How I’m cutting back on household expenses
Things are going really well financially at the moment, my business is doing well and I’ve taken on more hours at work, so I’m not really worried about our finances in the short term. But that doesn’t mean that we don’t still need to be careful with our money. In fact, when things are good, we need to be more cautious about our spending than ever so that we can be prepared for any emergency expenses or unknown events that might leave us short in the future.
Why I’m being careful with our money
I feel as though there is always such a lot going on with our finances that it can easily become overwhelming if I don’t constantly stay on top of things.
We have a lot of expenses to worry about at the moment, and whilst they’re all under control, I do need to consciously make sure that we keep things that way.
One of our biggest financial goals at the moment is to buy a house in 2021. Houses don’t come cheap! We own a house that we rent out and we’re renting somewhere closer to family. Whilst we’re fairly happy in our rental house, we’re eager to buy again as soon as possible. Our plan is to sell our rental property in 2020 and sort out any taxes and charges we owe, then buy again in 2021. We will have a fair chunk of money from the sale of our house to use as a deposit, but I want to be able to add a lot more to that from savings too. So we’re stashing as much cash away as we can for that.
I also have a huge tax bill to pay by the end of January, and whilst I was putting money aside for that throughout the year, the bill actually ended up being double what I expected, so that’s been a bit of a shock. Whilst I could use our savings to get that cleared now, I’m trying not to touch that and every penny I earn from my business is being paid straight into my HMRC self-assessment account.
As well all these big expenses, we have three children, and there is always something that crops up for one of them. The latest is a trip to Spain for our eldest at the bargain price of £830! Now, under normal circumstances, we’d just say it’s too much. But our eldest child is the one who never wants to do anything, doesn’t do any after school activities and whilst he’s very popular at school, we do worry that he should be socialising more! So, when he said he wanted to do this, we jumped at it. We’re very fortunate that his grandparents are helping to stump up for this, but we still have a big chunk to find.
How I’m cutting back on household expenses
Working from home can often mean that I save money. I don’t spend any money on my commute and I can easily make myself some lunch when I’m working. So in some ways, it does make saving money that little bit easier. But, working from home also means that I’m at home all day using electricity, broadband, heating, water etc that I wouldn’t be using if I went out to work. It’s swings and roundabouts I guess!
When I’m working, I rely on the internet, so one of the things I have to make sure I have is a reliable internet provider. Even though I work from home, I’ve been looking into using a business broadband service to see if I could save some money, and I actually managed to find some really great deals. We’re tied into a contract at the moment but I’ll be looking into this further when that ends next year as we could save a lot of money over the length of the contract.
Our gas and electricity contract is about to come to an end, so I’m currently looking into finding the best deal for this. I always use a price comparison site when it’s time to switch as it’s so quick and easy to do, and I always save money.
One of the main things I do to cut back on unnecessary spending is to meal plan. I sit down once a week and write down what we’ll be eating each day. I do this for each meal of the day (including the kids’ packed lunches). I then place an online shopping order using my meal plan so that I only buy what we actually need. I get my shopping delivered every Sunday night ready for the week ahead, and we’ll only need to nip out during the week for extra milk usually. When I don’t plan our meals, we always spend far more than we need to on food shopping. So this is one thing I make sure I do every week!
Do you have any tips for saving money on your household expenses? I’d love to hear about them in the comments below.
