hope you don't mind the query BC. 

Blackcats

Thank you Foxgloves for your wise words.   I think that by faffing around and making excuses that I haven't got enough money to start a pot, I'm just distracting myself from the task in hand and giving myself the opportunity to delay until another, unspecified, date.  

Maggiem, you aren't hijacking at all, it's a very good question.  As you can tell, I am not an expert but I'm planning to start by using an NSI account to accumulate 1 pot that I will keep a record of the various categories in.  My current account has the option for a savings account but the interest rate is really low and for me it's too tempting and too easy to move the money with the click of a mouse to my current account to spend on unrelated things.  Eventually I like the idea of having separate very specific pots.

foxgloves

That's pretty much how our current revised & improved version!) of Savings Pots works. I do use the savings account attached to our current account. The interest is atrocious, but if I had a large amount in any of my pots, I'd simply top-slice it & park the money in the account in which we have our emergency fund. I like being able to move money promptly & easily to & from our current account. Our savings pots money only gets used for appropriate mutually agreed spending. I do sometimes get tempted but I wouldn't self-sabotage in order to use those funds to buy unnecessary shiny things. That is the behaviour which led me into decades of debt. It isn't a path I would choose again.
We always say that the 'small things' add up, Blackcats. Just £10 a month into a Clothes Pot is £120 this time next year. Double it if you can afford £20 per month. But this is one of those pots which will build up best if you can have a year or so wearing the clothes you already own & trying new combinations to shop different outfits from home.
I do like the pots system but it can take a few tweaks to get it working optimally. 
F x

Blackcats

Your wisdom is much appreciated Foxgloves.  The "self sabotaging for shiny things" message really resonated with me as I think you knew it would.  

I have a payment due in to my account at the end of this week and I've plotted out a job for every £ including car savings pot and water bill savings pot.  

I hope everyone is safe from the storm and floods.