Bye Bye Buy

Christmas is Coming

It’s been a month since my last post and by rights, this should be a break down of my November spending but I think it’s important first to look at Christmas, and how I’m spending less this year… in theory at least.

Part one – The Secret Santa

For the last couple of years, me and my siblings have done a Secret Santa amongst ourselves and partners to avoid spending £10-£30 per person on stuff they don’t really want or need. Its worked well. So well in fact that we have gotten ourselves cut off from the gift tree of our parents who decided they wanted in on this game too. Which, okay saves me quite a bit of money overall, because I usually spend a good £30 on them each, but also means no “big present” from mum and dad this year.

We’ve set a budget of £50-£60 and made it so you can’t get your partner, or, in my Nan’s case (yep, my grandmother is also now involved), she couldn’t get my Aunt, who is the one helping her with all the technology side of things. The website we’ve used (elfster) has been really great in helping us organise it, and we’ll probably use the same next year adding the caveat of not having who we drew this year.

I’d definitely recommend this as a way to save money at Christmas, and also a great way to avoid getting lots of “little bits” off lots of people. Honestly, no one needs another Dove bubble soak and sponge set kicking around their bathroom.

Part two – No “Santa“

My partner and I realised that we just buy what we want or need through the year, and we are trying to save money and not clutter up our little home, so we’ve set a very modest budget of £50 each to get each other some treats.

That means no “stockings” this year, but also no pressure to get something amazing for my partner that I’m not one hundred percent sure he wants or needs. It’s also less stress to “think about what I might like for Christmas” or drop hints and hope he cottons on…

In terms of “Santa” presents for our kid, she’s still too little to understand what’s going on. She’ll be 15 months at Christmas so whilst she will have a riot undoing all the presents, she won’t have any understanding of what Christmas is or why anything is happening. Her presents are mostly clothes that we would have got her anyway, and in the next size up because I hate the idea of buying clothes that won’t get their full 6 months of wear. She’s also getting a tooth brush and some shampoo, because those were stocking staples from my childhood that I’d like to carry on.

Part Three – Christmas Parties

I’ve already paid a considerable amount (in my opinion at least) to attend my work Christmas party, and also a smaller amount to attend a “friendsmas” night out. Honestly, my intent to save money for these things is to not buy anything new to wear and to not drink. Ground breaking I know.

It also helps I suppose that I’m in a relationship and have responsibilities that mean I actually can’t attend a lot of events.

Unfortunately, my savings based Christmas has also led me to a couple of “Treat Yo Self” moments which, was really not the point. I also received an amount of backpay this month that I used to buy a couple of things for the house that I’ve wanted for a while. I do have a terrible habit of spending money before I get it when I know its coming. I need to unlearn that but I’m not sure how right now…

Later this week I’m going to share my spending this month but a little differently. I’m not going to include the every day stuff just the bigger spends or the “bad” spending. And that’s providing we don’t get hit with yet another toddler virus or molar or something else that stops me sleeping for more than 3 hours in a row.

How are you planning to save this holiday season?

Bulk is boujee? Spending more to spend less

Last week I mentioned that I’d be writing a defence of my £81.60 spend on shampoo and conditioner, so here we are.

I bought enough to last me for roughly a year (at least, the conditioner should last about a year, we all know the shampoo will last far longer though despite being the same size and trying to use roughly the same of each). I have previously had skin reactions to shampoo, and I have incredibly thin and fine hair that doesn’t stay clean for longer than 30 hours no matter how much I try to train it. I’ve wasted a lot of money in the past trying to find a routine that works for me and I’ve thrown away many barely used bottles that have angered my skin.

I used to buy solid shampoos and conditioner to try and be environmentally friendly but they still generally contained ingredients that upset my overly sensitive scalp, so I had to try and find something that didn’t bring my head out in sore red patches, doesn’t cost too much and was environmentally friendly. I found Viori bars which worked amazingly for me for a while, but I was finding that towards the end of a bar a lot would end up wasted as it broke apart.

