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

fionaandphil

If you have freezer space it may also be worth considering buying a side of salmon or a whole salmon and portioning it up? We always get a full one, get it filleted and then cut it to size.  It works out a lot cheaper than buying individual fillets.  Same with the chicken, we buy a big tray and freeze in individual portions.  We do have a big freezer though!

Once you get back into the swing of it you will get things back under control. Good luck and enjoy your day out

Edited - I've just received an email from Morrisons saying whole salmon is £9kg this week so I imagine other supermarkets may be similar - thought this might help working out costs

Bluegreen143

Baileys_Babe said:

Lovely to see you posting again @Bluegreen143 and to hear your renewed focus.

For the categories where you appear not to be putting anything aside, Car maintenance and MOT and Home maintenance, boiler service, what I do is look back at what I have spent in previous years and add 15% to give me an amount to work towards. I adjust this if for instance miraculously my car sailed through the MOT so it's a more realistic figure. I roll over any unspent money to the following year so as to reduce the impact the amount I need to put aside each month.

Are you putting anything aside for a replacement car, when the time comes?

That’s a really good way of working it out. I’ll need to go back through the last year’s bank statements and try to work it out - tonight’s job perhaps. I’ve currently got £200 in the home maintenance and car maintenance and £34 in my MOT pot so not enough!

We’re considering our Help to Save savings our car replacement pot as that’s what we intend to use them for. You’ll probably remember that we’ve not used car finance before and don’t intend to but I can’t borrow off my mum again this time!

The savings mature in December and we will get £6,000. The car would currently sell for about £5,000 so £10-11k is a decent pot (given we spent £8,000 the last time we bought a car). Obviously the car value will reduce over time so we will need to keep adding to the £6k to compensate. 

However Red is keen to sell the car early next year and use the sale price and savings to get something different. We’ve had quite a few issues with the car and both hate it (we’ve been so unlucky with both this one and its predecessor!!) and would like to get something a bit newer and more reliable ideally. 

I’m not sure if I was posting at the time but in early May the brakes failed when we were driving it. We were so lucky to not be on the motorway (which we should have been but Red happened to come off the motorway the exit before he meant to - then the brakes failed 5 minutes later when we were driving along a town street!). That’s repaired but we’ve kind of lost faith in the car now. 

Bluegreen143

fionaandphil said:

If you have freezer space it may also be worth considering buying a side of salmon or a whole salmon and portioning it up? We always get a full one, get it filleted and then cut it to size.  It works out a lot cheaper than buying individual fillets.  Same with the chicken, we buy a big tray and freeze in individual portions.  We do have a big freezer though!

Once you get back into the swing of it you will get things back under control. Good luck and enjoy your day out

Edited - I've just received an email from Morrisons saying whole salmon is £9kg this week so I imagine other supermarkets may be similar - thought this might help working out costs

Thanks for the tip. I don’t think Tesco does whole salmon, but I’ll keep an eye out if I pass a Morrisons! They do sides of salmon but the four pack of fillets were cheaper per weight because they were on offer just now. 

joedenise

Tesco tend to sell whole salmon around holiday times so Easter, Christmas.  Having said that our local Tesco has got rid of its fresh fish counter recently so not sure whether that will continue or not.  I hope so because that's what I often did.

Bluegreen143

Debsnewbudget said:

I changed from monthly audible subscription to an annual one and its saved money as well as allowing me to download multiple books at holiday times etc.
its £69.99 pa instead of £7.99 pm 

Meant to say this is a great tip! I didn’t know they did annual subscriptions. Going to switch over. Most of my credits go on kids’ books as I only listen to my own audiobooks if I’m driving alone in the car (I enjoy actual reading more otherwise) - but we do go through kids’ books even though they listen to them on repeat 😅 I like that you don’t always have to use your credits as often classics etc are available in the audible library. 

Bluegreen143

I’ve been using YNAB for a week now so here’s our spending breakdown since we started. Amazing how it all adds up!

TOTAL £975.12

Home maintenance £191.99
Plumber - we had a leak

Council tax £170

Groceries £240.62
Some of this was from the week before - Red claimed it back as he’d used his own card 

Outdoor equipment £82.12
Inflatable kayak plus life vests 

Petrol & parking £65.38

Eating out & excursions £47
Day out with the kids - swimming at an outdoor sea pool, entry to a country park and ice creams. Could have been done more cheaply if we’d gone to the beach instead of the country park, which wasn’t all that good. We did at least take a packed lunch. 

Life insurance £28.39

Gifts (me) £25
Half of my stepdad’s birthday present, Red chipped in the other half 

Chicken feed £21.99

Taxi for MIL £18.60

Clothes (me) £17.96
Ordered really good walking boots preloved on eBay 

Phone (me) £8
SIM only contract with Giffgaff

Audible (me) £7.99

Misc (me) £3.20
Lunch at work last week (had a bad cold and just couldn’t be bothered making something the night before because I was knackered 😳)

So yes, lots of things we didn’t need to spend on. And that groceries figure!!!

Baileys_Babe

Makes sense to me to change the car in the new year as neither of you have confidence in your current one.

smudge56

You can get a whole salmon from the fish market @ the Saltmarket (Trongate) a lot cheaper than any supermarket.  They will cut it into steaks for you if you want.

Bluegreen143

Good tip Smudge56!

Nice day today, though it’s felt rather short as both Red and I had a very long lie in until 10.30am 😂 normally I can’t sleep that late and I just lie in bed and read, but we’ve both been under the weather so we must have needed it as I actually didn’t wake til then! The kids are normally very restricted on when they’re allowed to watch TV, except for weekend mornings when they know they get a bit of free reign cos mummy and daddy like to sleep in 🙈 though I’m normally up by 9! 

I didn’t get much of my list done but I did spend ages reading to and with the kids, and I made and froze wraps for later in the week. 

We had a lovely time at my mum’s, where they ordered a big Chinese for everyone to share. 

Food today:

B - kids - I think one had cereal and one peanut butter toast. I didn’t have any based on how ridiculously late I woke up!

S - kids had tubs with chopped apple, strawberry and blueberries (blueberries from the garden 😇)

L - I had banana & strawberry milkshake; the kids had pasta with leftover pizza sauce, chopped ham and leftover roast veg stirred in 

D - Chinese at my mum & stepdad’s house

Spending 

None!

enthusiasticsaver

I would say £1000 each on personal spends is a lot so reducing to £500 is sensible.