Some great suggestions here. Tashy I *wish* we were spending it at Bunnings...that's partly my frustration...we have so many projects around the house that are all in the $100-300 range, but we never seem to be able to do any of them because there's never that chunk of money (and if there was we should be saving it, instead of living on the bones of our bare arses all the time). I love your tip of paying ourselves (savings) first and I was doing that for a bit until it all got a bit crazy over the last couple of months and it got spent just meeting the basics (which is the whole point of having savings I suppose).

The other thing that drives me absolutely *wild* is that DH forgets that stuff needs to be paid for, so I have all the $ allocated, then he'll suddenly pipe up that x amount is need for some forgotten bill or something so suddenly I'm scrimping and skimming off $ allocated to other things to pay for it.

Joeve, I know the $61 is pretty random, it's through an agency though so I assume the cleaner gets however much per hour and then the agency gets a dollar amount on top of that.