Stopping the backsliding… a family of four no longer living beyond their means

Bluegreen143

No worries, I’ll pop it on tomorrow (remind me if I forget!).

A few spends but I’ll round up the weekend tomorrow as we’re getting ready for date night right now. 

Had a nice day at my friend’s house, where she kindly hosted our group of mums & kids. Such a lovely group, we only hang out a few times a year but it’s always lovely and the kids play great together despite the long gaps in between. We are a group of seven mums and have 17 kids between us ranging from 1yo twins to a 10yo. It’s fairly frugal in that we always meet at home or occasionally a park, and do a pot luck. 

However tonight will not be frugal as we’re out to a VERY fancy restaurant. We have a £50 voucher, interested to see how much we get for that 😂

smudge56

If you have cancelled your Amazon subscription they will normally refund you 

Sarahwithlove

I've just caught up, nice to have you back on these boards. Not so much about the debt but you've caught it early so well done. 

I see Red and his monthly spends are still quite high, what on earth does he spend it on? That's my monthly budget after bills for food and spending money. Seems like you have a good plan in place anyway to tackle the debt. Good luck 

Bluegreen143

@Sarahwithlove a few things - he vapes - when he started 10y ago it was much cheaper than smoking and only cost a token amount, but costs have definitely gone up over the years and it’s an expensive habit now. He’s also the kind of person who drinks a few beers after work each day (not enough to get drunk but as an unwinding thing) and alcohol comes from his budget too. 

Then there’s tools/project supplies - his main hobby is woodwork and wood is expensive now too, even from the wood recycling place. Between Feb-June his main thing was building a clay pizza oven which he horrendously under budgeted for and cost about £1k. I refused for this to come from the joint budget so he paid for it all himself. He used birthday money but that only covered about 1/3 of it so the rest came from his budget over those months. 

His personal budget also covers clothes (but he doesn’t spend much on these), his phone bill, seeing friends (he doesn’t spend a lot on this either compared to me) and tbf he is a generous soul and buys little bits for the kids and I or his mum out of his budget too. He just came home with crabbing nets for the kids yesterday and last month he paid for one month of Disney + for them since they’re off on holiday just now. 

Funnily enough on our date last night I said to him “you must have finished your month with loads of £ because you had a higher budget last month” and he looked abashed, said he had under £50 in his account when he got paid, and then said “I actually think it doesn’t matter how much personal budget I get, I’ll always end up spending it all. This is why it’s better we’ve reduced the budget a bit now” 🤣 so at least he is somewhat self aware bless him. 

Luckily he has enough good points to make up for being fairly hopeless with money 😉 

He found out the other night that his friend & wife (who has a good job! And no kids) is in loads of debt and having to consolidate and he did say to me he is very grateful as he feels if he’d married someone else he’d have been in the same boat and would have just blundered into borrowing money for anything he wanted. 

Bluegreen143

Well our very very fancy dinner ended up costing £128.25 including tip, even after our £50 voucher 😳 I think I’ve only ever been to such a fancy restaurant once (with my mum and sister - that was the kind where you get a 7 course tasting menu with matching wines. Last night was a super pricey steak place with very cheffy starters and nibbles and weird cocktails).

It was a lovely and novel experience, and very kind of the person who gave us the voucher, but afterwards we agreed that we really aren’t the kind of people who appreciate this kind of thing enough to make it a regular occurrence. I do love good food, my whole family are foodies and my sister regularly goes to this kind of restaurant but we talked about the fact that we could both work a lot harder and earn a lot more so that we could go out to places like this regularly… but it’s just not worth it to us. We actually really like my home cooking thankfully! 

After we left the restaurant we intended to go for drinks but everywhere was rammed (given it was a Saturday night in a popular area). We just looked at each other and straight away agreed to go to Tesco, buy dessert and booze (we didn’t fancy any of the desserts at the restaurant) and go home 🙈 I actually think though that, although the chateaubriand was delicious, the very nicest thing I ate all night was the Gu dessert I bought in Tesco! 

However the point of date night is bonding, putting our phones away and spending time together and we had a right laugh and enjoyed ourselves so that’s the main thing! 

Sarahwithlove

Bluegreen143 said:

@Sarahwithlove a few things - he vapes - when he started 10y ago it was much cheaper than smoking and only cost a token amount, but costs have definitely gone up over the years and it’s an expensive habit now. He’s also the kind of person who drinks a few beers after work each day (not enough to get drunk but as an unwinding thing) and alcohol comes from his budget too. 

Then there’s tools/project supplies - his main hobby is woodwork and wood is expensive now too, even from the wood recycling place. Between Feb-June his main thing was building a clay pizza oven which he horrendously under budgeted for and cost about £1k. I refused for this to come from the joint budget so he paid for it all himself. He used birthday money but that only covered about 1/3 of it so the rest came from his budget over those months. 

His personal budget also covers clothes (but he doesn’t spend much on these), his phone bill, seeing friends (he doesn’t spend a lot on this either compared to me) and tbf he is a generous soul and buys little bits for the kids and I or his mum out of his budget too. He just came home with crabbing nets for the kids yesterday and last month he paid for one month of Disney + for them since they’re off on holiday just now. 