The answer, at least for now, appears to be refillable shampoo and conditioner bottles. One, 300ml bottle of the conditioner lasted from mid July to the end of October, so 3.5 months. The refills are about 950ml which I think should end up being 11 months at least, and I can go easy on the conditioner now I now how long I want it to last.

Buying in bulk also meant I could use a “first time costumer” discount code by buying from a new store, saving 15% off the total order cost which, if I had stuck to smaller sizes I would have had to have found a new site or new account each time and I don’t have that many email addresses. It also meant that the order was above the free delivery threshold whereas the single order would have had a delivery charge on top of the higher cost per ml.

There are a lot of things that cost less if you are able to spend more upfront, so my mentality on this doesn’t just apply to my haircare. We buy our toilet roll in bulk, the big packs of detergent and stain remover, and always pay our car tax and insurance up front so that it costs less and we don’t have the monthly cost to budget for – which is the other major bonus of paying it all in one go – the mental load of that cost is gone for a whole year/however long the period is.

This all feeds into a big problem though – it costs more to have less money. If you can’t buy in bulk you pay more per unit, or more in interest, or have to shop more frequently (which costs fuel or delivery or bus fare etc). When it comes to things like insurance, you pay higher monthly costs or you can’t get the best interest rates for your mortgage. And on top of that, when you have to pay everything monthly you have higher monthly costs and it becomes harder to break the paycheque to paycheque cycle.

By buying the bulk option, I’m making my monthly cost £6.80. Buying the same brand, but in the smaller size every 3.5 months would cost £164.16 over the year, or £13.68. That’s double the cost.

October

Okay this did not go to plan. I think because I knew in my head that I’d be spending a lot of money on the dentist I sort of, wrote the whole month off? Which is not the point.

I’ll start with money that I need to pay myself back from the joint account – £204.77. This is food shops but also pet food and toilet roll and other bits for the family rather than for me.

£86.41 on fuel

£40.02 on subscriptions (including two phone payments which managed to fall in the month)

£35 on gifts for people. I could have spent less here but I like buying nice gifts. I’ll cover Christmas soon in its own post but I’ve started and I do have a budget… sort of.

£56.42 on days out – £30.90 of this could have been saved by better planning (taking lunch). Lesson learnt for next time though.

£23.61 donations to charity. I could not donate to charities. But I won’t not donate to charities.

£27.97 on my hobbies – £20 on printing photos, £7.97 on a replacement part for my Kenwood. I’m going to try not to print any more photos until next year, but I know I already need another part for the mixer!

£14.10 on toiletries for me and my daughter to keep at my parents as we spend a lot of time there.

£14.36 on parts for a Halloween costume that I mostly already had. This was a waste of money. The party has been cancelled and now I’m stuck with a red skirt that I’ll need to re-sell because I’m likely not going to wear it.

£205 dentist appointment. This stung but is an essential. You have to look after your teeth to look after your health.

And the one that I’m going to write a defence of next week….. £81.60 on shampoo and conditioner. It’ll be discussed and I’m sure you’ll understand. Hopefully. Its definitely not quite the splurge you might be thinking.

So I make that just under £790 total spend. Outside of my £800 payment to the joint account. Making £1589.26 which is £42.00 more than my take home pay from my full time job. I need to do better at this but, £204 will be paid back to me so I don’t count it as a complete loss… I’m going to say I overspent by £65.26 this month.

If I cut out gifts and charity then that’s another £58 or so that I’d have saved but honestly? I don’t want to cut those things. I think they’re important. Do you have anything you devote money to even though you could technically cut it out easily?

Scheduled Payments

Lets take a deep dive into my regular standing orders and direct debits, and see if there’s any I can do without…

Up first its the joint account!

First up we have the mortgage – which as I briefly mentioned in my last post, is a work in progress. This is currently at around the £800 per month mark, which we are hoping to keep it at with a new, 5 year fixed term mortgage.

