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Our income has been up and down the last year or so, lately we have been down to my wage and clink benefits.. until next week when DH gets paid for his first week of his new job!!
I have to alternate my bills to pay some fortnightly, some monthly and rent weekly. I sometimes have to split my monthly bills over a few weeks and i am always calling people to make payment arrangements!!!! It sucks!!! But generally over a month its a bit like this....
REnt 1460
Phone?net mobile 250
insurance 75
car payment 465
flexi rent 147
debt payment 360
daycare 360
electricity 200
food 600 ish
fuel 350 ish
so 4267 over the month we would only make about 4200 so i am always shuffling and the shopping budget gets doesnt always get to be so big :( Its sad when you see that your outgoing is higher than your incoming :( and there really isnt room for extras until we get things like tax returns (which co incide with rego) and FTB advances (which i get around the kids birthdays) and CCR :( Man i am sad now.. except that from now on we will loose our centrelink money and double it back with a second income.. so we will raise to about 5200 which will be very nice!! Except that for the next few weeks we will be using the extra money to catch up on some bills we are behind on at the moment and we have a car to fix and a new 2nd hand car to buy.. not to mention this thing coming up called christmas!!! It just never ends!!!
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We never use to budget, with me being on a decent enough wage to not need to. But now we are only on DH's wage, and FTB. My only income is the FTB and I get about $80 fortnight. Dh earns about $900 a week. I feel broke and like we are struggling, but that is only because when I was working I was earning $2000 a fn. So its a big change of lifestyle for us, and atm we are still working out how to keep afloat...and I think we are only just keeping our nose above water...
DH puts $400 a week into our offset account and I put my whole $40 a week in there too. from there we pay our mortgage and all our bills out of it. Fortuantly we did plan ahead and put a tiny bit more (like a couple of extra dollars - basically me just rounding everything up) than we need in there, and we pay more than we have to on the mortgage. so if something bad happens, we do have enough money in there to make cover an extra month on the mortgage so we don't loose the house, and gives us a little extra time before we fall in a heap.
whatever is left in DH's bank account (after the $400) is used to buy food and petrol etc.. so we don't actually end up with anything left at the end of the week. We are getting better, but it is a big change in lifestyle we are still getting use to.
forgot to add, our only debt is the house, we own all our cars etc.. so no car loans or anything like that. our bills are just our mobs, internet, water, and electric.
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if i don't save for it, i can't do it, so have alot of accounts for everything i can think of that i consider most important.
no credit cards, only debit cards, safer for me.
i have found direct debiting to be very helpful, no more big bills, as i am paying all of them by the fortnight really. This was taught to me by a charity financial counselling service years ago. The most important lesson was to look at each expense - is this a want? or a need? And you can't necessarily have everything on your "need" list either, need to prioritise it, work out opportunity cost.
