Welcome to No More Spending; how we manage our budget as we attempt to pay off our mortgage early, move abroad, and reach Financial Freedom by 2020. You can read more about this site here and subscribe to get all the latest updates sent to you by email or RSS feed here.  Thank you for visiting!

24 August 2008

Bare bones budget

Due to the uncertainty of the economy here in the UK and in the US, a few bloggers have posted their bare bones budget. The idea is that this is the bare minimum you would need to cover expenses if your income was reduced.

These are our essential expenses:

Food: £200
Mortgage: £862
Council Tax: £122
Utilities: £220
Fuel : £120
Life Ins: £22
House Ins: £20 (Buildings not contents)
Debt Pyt: £492

Total: £2,058

This amount is frightening and higher than I thought. On two incomes dh and I can cover this, however if one of us was out of work, we would be struggling.

There are only two items on that list that I can actually affect at this moment, as moving house is unrealistic in the current housing market, and that's the Utility payments and the Debt repayments. Plonkee is running an excellent series at the moment, which includes advice on reducing utility expenses here in the UK, and I'm going to follow her advice. This leaves the debt repayments. Take these out and the total drops to £1,566, this leaves spare money out of one salary.
The repayments are for two loans with minimum payments of £296 and £196. I have a goal to clear the first one by the end of the year which will reduce the total essential expenses to £1,762, less than one salary.

Further reading:
Goals re focus August 2008

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6 comments:

  1. Ouch, utilities are steep! I budget about 100 euros a month.

    I just did my href="http://journeytofrugaldom.wordpress.com/2008/08/09/fall-goals/">Fall Goals< and I realized that we reached a significant PF goal. We can live on my Wife's pay. A big change for us.

    Your article is rather timely because the US economic numbers don't reflect how bad things are in the US. I've seen the tone change over the last few months on many of the blogs I read. People are really worried.

    I'll link back to my blog, I like to compare budgets.
    ReplyDelete
  2. just posted my bare bones budget and don't really like the numbers :(

    href=" http://journeytofrugaldom.wordpress.com/2008/08/24/my-bare-bones-budget//">My Bare Bones Budget<
    ReplyDelete
  3. Hi there-best of luck getting this loan paid by the end of the year!!
    ReplyDelete
  4. hi rob, its good that you can live on one salary. That's my goal for 2009 :)

    hi sharon - thank you and welcome to personal finance blogging :)
    ReplyDelete
  5. thanks, not really sure what's going to happen at the end of the year. Wife's company is going through a major restructuring and we don't know where she'll wind up or if she will even have a job.

    Hopefully we won't have to find out what it's like to live on our bare bones budget
    ReplyDelete
  6. Great post, I'll do it myself to examine my necessities vs spending.
    I think this is why people on 1 income struggle so much, bills (essentials) take almost all of your income.
    ReplyDelete

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