Do you have a household budget?

Bamhan

I think it is an attitude thing. I don't think I could function in an anxiety free way if I didn't know what state my finances were in or unless I had some good plans laid out. Other people don't seem to think like that at all. Are you not concerned about what your financial state will be in 5 years time, or whether you will have sufficient pension, or whether you will be able to afford the kid's education?

No I know we have a secure financial future, or at the very least have made as much effort as is humanly possible to ensure that this will be the case....it is the here and now I am concerned with....all this saving for the future and what about living life now.
Anyway why marry an accountant and then have to control finances (like buying a dog and barking oneself)

Hi Bamhan
I found this MSN article to be very useful.
http://moneycentral.msn.com/content/Savinganddebt/Learntobudget/P36153.asp

Essentially, you live on 60% of income - groceries, utilities & daily expenses.
10% paid to pension.
10% paid to paying down debt or long term saving/investments.
10% paid to irregualar expenses e.g. holidays, car /home repairs
10% for fun.

As a guideline its very useful, easily modifiable based on your own set of circumstances. I like the idea that fun should be on the agenda.
If you & hubby can agree on what percentages work for both of you, then DDs can be set up facilitate it.

We have a budget for day to day expenses - basically I withdrawn €50 each for our spending money and a further €70 for petrol. Everything after that is allocated to bills, food, debts and savings. We spend €200 per month on food & alcoholic drink - very little on socialising tbh.
At the moment the savings are down a bit because of Christmas. We save approx 30% of our net income, 10% of which is for spending money on special occasions over the year including holidays - the remainder is for a rainyday.....
It's a big improvement on this time last year when all our finances were servicing day to day spending, bills & debts. We are now down to the "big 2" - car & mortgage with the intention of paying a large lump sum off the car loan shortly and clearing it (higher interest rate). Ultimately we would hope to increase our mortgage repayments and reduce our term by about 20 years - paying off our mortgage within the next 8 years!
We are both still in our mid-twenties so it would give us an opportunity to expand our family with less stress about debt or go travelling without having to worry about servicing debts. We both earn under the average industrial wage, btw, just very careful with our money after being badly burned.....

these budgeting ideas sound great. I did keep a record a couple of years ago of every penny out for 3 months, helped a lot, and I discovered that the main thing I hadn't factored in was the presents for the birthday parties the kids had been invited to. They were happening a lot more often than i had thought, even though I was doing the ferrying in most cases. But what about when your income, like mine, is very irregular due to being self-employed? Some months almost zero income, some months mega income (relatively speaking!)

I've kept a track of most of our expenditure on Microsoft Money for the last four years - we use credit cards for most day to day spending - however all I do for cash withdrawels is record them as such - I don't attempt to track what we spent the cash on. Other than that it works quite well.

Past30

Hi
I am currently trying to budget as I have been overdrawn since I can't remember when. It all started when I decided to up my SSIA to the max. limit so I could save for the future but forgot to check to see could I afford the present. The bitter truth is I can't. Lots of people have there own ideas. My sis gets her statement goes through it & her cash receipts & figured out how much she spends each month. She looked at what she was spending her money on & decided on a budget from that. Personally I don't know why a single woman on 42k needs to budget but that's just me, live a little I say. How the other half live!! I myself have tried doing obvious things like making a little extra at dinner time & bringing it in to have for lunch the next day as I costed out I was spending 4.50p/day x 5=€22.50 a wk= €90p.mth. It's like someone else posted earlier, the little things add up soooo much!!
Good luck with the budget,
ThereseM

This is a good week.

Yesterday I learned that, through work, I could get a discount from BT Ireland on broadband and line rental.

Today I learned that I could pay less to VHI for the same cover and get partial refunds on GP visits. In last 2 months, we've handed over €250 to the GP which is hard to budget for.

Not a fortune in either case but better off in my pocket that theirs.

D8Lady said:

Hi Bamhan
I found this MSN article to be very useful.
http://moneycentral.msn.com/content/Savinganddebt/Learntobudget/P36153.asp

Essentially, you live on 60% of income - groceries, utilities & daily expenses.
10% paid to pension.
10% paid to paying down debt or long term saving/investments.
10% paid to irregualar expenses e.g. holidays, car /home repairs
10% for fun.

As a guideline its very useful, easily modifiable based on your own set of circumstances. I like the idea that fun should be on the agenda.
If you & hubby can agree on what percentages work for both of you, then DDs can be set up facilitate it.

Click to expand...

That's an interesting article and I quite like the calculator in it. Of course, I'm nowhere near having 20% to pay towards irregular expenses and just fun as I'm putting as much as possible towards paying off my loan. But I like the idea of putting percentages on things - it's someting I do in a sort of vague way (remember one of my sisters telling me years ago that rent shouldn't be more than a quarter of gross income or a third of net) but only for my biggest expenses i.e. loan and rent. Must take another look at my budget and work out the percentages properly. It'd be good to be able to think to myself that in a few years when loan is paid off I'll be able to use x% of income for y purpose.

