I’ve not posted a Monday Money article for a few weeks so this is a big catch up with TONS of money saving ideas and a catch up of a month of spending.
I added up all my spending and was pleased to see that despite me being on holiday for 10 days of the 4 weeks I managed to stick to my monthly budget of around £3,000.
This is based upon 55% going on bills, including the usual suspects of mortgage, energy, water, mobiles, broadband, TV package. My mortgage alone makes up 39% of my outgoings.
Food costs this month are high due to being on holiday where a lot of eating out was happening. 10% or £300 on groceries for the month, lower than usual but 17%/£500 was on eating out, higher than usual.
Car costs were low as I took the train to Penzance for the holiday, and those costs were paid weeks ago. Just £76 in a month that’s just one tank of fuel plus tax and insurance costs! Yes!
Other spending includes Children costs, savings and some fun money where I bought myself a new shell pendant and necklace from wonderful Faye Page on the Isles of Scilly.
My Scilly holiday cost a total of £1270 including all travel (£270), accommodation (£500) and spending money (£500) whilst there. A lot more than Spain earlier this year!
Here are some money saving highlights
Sprive Mortgage Over payments
I am loving my new mortgage overpayment app and I overpaid my mortgage by another £74 this month via automated savings using the app. Small monthly overpayments make a huge difference to the overall time to repay my mortgage and interest payments. Check out my review article here.
Or you can just sign up to Sprive here by downloading the app, don’t forget to enter MUMPENNY as a voucher code to get £5 credit to your savings account.
Check Your Netflix Account for the correct monthly payment
I checked my account and have moved my monthly payments down from £9.99 to £6.99 a month. But I had many reports from readers recently about their monthly payments going up to £15.99. I wrote this article for The Mirror about it. Go to your account setting now and check that you are paying for what you set up originally.
Auto savings into Plum
I saved another £80 over the four weeks into my Plum auto-savings. I raid this every so often, normally for holidays. My balance currently stands at £300 which I intend to save for our summer family holiday.
Plum works by making an auto saving for you based on your bank account balance and spending for the week. The savings are stashed away with a small amount of interest paid. It also very useful for building up emergency savings without any effort.
Pension Confident Podcast Talking about Cost of Living
I was guest on the recent PensionBee podcast discussing how to make savings in the current cost of living crisis. Take a listen to us sharing ideas. I really enjoyed this recording with Scott Mowbray from Snoop and Claire Reilly of PensionBee.
