Cost of running a house!

[benczuk]

council tax £3199.85 a year,

What band is that??

[DaiRees]

Okies:

Gas £83
Leccy £88
Water £47
Council Tax £127
Sky £94 (TV / Broadband / Phone)
Mobiles £40ish (mine and my son's)
...all monthly.

I've also got another £150 ish per month going out on insurances, home, life etc and an endowment that I'm still paying despite having paid off the mortgage, it should bring in a lump sum in a few years (albeit much less than it should have been!).

The other thing I do is transfer £100 a month into a separate account by standing order to pay for car costs (insurance, tax, tyres, servicing etc), excluding fuel. That's something I started when I had the Suzuki and it works really well so I've just carried it on, that fund paid for the winter tyres and alloys.

The way we do it is that I pay all the above stuff and all my day to day costs (food out of the house, clothes, fuel for the car, socialising, rugby, guinness, guitars etc ) and the wife pays for the weekly food shop (usually well over a ton ), her and the kids' costs etc, and she's also responsible for saving for nice stuff like holidays and home improvements (which reminds me, I need to ask her for 4 grand to fix and extend the garage )

[rwb]

You've got to get them kids to turn stuff off lozz!
The top rate of council tax here is under £2800, and this is the south (although not a Labour council).

Sam: have you thought about pensions at all?

[lozz]

council tax £3199.85 a year,

What band is that??

H

[teamster1975]

Monthlies:

Rent £1095
Council tax £194
Gas £99
Elec £55
Water £19
Virgin BB/TV/Phone Average about £75
Contents insurance £8

Credit cards - won't go there!

We do get child tax credits which makes a huge difference, it pays for the food which with 3 sprogs can be quite a lot!

[MacWomble]

I'd agree with the other posters Bailes, I think you should factor a bit more into your equations.
My girlfriend and I spend £1800 a month (including food for 2 adults), but that excludes our mobiles, our cars, clothing and entertainment.
You get an unexpected repair bill for a car or a gas boiler and you could get caught out.
This is in Gloucestershire though, which is a bit of an expensive county to live in.

[Bailes1992]

I'm simply taking into account the running costs of the house.
Money for food, cars, insurance, holiday etc will all come out of my pay.

Here's the plan.
We will have 3 joints accounts.
Account 1 will have her pay go into it.
Account 2 will have my pay go into it.
Account 3 will be for savings.

She gets paid on a monthly basis so her pay will be used for the bills.

After reading your posts these are my 'estimations'.

£500 for Mortgage (We are expecting a £100k - £110k mortgage with a 10% deposit over 30 years).
£120 Council tax
£150 Water, Gas & Electric
£50 Mobiles
£15 TV Licence (Obviously we'll pay this yearly)
£50 Broadband, Sky and Phone

That comes to £885 a month. That still leaves us with a fair amount of money left of her pay every month.

I still think the Water, Gas and Electric at £150 per month is airing on the side of caution. There will only be two of us. Also I'm a massive fan of low energy lighting and it's highly likely within a few months the house will be lit entirely with LED based fittings.

[scotty73]

I'm simply taking into account the running costs of the house.
Money for food, cars, insurance, holiday etc will all come out of my pay.

Here's the plan.
We will have 3 joints accounts.
Account 1 will have her pay go into it.
Account 2 will have my pay go into it.
Account 3 will be for savings.

She gets paid on a monthly basis so her pay will be used for the bills.

After reading your posts these are my 'estimations'.

£500 for Mortgage (We are expecting a £100k - £110k mortgage with a 10% deposit over 30 years).
£120 Council tax
£150 Water, Gas & Electric
£50 Mobiles
£15 TV Licence (Obviously we'll pay this yearly)
£50 Broadband, Sky and Phone

That comes to £885 a month. That still leaves us with a fair amount of money left of her pay every month.

I still think the Water, Gas and Electric at £150 per month is airing on the side of caution. There will only be two of us. Also I'm a massive fan of low energy lighting and it's highly likely within a few months the house will be lit entirely with LED based fittings.

You could be smart with your landline/broadband and mobiles bud.
We shopped around again this year for phone/broadband and TalkTalk couldn't be beaten my bill this month it £23 for unlimited phone/band plus another £11.25 for 3 mobile contracts.... Yep 3 that's me and the two kids on 250 minutes 3000 texts and 1gig of data each all on vodafone and it's free to phone each other.

