The end of maternity leave draws near, preparing to be a better organised working mum!
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RockTheShack
Posts: 23 Forumite
This Spring I'll be returning to work from maternity leave, both of us are planning to reduce our hours equally to combine work and childcare but several months as a primary care giver to our baby while my husband is working full time have left me carrying a huge amount of 'mental load' a concept I came across in this comic and know a lot of working mums who relate to it! So the next few months are going to be focused on getting us into good habits to try and share that load equally and adjust to living on our lower incomes with the added outgoings of childcare. I have always struggled with achieving a good work life balance so now we have a child I'm really keen to establish better ways of doing things!
To try and get into better habits and meet my goals I'm going to write about them here, anyone else in a similar position and want to join in? Or have any tips?
My aims for when I return to work are (applying to both me and my husband!):
1. Be in a position to have enough left over each month to increase our monthly pension contributions (realising that both our current pension pots are pitiful)
2. Get our personal finances in order while I have time to research, become more savvy with investments and make our savings work harder to beat inflation.
3. Eliminate 'top up shops' and reduce our monthly food bill, I thought we were being frugal but :eek: at January's outgoings when I sat down and added them up!
4. Get on top of keeping the house tidy and maybe even find money in our household budget to employ a cleaner to help free up weekends for more family (and me) time.
5. Maintain our mortgage overpayments at same level as before baby.
so this is how I plan to do it...
1. Review our household budget and set up a Monzo joint account for everyday spending and groceries to keep a closer eye on outgoings.
2. Food shopping, a monthly online shop for store cupboard items and weekly veg box delivered, topped up with a weekly shop for fresh items ie. milk, meat. The veg box isn't the cheapest way to buy veg but it does help with meal planning and encourages trying new recipes which I enjoy. I hope this approach will avoid the need for big supermarket shops and mean we only buy what we need.
3. Meal planning and prepping for work lunches.
4. Become a slow cooker pro for mid week dinners.
5. Achieve a satisfactory level of half arsed Mari Kondo tidiness to at least feel a bit less like a domestic failure.
To try and get into better habits and meet my goals I'm going to write about them here, anyone else in a similar position and want to join in? Or have any tips?
My aims for when I return to work are (applying to both me and my husband!):
1. Be in a position to have enough left over each month to increase our monthly pension contributions (realising that both our current pension pots are pitiful)
2. Get our personal finances in order while I have time to research, become more savvy with investments and make our savings work harder to beat inflation.
3. Eliminate 'top up shops' and reduce our monthly food bill, I thought we were being frugal but :eek: at January's outgoings when I sat down and added them up!
4. Get on top of keeping the house tidy and maybe even find money in our household budget to employ a cleaner to help free up weekends for more family (and me) time.
5. Maintain our mortgage overpayments at same level as before baby.
so this is how I plan to do it...
1. Review our household budget and set up a Monzo joint account for everyday spending and groceries to keep a closer eye on outgoings.
2. Food shopping, a monthly online shop for store cupboard items and weekly veg box delivered, topped up with a weekly shop for fresh items ie. milk, meat. The veg box isn't the cheapest way to buy veg but it does help with meal planning and encourages trying new recipes which I enjoy. I hope this approach will avoid the need for big supermarket shops and mean we only buy what we need.
3. Meal planning and prepping for work lunches.
4. Become a slow cooker pro for mid week dinners.
5. Achieve a satisfactory level of half arsed Mari Kondo tidiness to at least feel a bit less like a domestic failure.
1
Comments
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Update on how things are going... so far the Monzo account is proving very useful. Knowing that a notification will pop up on my partner's phone everytime I spend money on groceries really discourages unnecessary purchases so far. Meal planning currently revolves around what appears in the weekly veg box, the day it arrives I tend to go for a freezer meal so I can focus that evening on planning meals for the week ahead, its quite hard to muster up the energy for meal planning when you're exhausted from running after the baby but I do find we're saving money and reducing food waste. Enthusiasm for the slow cooker continues, and I'm hoping using it 2-3 times a week will have an effect on our energy bills which have gone up lately, not sure how much that's to do with having a baby or tariff increases, we're with bulb and I find their website not very informative when it comes to analysing our consumption.0
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Hi. I am in a similar situation. My maternity leave has finished and I am now using my annual leave up before I have to return to work towards the end of March. Not looking forward to it. I have a 2 year old and my youngest will be one on Tuesday :eek: when I went back from maternity with my eldest, although I hated it I knew it wasn't for long as I was already 6 months pregnant with baby no 2. But this time I am finding it hard to know that once I am back that's it! I'm back for good.
I found batch cooking and freezing meals to have on the days I was working really helpful.0 -
Does your finances include saving up for an emergency fund and life happens fund?
The faithful on here have been informing people for the longest that this is one of the things that they must have.
I can bet that during the crisis we are going through now, a lot of people are kicking themselves for not having both of these funds.
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Hi I’m new here and after some advice, me and my ex partner own a house together I won at court to buy him out and take the property in to my name, what my problem is we have had a lot of problems from him lying about how much he earns so Maintanace for the children and getting things rolling with a lender have been hard as he is affecting my credit report with association which has taken me a while to be able to get myself a lender who will give me enough to buy him out and remove him from the mortgage, however he is ignoring my solicitor letters with offers on and has told another solicitor today who he called (her words very aggressive on the phone) said he bins all letters sent to him he will not reply. Now the mortgage I’m paying is a lot more than what I’ll be paying if he would accept my offer, now the court order states for me to remove him off the Mortage and him to receive 50% but if he is not willing to cooperate what can I do as I’m getting crippled having no spare cash because of the payments do I need to go back to court this has gone on now since September when I won in court. I just feel so hopeless thanks in advance0
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