DrSpendingLittle's New Home - staying accountable and responsible

Sarahwithlove

I've given up on getting much interest tbh. If it's not a massive amount you might be better off with a bank account that offers interest. But even those they are starting to reduce. I think its to encourage more people to spend their money on things they had been putting off. 

DrSpendingLittle

Well, well well. Very long time no posting. Where do I start? 

I've been drawn back to this site for one main reason - to get inspired back into frugal spending habits.

We recently completed on the sale of our house (the same one that we tried to sell in 2019). Hurrah. We decided to break the chain though, so are in rented accommodation whilst we look for a house that suits our now very different needs, because.... we finally started a family and had a baby! He's a little rockstar and our absolute world, but, he is expensive! More on that later. 

For now, my simple aim in returning to this site is to save, save, save. I want to maximise the amount we have going into a house purchase. And our newish life as parents now means there are many more ways of frittering money than previously. 

Financially things are sound. They were very good and then we had the baby and mat leave. All this ate into my savings a little. I started using YNAB again a few months ago and paid for the annual subscription so I'm committed to that. 

I have no debt. Well... I do have a personal loan that paid for a 'new to us car' I bought when I was pregnant (my little commuter car was unsuitable for a little one). However, this could have easily been paid for / off with savings. But, the interest rate is / was only 2.8% and so we decided to protect savings. A recent settlement figure states the interest saved would only be £152.01 of I paid it off today, so I am minded to keep it ticking over and keep the ££'s in savings earning interest. I will discuss with a mortgage broker - they may well advise to clear - but for now it stays as it is.

I'll do an update on financials later, perhaps including a basic SOA. But for now, I wanted to put down a marker as a way of committing to restart my frugal living ways. I might not have as much time as I did previously now I have a little one but I'll try to best.  I had a read of my old SOA's today - it's absolute madness how the cost of living has affected the bills / petrol / groceries amounts!

Why am I posting here when I have no debt? Well, I want to stay in the DFW community as my experience here when paying off my debt was so good and I want to be a part of, and inspired by, that community again. A lot of previously familiar faces have since left, which is a shame and I do wonder what became of them. I see @enthusiasticsaver is still here - hello again!! - which is awesome, yay! 

Right, I'd better scoot off now. We're having a takeaway which is due to arrive soon. Little one went down about an hour ago, so I'm in my precious personal time, which is now so very valuable to me and I want to spend it catching up on diaries and find some new ones to be inspired by. 

Great to be back, speak soon,

DSL

enthusiasticsaver

Lovely to see you back DSL and congratulations on the new baby. Well done on staying debt free and hopefully you will find a new home soon. I agree that little ones are expensive but lots of options to keep costs down including buying used stuff especially if they don’t use equipment/clothes for long. 

redofromstart

Welcome back and congratulations on your new addition!

DrSpendingLittle

An update on financials whilst I get the chance. I can't seem to get the usual SOA formatted so I've created my own.

I work full time, have a little one (21 months old) in full time nursery (we are not entitled to child benefit, we use tax free childcare and will be getting 15 hours free from September). I pay 7.1% into my pension and I paid off my student loan about a year ago. We recently sold our house so have the equity stashed away in various easy access savings accounts across multiple banks earning interest. I have personal savings of about £5K, which is a lot less than before I had the little one - I was up to about £20K in 2022, down to £12K in 2023 and it has continued to dwindle ever since. Numerous reasons, including baby-related purchases and financial complacency are to blame. But we have also had an overlap in selling and renting, meaning a quite a few months of paying mortgage and rent plus all the associated bills at both properties. Thankfully we can now move on and settle into just funding one house (!!!) and prepare for buying. We won't be going on holiday this year. 

So, this is very much a first go. I'll be starting this all off in YNAB on July 1st and I'll gradually see whether the categories and amounts are realistic and then adjust accordingly over the following months. My aim is to maximise the residual for house savings - whilst also building back up my own personal savings - so we can effectively pay for stamp duty and moving costs without touching the equity from our recent sale, which is ring fenced for the deposit to keep a decent LTV. I'll create some saving targets / actual £ figures over the coming days to reflect this.