[dirtydirtydiesel]

Sam,
Your last estimates sound a lot closer to the mark, but you haven't bugeted for building & contense insurance there + if you can aford to it's a good idea to put into an emergency pot each month for the unexpeted ( it's got us out the s**t a few times ). boilers / cookers / busted pipes ect:. Then theres home improvments / cars / holidays ect,ect
not trying to put you off but it can be very hard & then when you've done all those calculations you have a couple of kids & then the other half packs in work & you've got to find the lot .
But it'll be the best thing you've ever done , Nothing worth doing is easy

[jasper5]

I have to agree with the above....since I've been married my way has always been to have a month's wages in savings.

[Bailes1992]

Don't worry!
£100 per week will be coming out of my pay for savings .

We'll make sure we start off the savings pot with a few grand too!

[Welly]

I've never saved any of my wages in the last 20 years I spend it all (and more besides sometimes) although the last 6 months have improved and I don't go into the red now each month, and I don't have any credit card debt for the first time in 7 years since I received my PPi pay out and cleared it so that's nice now.

Biggest 'problem' for me is that her indoors has only worked part-time since having the Kids, she could probably bring in an extra £1K a month if she had a decent full-time job. Our youngest is 15 now and the Mrs is looking for more work but has been held back on a lack of computer skills/confidence and such (has been at night school for 12 months to get an 'ECDL' cert).

When we first had kids we couldn't get good child care (not so easy as it is now) so her indoors stopped working....this was *tough* I remember sitting in tears one day counting coins from a jar we had so I could buy food before pay day; we were tired, miserable and skint......but it came good we all stuck together and are probably better for it.

[Captain Jack]

I can't really say anything others already haven't but I'd like to reiterate you to watch your energy bills. The first house I bought with a friend back in 2006 (great timing...) we racked up £1000 worth of energy bills simply because our monthly DD didn't cover what we used and we never read the meters in the 3 years that we lived there Live and learn...

Our current outgoings are:

Rent: £950
Electric: £49 (underpaying a lot I think!)
Council Tax: £170
$ky: £37
Phone: £15 +calls
Internet: £30 - I live in the sticks and need a "niche" provider to give me everything unlimited/unthrottled/unblocked (even TPB isn't blocked!)
Food: £££££££ I dread to think what it is. My girlfriend spends anywhere between £120 and £170 every 1.5 weeks on groceries for us two and the two cats. Watch the food bills as that's one thing that's always going up.

I haven't mentioned gas because we don't have any. It's all oil and electric. Oil is about £300 for 500 litres, which lasts a few months in the winter and we don't use it in the summer. Hot water is provided through in-tank immersion heater. There are other things like insurance, TV license etc.

We have a joint account that we pay £800 a month into and the rest of wages is ours (we pay our own mobile phones etc.). I put as much as I can into savings as I can, though with a recent car purchase and the looming £2000 income tax bill, I am being a bit squeezed. Also have loads of credits cards and loans from student days that I am trying to get rid of... not long now!

[kevtherev]

Don't worry!
£100 per week will be coming out of my pay for savings .

We'll make sure we start off the savings pot with a few grand too!

A WEEK????
if ya gonna have a few grand saved in a pot anyway don't bother saving anymore than that, it makes fook all interest and aint worth it.
instead pay what you would of saved off ya mortgage instead. batter that mortgage at every oppurtunity would be my advice, and do it while ya child free too

[mjb]

if ya gonna have a few grand saved in a pot anyway don't bother saving anymore than that, it makes fook all interest and aint worth it.
instead pay what you would of saved off ya mortgage instead. batter that mortgage at every oppurtunity would be my advice, and do it while ya child free too

This.

There's other factors in play obviously, but a 5% mortgage over 30 years will see you paying £537/month, for a total of nearly £100,000 interest. At 1% interest on a savings account, starting with £3k and putting £400/month away, you'll earn £25k in interest by 2044.

Overpaying £400/month instead would mean you'd have the mortgage paid off in 2025, saving £61,000 in interest in just 11 years!

It's a no-brainer if you can afford £100/week! You just need to make sure your mortgage doesn't penalise you too much for overpayments.