Then we have things we can’t reduce the cost of in any way – things that are determined by where we live or rates are set by the government (local or otherwise)
Council Tax – £170
Water – £46 (annoyingly we have about £200 sat in this account that I need to try and get refunded)
TV License – £41 per quarter – £13.67 per month (although…. we don’t watch a lot of live TV as it is and what we watch on catch up is rarely BBC…)

Moving on to the potentially reducible – either optional or changeable in some way
Gas and Electric – £130 (this will be changing for November, although I’m not entirely sure what to, the email from our provider actually implied it would be less somehow)
Home Insurance – £9.32 (fairly confident we can’t do better than that at the moment)
Pet insurance – £27.08 (okay, this needs looking at!)
Internet (and phone…) – £34.99 (yep – also needs looking at)

All that comes to a total of £1231.06 per month of “bills”. We both put £800 per month into the account so that should leave £368.94 per month to cover food and any other expenses, which sounds reasonable on paper but never seems to stretch far enough. Maybe its time for a food shop process reset?

Personal account

These will be all my personal expenses for myself or my hobbies. I know there’s going to be things in here I can trim.

Life insurance – £6.04
Photoshop/Lightroom – £9.98 – maybe I need to look into free alternatives for this
Microsoft – £5.99 – I think I can drop this. I only use it for Excel and I think I can do what I want to in Google sheets instead.
Mobile phone – £6
Google photos – £1.59 (this is a need until I can cull my photos, something I never seem to have time to do)
Patreon – £3.52

Total – £33.12

Honestly looking at it all laid out it seems very reasonable. I’d already cut a lot of my spending before my maternity leave – £600 per month doesn’t leave any wiggle room at all – so that’s probably why its looking so low right now. I used to support a lot more people on Patreon and other platforms and I’d like to again when I’m able.

I think this shows that its my impulse buying and unplanned for expenses that are really letting me down at the moment. The October break down is going to have a couple of “Yikes” purchases in already… and there’s still two weeks to go!

Joint finances?

I’ve had a couple of conversations with people recently about how people handle finances in their relationships and obviously the answers are vastly different across different life stages, relationships stages and cultures but I thought it’d make a good topic for a post.

As some background, my partner and I are both late 20s (wow, I hate that its true) and have been together for 7 years. We have lived together for 6, have owned a home for 5, and have a dog and a baby together. We are not married. The house is owned between us equally.

We do have a joint account, but we each get paid into our own current accounts and those are what we use for our personal spending. This is probably something we need to re-visit as we both do a lot of spending that should be joint, out of our personal accounts. We each put the same amount in the joint account each month which was fair enough when we started out, but again, probably needs re-visiting now that the salary discrepancy has increased since I took a pay cut to move to a more “family friendly” department within my workplace.

Its really tricky for me to wrap my head around the fact that all our money is our money really – I’ve been so stubborn making sure to pay my share but maybe I need to accept that my share is smaller for now and that our combined finances are more important than my own personal situation at this time. I don’t know why I have a harder time accepting that his money is ours, when I readily share every penny that I earn with our little family.

I guess part of that is I’m worried that it makes me “bad with money” that all of my savings were eradicated by maternity leave and now I’m barely able to save £200 a month because things keep coming up that cost money (which, is why we are doing a no buy!), meanwhile his savings are growing and earning interest. I definitely feel like I’m not pulling my weight sometimes.

We’ve recently been discussing moving (okay, for the last year we’ve been discussing moving) but we’ve left it too late and the banks have all hiked their interest rates higher than we can realistically afford for the size of house we would want. I had a call with a mortgage advisor today and I feel kind of defeated. We had a plan and it was a good plan but then the government went to pot and took the economy down with it. My dream of reducing my hours at work is fading by the day…

I guess there are a few conversations to be had between my partner and I about our shared money. How do you sort your money as a couple? If you’re married, did that change things?

