Making a budget (and sticking to it!)

Kat78MFW

So the August budget is doing OK for now as we have spent most of the last two weeks sat at home watching the Olympics. DD1 has also been away on holiday with her boyfriend's family and she is the more costly of the two girls! We have promised to take her out, with her bf family as well, for a meal when she gets her A Level results. I hate to think how much this will cost but have persuaded her that we'll do it Friday lunchtime instead of Thursday night so we can get a lunch meal deal to try to keep the cost down. The restaurant she wants to go to has a £10 deal at lunchtime so hopefully we can take advantage of that. 

I'm working an extra day at work tomorrow so I'll pick up some additional pay in my October pay packet.

Kat78MFW

Other than food shops and bills, the main things I have spent money on are petrol, swimming with DD2. I have done two big supermarket shops so far this month plus a few top-ups at the corner shop and paid the milk-man. We've already spent half our month groceries budget of £700. 

I am going to try to do some more Prolific studies to make extra cash to put towards the meal out on Friday.

Kat78MFW

Can't believe it's over a month since I posted. Very proud of DD1 - amazing A Level results and she's off to Cambridge Uni in a few weeks. The meal out was lovely and came to £110 for all eight of us but DD1s boyfriend's parents insisted on paying half. We had a super holiday (paid for from savings) and were fairly frugal while there. We swam every day (included in the price) and used the hot tub every evening! Only ate out once at a pizza takeaway where we got a 15% discount. Overall we came in about £250 under budget for August but about £150 over budget on our food spending. Hopefully that'll come down in October when she goes to uni.

We hardly bought any uni stuff in August but we are nearly there now. Grandparents have paid for all her bedding (about £100) so that has helped. She has been very good about choosing lower cost items and putting things back that she decided she wouldn't use. Most money saving purchase was a Habitat 4-place setting crockery set plus 4 pasta bowls in the sale. Used £10 of PayPal credit from Prolific for a final price of £23. 

It's taken ages for Student Finance to reassess our income but it finally came through yesterday. She'll get £900 per year more than minimum maintenance plus about £700 as a non-repayable bursary from Cambridge. We still don't know how much her accommodation bill will be.

Will try to post a bit more often.