TarfHead said:

This is a good week.



Today I learned that I could pay less to VHI for the same cover and get partial refunds on GP visits. In last 2 months, we've handed over €250 to the GP which is hard to budget for.

Not a fortune in either case but better off in my pocket that theirs.

Click to expand...

Joining the HSA has helped me enourmously in this regard. There are a couple of threads on this if you wanted to search and see if it's something that might be of use to you. As it's a cash plan it doesn't interfere with VHI/BUPA. It also forced me to keep all my receipts together as you can only send three at a time and must claim the money within 6 months so I was doing it on a regular basis with the result that now I've gotten my P60 I can fill out my Med Form 1 and 2 to claim tax back straight away - something I've not yet ever actually gotten around too. Once I've done it for this year, I'm going to try and find all the receipts for previous years to claim as well but at least going forward I'll be on top of this.

me and partner have never had a budget and its only in the last couple of weeks that we have decided to sort this out like we never seem to have anymoney between us end up taking money from bank machine, credit card whatever anyways we added everything up and on paper it seems that we should have €300 over! but we dont, so as eddie suggests, we got a note book and i now write down everything that we buy and bills payed and savings. we were so amazed that just like during the week we could spend up to 200 on takeaways, fags, credit (even tho we have house phone and bill is always huge!) also the baby cant run it up (cant talk yet!!), magazines, petrol, car wash (i like my car clean), and bits and bobs. so i decided no more of this crap and going out in the evening to get o an ice cream or wot ever. we used to shop in tescos would come to about 130 and we would be out buying more stuff by friday and eating 2takeaways. so dont go anymore we go to aldi and spend €50 and this food does the whole week ok 1takeaway, we dont touch my partners bank accout this is for morgage, bills,loans ete. then my money is for food and saving. we have run up two credit card bills and like were trying to pay them of they never seem to go down. have cut them up (wish i never got them) credit union loan nearly paid of thats ok. and partner has boi loan which is 200 pm. also then theres kays bill. and the rest its soo hard to stick to a budget of some sort. we have an appoitment with mabs on friday so hopefully they can point us in the right direction

tarfhead: dont believe all you hear or read about bt and line rental and broadband. suggest you have a gander at the IT forum, search for the topic on being overcharged by bt for broadbanda+line rental package. if you dont mind a bit of hassle, phoning comreg, making numberous phone calls to bt then its right your street. Me? I signed up for bb+lr in october. still being billed by eircom for line rental as bt say I didnt apply for lr ( written confirmation with me) also they advertise €15 off for the first 4 months but dont actually apply it. in fact they charge you for broadband from the day you apply -not the day you actually switch over.
back to this topic. yes I do keep a household budget and Icould not manage without it. basically set aside money each fortnight for esb/home heating oil etc in one section. car insurance/house insurance and other larger bills in seperate section. put aside €40 each fortnight strictly for Christmas Shopping. ( crazy but necessary) try and put aside money each fortnight for college campus for next sept but have fall back savings which were seperately set up for university costs which I can draw on anyway, but obviously the more I can put aside regulary the less I have to dip into these savings.Seperately put aside money for holiday/special occasions or just plain emergency ,deposit into ebs at level I can sustain that particular fortnight. might vary from one period to another. Always clear off cc as soon as bill arrives or before next one comes anyway. without a budget I could not manage, simple as that.

cuchulainn said:

tarfhead: dont believe all you hear or read about bt and line rental and broadband.

Click to expand...

My experience is different to yours.
I'm already with them for calls & line rental & BB and they're giving me 15% off BB & line rental monthly charges - €6 saving per month.
The principal issue I have with them is they f'ed up my billing and sent me a threatening letter, but they'd have to do worse than that to get me crawling back to eircom.

TarfHead said:

Yesterday I learned that, through work, I could get a discount from BT Ireland on broadband and line rental.

Click to expand...

Sorry to drag this slightly off-topic, but how does that 15% discount work, TarfHead — do you work for a company that's a BT business customer or something?

I have the same package as yourself at home, and have had much the same billing experience. But when they sent me a (completely unwarranted) threatening letter I kicked up such a stink that the head of their 'Customer Services', in a written apology, assured me that there's be no further nasty letters, nor any risk of disconnection, until they'd sorted out the long-standing billing cock-ups on their side. That was in November 2005, and I've effectively been on interest-free credit ever since... (Don't worry, I have the money put aside for whenever they finally get around to looking for it!)

To return to the OP's query — there are some useful budgeting tips to be had on (home to the famous ).

DrMoriarty said:

Sorry to drag this slightly off-topic, but how does that 15% discount work, TarfHead — do you work for a company that's a BT business customer or something?

Click to expand...

Yes