Funnily enough on our date last night I said to him “you must have finished your month with loads of £ because you had a higher budget last month” and he looked abashed, said he had under £50 in his account when he got paid, and then said “I actually think it doesn’t matter how much personal budget I get, I’ll always end up spending it all. This is why it’s better we’ve reduced the budget a bit now” 🤣 so at least he is somewhat self aware bless him. 

Luckily he has enough good points to make up for being fairly hopeless with money 😉 

He found out the other night that his friend & wife (who has a good job! And no kids) is in loads of debt and having to consolidate and he did say to me he is very grateful as he feels if he’d married someone else he’d have been in the same boat and would have just blundered into borrowing money for anything he wanted. 

Haha at least he is self aware and you have a budget in place for it and it's not getting you into more debt. 

Sarahwithlove

Bluegreen143 said:

Well our very very fancy dinner ended up costing £128.25 including tip, even after our £50 voucher 😳 I think I’ve only ever been to such a fancy restaurant once (with my mum and sister - that was the kind where you get a 7 course tasting menu with matching wines. Last night was a super pricey steak place with very cheffy starters and nibbles and weird cocktails).

It was a lovely and novel experience, and very kind of the person who gave us the voucher, but afterwards we agreed that we really aren’t the kind of people who appreciate this kind of thing enough to make it a regular occurrence. I do love good food, my whole family are foodies and my sister regularly goes to this kind of restaurant but we talked about the fact that we could both work a lot harder and earn a lot more so that we could go out to places like this regularly… but it’s just not worth it to us. We actually really like my home cooking thankfully! 

After we left the restaurant we intended to go for drinks but everywhere was rammed (given it was a Saturday night in a popular area). We just looked at each other and straight away agreed to go to Tesco, buy dessert and booze (we didn’t fancy any of the desserts at the restaurant) and go home 🙈 I actually think though that, although the chateaubriand was delicious, the very nicest thing I ate all night was the Gu dessert I bought in Tesco! 

However the point of date night is bonding, putting our phones away and spending time together and we had a right laugh and enjoyed ourselves so that’s the main thing! 

Sounds like you had a lovely date night and although the expensive restaurant won't be a regular thing hopefully you'll get more date night's together. 

Spendless

FTR it took my DH a very long time to be on the same page as me re finances.

Even last year when we decided we wanted rid of the CC debt we both wanted a different approach. He wanted to take the money out of windfall savings we had. I refuesed saying hed been using like a cash machine for years and didnt trust hed stick to his word to repay it. He didnt want to pay interest on our debt. We had stalemate for a while till we both agreed a way forward (in our case to get a 0% CC BT)

Nowadays he is far more on the ball with it all and loves that we monthly review any spending.
Downside is it took 23years of marriage and both kids being adults before we got there.
Keep chipping away is all I can say, you'll get there. 

Bluegreen143

Thanks everyone, good to hear that you’ve had a similar situation Spendless but are more on the same page now. We’ve been together for 16 years and married for 10 so not long to go to get on the same page I reckon 🤣🙈

Just doing the mealplan & online shopping for our holiday. Mealplan below:

Breakfasts 
Cereal, porridge or peanut butter toast for the kids
Greek yoghurt/nuts/banana or avocado & scrambled egg on toast for me
Bacon sandwich for Red, but he often skips breakfast 

Snacks
Fruit (bananas, apples, grapes, strawberries)
Crisps
Chocolate biscuits
Ice lollies 

Lunches
Sandwiches (with fruit/carrot sticks & crisps) - peanut butter, hummus, ham and tuna mayo all on offer 
Leftovers from dinner, leftover sausage rolls etc 
Pesto pasta or mac & cheese 
Beans on toast 

Dinners
1. Salad stuff with olives, hummus, falafel etc and bread or wraps 
2. Salad stuff with cold meat, cheeses, pork pies and sausage rolls 
3. Chicken kebabs with salad & hummus 
4. Hot dogs with corn on the cob & HM coleslaw
5. Burgers with corn on the cob & HM coleslaw 
6. Pesto pasta with chicken 
7. Goats cheese & asparagus spaghetti 

Red and Monkey are optimistic about catching some mackerel, but experience has taught me not to rely on fishing to fill the mealplan!!! If we do catch some we’ll barbecue it alongside the other food. 

Drinks
The children obligingly only drink water rather than being fussed with juice - but the tap water isn’t drinkable so we need to get some big 5L bottles. We will also need some alcohol and fruit juice for Red to make me cocktails (he likes to invent me cocktails when we are on holiday, bless him!).

Not the cheapest week of eating ever, particularly as I will buy things like hummus, falafel, sausage rolls and wraps rather than making my own. But again experience tells me that we don’t want to spend ages in the kitchen on holiday and that it’s probably worth just serving things that everyone likes rather sticking to than our usual fairly stern approach to kid pickiness! 

We will probably go to the nice toastie/soup cafe once but we are unlikely to eat out otherwise. We go here every year and unfortunately the couple of other restaurants and one takeaway are expensive and not good. 

Normally I would take things like olive oil and balsamic vinegar from stores, but we are running out of both anyway. However we’ll obviously take the bottles home again so at least it’ll reduce next week’s shop! 

Spendless

How are you going to transport the ice lollies? Is there a shop nearby? Just thinking of your recent expensive trip to the ice cream van. We have a car fridge/freezer but that was a luxury bought with a small inheritance i received. Have you considered taking ice pops instead? Come in a box in liquid form just throw in the freezer for however many needed.