How do you organise your monthly spending?

plzhelpmesave!

Don't know if the title makes sense (!), but just wandered how people sort out all their monthly expenses?

DH & I have just remortgaged (at end of fixed rate), cleared off outstanding debts and now want to get going on putting extra towards mortgage - after inspiration from here!

But i can't get my head round as to how to sort out all our expenditure!

Mortgage,bills, insurances all go out Direct debits thru his bank -
DH pays his own petrol & some shopping (works in suprtmarket!)

I've just started work, part time, self employed and as an estimate bring home about £100 a week.
Child benefit goes into my bank - but covered my car insurance & mobile phone & petrol expenses. I also do the main family shopping, clothes and all other mummy things.

I know martin likes the piggybank thing - but seems v messy to have so many accounts and don't really want to do that. Was thinking about the old "cash in jars" for car tax, mot etc. as this will be our first month with no credit cards or loan to pay off, i want to get us organised into a good savings routine - but don't really know how to do it!

We should have approx £300 a month spare. Sorry for rambling, and thank for any advice.

Trying_to_be_good

Like you I have the main 'normal' things going out by direct debit. I then worked out what the annual expenses were (for me car insurance, contents insurance, health insurance, breakdown cover, MOT, car service, car tax), divided by twelve and put that amount into a savings account. After a year (less as you end up with a 'rolling balance') you have enough to draw out of there for these bills, though the first year is tough when you're paying the real bill as well as savings for next time.

I use a credit card (paid off in full each month) for food, petrol, any clothes, presents etc, and allow a set amount a month for this, so if I spend more on petrol, I have to cut back elsewhere.

It takes a bit of sitting down with all the bills to work out the budget initially, but then only need tweaking. A bit anal, but it works for me!

Kaz2904

I found it really hard to run a budget when everything was separate. We now have both wages going into a joint account. All bills go from this account. Then I sat down and looked at everything I needed to pay for, food, petrol, christmas, insurances, birthdays you name it. I added them all up and divided by 12. I then made sure that DH and I have our own spending money and we have a family leisure budget so we all get to go out. The rest goes into savings for doing up the house as we had decided how much we could afford to overpay on the mortgage and it gets sent by SO.
If I work any extra shifts or do more weekends I get paid more so it's more for the pot!
Hope this helps, Kaz.

plzhelpmesave!

Kaz2904 wrote: »

Then I sat down and looked at everything I needed to pay for, food, petrol, christmas, insurances, birthdays you name it. I added them all up and divided by 12. I then made sure that DH and I have our own spending money and we have a family leisure budget so we all get to go out. The rest goes into savings for doing up the house as we had decided how much we could afford to overpay on the mortgage and it gets sent by SO.
If I work any extra shifts or do more weekends I get paid more so it's more for the pot!
Hope this helps, Kaz.

thanks for the reply. So, does it go into an actual physical pot, or a separate bank account, and withdrawn as needed?
Have never saved for payments like road tax and mots, just get the money together when they are due, but we should now be in a position to plan and save appropriately.

ailuro2

We put everything in the joint account, spend what we need throughout the month, then after the bills come off on the first anything leftover gets sent to savings or overpayments, depending on whether anything is coming up or not- like car tax etc.

It is simple, works for us, the less we spend during the month, the more we have left over. Simple, if you can control your spending habits daily.:D

sunshine_shell

me and my other half put in equal amounts into a joint account every week and thats pays for all our bills, this way our left over money is our money that we can do what we want with, i'm currently saving up a chunk to help pay off some mortgage

Ibex

plzhelpmesave! wrote: »

Don't know if the title makes sense (!), but just wandered how people sort out all their monthly expenses?

DH & I have just remortgaged (at end of fixed rate), cleared off outstanding debts and now want to get going on putting extra towards mortgage - after inspiration from here!

But i can't get my head round as to how to sort out all our expenditure!

Mortgage,bills, insurances all go out Direct debits thru his bank -
DH pays his own petrol & some shopping (works in suprtmarket!)

I've just started work, part time, self employed and as an estimate bring home about £100 a week.
Child benefit goes into my bank - but covered my car insurance & mobile phone & petrol expenses. I also do the main family shopping, clothes and all other mummy things.

I know martin likes the piggybank thing - but seems v messy to have so many accounts and don't really want to do that. Was thinking about the old "cash in jars" for car tax, mot etc. as this will be our first month with no credit cards or loan to pay off, i want to get us organised into a good savings routine - but don't really know how to do it!

We should have approx £300 a month spare. Sorry for rambling, and thank for any advice.

Hi

i have used a product called budget map for the last 18 months. This is a small booklet from the US that enables you to track accurately your budget together with your daily spending and income. I spend about 10 minutes updating it everyday - with out fail - and about an hour a month when I set the next months budget. I ordered it ages ago and bought it well before my light bulb moment, in july 06. So when I got down to sorting my debts out i tried note books, packages like microsoft money and quicken but couldn't get a grip. Then i found these booklets in the bottom of a heap of papers were they have been discarded, and gave it a try, I find them fantastic. I have to credit this little book with most of my debt busting sucess.

Good luck with the budgeting however you decide to do it.

BW

Ibex

aliportico

DH and I have separate accounts, always have done, and I have our joint savings in my name for tax purposes.

He has a few bills that he's responsible for (phones, car stuff) and I pay for all the household and kid stuff. He puts money into the savings, and I have started overpaying the mortgage.

I know he does his budgeting using Excel. I use ClearCheckBook.com - http://www.clearcheckbook.com - and find it really good. I looked at several money management programmes, and they were all either too simple or too complicated for what I wanted, but I love this.

At the beginning of each month I input all that month's bills and expenses that I know about, plus Child Benefit and Tax Credit. Then as things actually get paid, and as you spend money from the account, you tick them off as being cleared (they call it "jived"). So there are always two running totals visible - the jived balance which is what has been spent so far, and matches my actual bank balance, and the overall balance, so I can see what I'm going to end up with at the end of the month if I don't spend anything else - and that excess is for the mortgage!

I find this incredibly useful - with CB and CTC going in at different and variable times each month, I was finding it difficult to keep track of how much money I actually had overall, but this makes it obvious.

You can have as many accounts as you like, and I have split my (one real life) savings account into several pots - general savings, birthdays & Christmas, holidays, kids' shoes (! with 4 of them I used to be forever caught out by all of them needing shoes at the same time!), saving for swimming lessons, etc - so ClearCheckBook keeps track of how much is in each pot but I only need one account.

And it's free

I've probably gone on about it far too long, but it's really helped me stay on top of things, and I've been able to do away with the envelopes and jars I used to struggle with, and constantly pinch money out of!

Kaz2904

plzhelpmesave! wrote: »

thanks for the reply. So, does it go into an actual physical pot, or a separate bank account, and withdrawn as needed?
Have never saved for payments like road tax and mots, just get the money together when they are due, but we should now be in a position to plan and save appropriately.

It stays in the bank where it can earn interest!

getmore4less

The key to money management is to budget.

A budget is a plan(in advance) of what you are going to spend and save from your income a year is a good start although ou should realy think longer term through to retirement.

The trick is to actualy track your spending is on budget various tools for that some use spreadsheets others packages like MS money.

how you manage your cash flow to make this easy for you will depend on how disaplined you are at keeping to your budget.

If you tend to spend what you have then a "pay yourself first aproach" may be a better option.


Seperate the spends management from your income that is cashflow planning not budgeting.