I haven't budgeted this scrupulously for a number of years -  it's going to be a bit of trial and error, so bear with me!

Net Monthly Income: £3395.46

Immediate Obligations: £1,801.04, as follows: 

Rent £142.55 (my net contribution - I pay all the bills)
Nursery £550.00 (my average pro rata contribution)
Netflix £4.99
Broadband £52.26
TV licence £13.25
Water £69.00
Medical £31.67 (will explain at a later date)
Council Tax £168.00
Gas £90.06
Electricity £87.31
Contents & Tenants Insurance £29.95 (I'm sure I can get this cheaper, up for renewal currently) 
Broadband2 £57.99 (for an empty family property we regularly use; might cancel in September though)
Storage £150.00 (for belongings from house sale until we buy again)
Car Payment £309.03
Car Tax £16.62
Mobile £9.86
Dentist £18.50 (need to look for NHS dentist in my new area rather than paying private)

Monthly / Yearly Expenses: £1215.00, as follows: 

Personal Monthly Saver £250.00 (ideally I'd like it at 10% of net income)
Petrol £80.00
Child-related expenses £50.00 (shoes, toys, clothes, swimming lessons etc)
Groceries £400.00
Entertainment £40.00 (random for now)
Takeaways £60.00 (needs reducing, being realistic!)
Work Lunches £30.00 (needs reducing!)
Work Parking £20.00
Household slush fund £80.00 (if I forget to budget for something) 
Gifts £40.00
Clothes £70.00 (random for now, probably too much)
Toiletries & Hair £40.00 (random for now, probably too much)
Car Maintenance £25.00 
Car Insurance £30.00

Residual for House Savings: £374.42

Will be back over the weekend with more updates. 

DSL

DrSpendingLittle

enthusiasticsaver said:

Lovely to see you back DSL and congratulations on the new baby. Well done on staying debt free and hopefully you will find a new home soon. I agree that little ones are expensive but lots of options to keep costs down including buying used stuff especially if they don’t use equipment/clothes for long. 

Thanks so much! Yes, we've leaned some of those lessons over the past months - we did indulge ourselves in buying lots of new baby stuff when I was pregnant and have seen how little time these things are used for and how quickly babies grow! 

DrSpendingLittle

redofromstart said:

Welcome back and congratulations on your new addition!

Thanks redo, great to be back - I see you've starred a new thread, so I look forward to catching up and gaining more recipe insights from you!

DrSpendingLittle

My immediate financial goal is to save £2,321.81 in my 'residual for house savings' pot. This figure reimburses the equity I received, as I used some of that to pay for the removals company and some other bits and bobs that were on my credit card (I use it for online shopping and pay the balance in full every month). I could have used my personal savings but I didn't want to withdraw monies as it affects the interest rates.

By the way, the total cost for selling our house, if you're interested, was £6,497.60, as follows:
£3,180 - estate agent fees
£2,062 - conveyancing fees
£1,255.60 - removals company inc. full pack (well worth the extra cost)

So, I intend to assign between £300 - £400 to 'residual for house savings' in my budget every month, starting from July, as well as trying to save £250 into my personal savings. It will be tight but I will try. 

My current savings are as follows:
£4,000 - personal emergency fund
£500 - monthly saver
£521.74 - random 2 year ISA with another 12 months to run (I can't add to this as I opened a new ISA recently and maxed it out with some of the equity)

DF and I will create joint savings in addition to our personal savings once we buy a house. We don't have a joint savings account at the moment and we won't be opening one until we move as we don't want any searches on our credit reports - we'd need a joint savings account to be with different bank than our current ones and I am not sure if we can open a basic bank account without a credit search?