September so far…

I get paid mid month, so my in bank budget runs from the middle of each month every month and as we’ve passed Septembers Payday, its time for a little look at my last months expenses.

I decided to start this in September so the end of August was still very much a “yes buy” phase.

September is also birthday month for both me and my daughter, so I have ended up with a little extra money from my birthday which has been spent in lieu of birthday gifts. I’ll include those spends, but will note when its been a “birthday money” purchase. For information – I’ll be referring to my daughter as “A” in these posts.

One thing I NEED to stop doing is little “Co-op runs” midweek when we need something like bread or veg or milk and putting it on my card. Some of those turn into actually quite expensive shops, especially when you add it all together.

My little Co-Op trips cost me £107.05 this month.

Whilst I try and keep our days out as cheap as possible, we do inevitably incur some costs. This month I spent

£20 on A’s birthday trip to the farm (my partner paid for the lunch and drinks when we were there)

£8 on a sandwich and coffee, then a tots gymnastics session for A

£4.40 for a pint of lemonade at a wedding (!!!!!!)

£7 on drinks on my birthday trip out

£10 deposit for a Christmas party

So that brings our day out spend to: £49.40

All this seems fairly reasonable (except the £4.40 lemonade which still stings). But what other spending have I done?

I bought a first aid kit for the house which was £26.94, and spent £6.94 on calpol.

£35 for the dentist

£5.09 on McDonalds.

Birthday spends:

I pre-ordered an album for £36.94 (its on vinyl….does that make it more reasonable?)

£19.50 on a photo album

£52.11 on a collectors item (a cool x-ray record)

for a total of £108.55

I also paid £300 off my credit card which has been dipping lower and lower since trying to recover from the financial hit of maternity leave (and pay) leaving a balance as of today at £199.99

Overall, I don’t think I’ve done too badly – what do you think?

Hello, Goodbuy

Welcome to my “no buy” attempt. Let us start with the basics, shall we?

What is a “No Buy”?

I will be attempting to buy as little as possible for the remainder of this (2022) calendar year. Maybe it will be extended, but I’m not in a place to commit to a full no buy year right now. Obviously I will still be purchasing essential items, and I think I will be sticking to the usual rules of personal hygiene products, replacing essentials, and things I actually need to survive. Oh and Christmas and birthday presents etc.

Why am I doing it?

I have a one year old and I work full time. Currently all my money seems to disappear before I even get a chance to count it. I would love to drop a day of work per week but at this rate, we just can’t afford it. If I can figure out where the money has been going or where I can cut back, maybe its something we can consider. We also could do with a bigger house, which means selling ours, which according to the estate agent that came to visit, means we need to declutter. There is no point in decluttering just to replace it with other things, right?

What are my “problem areas”?

Bedding. I want to buy new bedding all the time and I know I don’t NEED it. Also clothes and toys and little bits and bobs for my daughter. I will still need to buy her clothes but that will come out of the money that I’m putting aside each month specifically for her. I’ll also be trying to buy way way less than we had in the previous sizes because honestly it was way too much. I seem to way overestimate how many clothes a kid needs. Its like I forget we can wash things?

Also, I’m always the one who is easy to break about ordering food in. Mention the word “curry” and I am all yours. I also tend to go for a cheeky drive through on the way back from my parents which is never strictly necessary but its convenient and means I don’t have to cook when I get in. I can stop that.

I have a tendency to buy “aspirational” items as well – make up that I might wear once before it goes out of date, dresses that look beautiful on someone but just don’t fall right on me or that I’ll never have an appropriate event to wear it to. Especially when I have a wardrobe full of outfits that will also work for any event that did come up.

How is this blog going to help?

I will share my successes and my failures, and attempt to justify any spending I have done. I will let you be the judges of whether my purchases were necessary or not.

I’ll be attempting to post weekly, we will see how that goes, starting with a breakdown of my September spending (so far….) at the weekend.

See you soon!