DSL

DrSpendingLittle

I'll make a quick note of where I think I can trim back my current budget:

Groceries / Takeaways
We need to do more meal planning, particularly making more use of the slow cooker, in order to control costs and shop more efficiently. We currently cook separately for the little one which isn't really efficient but we do tend to eat foods that are unsuitable in spice or salt terms for him. We need to think of more meals that we can serve him and then 'finish' for us later on. There are meals we all eat but we could do a better job of expanding this range. There is very little time between getting home from work / nursery and his dinner time, so we generally have to meal prep / freeze for him, unless I can rustle something up in 20 minutes. The groceries budget includes nappies, wipes and most other baby / toddler stuff you pick up during a food shop, as well as most of our toiletries and other household items like cleaning products etc etc. Takeaways have crept up recently and are a symptom of not meal planning and being too tired to cook come our dinner time. We know this needs cutting down and hopefully family meal planning can help address it.

Work-Related Costs
I need to make sure I take my lunch in every day. I am usually okay with this. I make my own tea and coffee in the office so that is covered. Parking is a few quid a day when I do go in. I tend to WFH 2-3 times a week but might decrease this as I am more efficient in the office and it will reduce petrol costs - if I WFH, it costs more as I drop the little one off at nursery on the way to the office and it's a longer drive to come back home and go back out to pick him up than carry on to the office and spend the day there.  

The Little One
I have become more measured and discerning in recent months around what toys etc we buy him. I now think more thoroughly about how he may use each item, whether it would be a duplicate of what he already has, and how long it would last him. I haven't always done this and I've found it to be very easy to fritter away the ££'s on 'stuff' for him. Clothes wise, I have always been fairly measured for him as if he has too many, it either causes a log jam in the laundry or he doesn't end up wearing them often enough. He has a basic capsule wardrobe which makes choosing outfits super simple and keeps the laundry pile down. Nursery fees are as expensive as they'll ever be and will come down in September when we get the free hours and further again next September when we are entitled to more free hours.

Personal Spends 
I added a few clothing items to my wardrobe after pregnancy as some of my pre-pregnancy items either weren't practical or didn't yet fit. Plus I needed a bit of a refresh. I've parked my usual approach of investing in a small number of good quality items in favour of operating a basic mum wardrobe made up items I don't mind having muddy footprints or weetabix on! I run a very basic capsule wardrobe for work which I've added only a handful of new items to since returning to work. I get changed immediately when I return home from the office to avoid the little one wrecking them! All this means that I am not currently in a spending season when it comes to clothes, bags, shoes etc. That can all wait for a few years down the line. There might be the odd piece I want to add to my work wardrobe now and again, but I am not actively or consciously looking for anything right now. Generally, I don't want for anything else really. I will budget for hair cuts, makeup / skin care and still save for clothing, so will look to see if I can add efficiency here. My sport hobbies have been on pause since having the little one but I intend to get back into them soon - I have everything I need for them, so no spends anticipated. 

Bills and Utilities
I'm not sure there is much more scope to cut back here. I will probably cancel the broadband in the family house come September when our contract runs out as we haven't been going there as much, so I can't really justify the spend. Tenants and contents insurance - currently combined - is due for renewal soon so I will look into that. Gas, elec and water are what they are. We are already mindful when using these. 

Entertainment and Household Slush Fund
I've no idea if this is enough or not. I guess we need to budget for family days out etc. Most of what we do is free as we take advantage of the outdoors around us and luckily the little one loves that too, but there are the odd days when we can spend c.£60 on entrance fees etc so we need to be realistic about those. We also need a fund to cover a new kettle or wooden spoon or whatever. It will be interesting to see how this category goes over the coming months.

I'll be finalising my July budget over the coming days so will put up my intentions for that soon. I currently have one more bill to pay this month - a £10 mobile phone bill - then that's it for immediate obligations. I have reasonable amounts left in most of my monthly categories and £500 set aside for the residual house savings funds which I will transfer over on the last day of the month if all goes well. Oh, I've just remembered, I do have a £50 bill for storage to pay but I am hoping to cover that with leftover monies from my monthly YNAB categories. Otherwise it'll have to come off the house savings for this month. 

DSL 

enthusiasticsaver

Looks like a fairly comprehensive soa to me.  There probably is room for you to cut back in places  though.  The groceries looks quite high.  Is that split between you and your partner?