In this edition, we will go into a bit more detail on our household income and expenses. We’re sharing this with relative specificity because it helps us to focus our thinking, is easier and because, from our experience, content like this doesn’t always provide examples to this depth for people in this demographic facing some of this privilege and challenge.
Overview of gross salary
Her
- Base: £42k
- Bonus: None
- Other (income from a family owned property): £6k Gross
- Total Gross Income (i.e. before taxes): £48k
Him
- Base £110k
- Bonus c. £20k
- Total Gross Income: c£130k
The baby recently started nursery, and in line with how the system is set up, we have adjusted pension contributions to optimise our effective household net income. We will do a separate blog looking at that in more detail.
For now, the important point is that on average, net household income per month is £7,200.
The usual monthly spend breaks down as follows:
| Income | 7,200 |
| Mortgage | 2,200 |
| Flat Service charge | 60 |
| Car (petrol, insurance) | 55 |
| Nursery | 1,100 |
| Council Tax | 204 |
| Electricity | 100 |
| Water | 37 |
| Internet | 36 |
| Entertainment (Now TV, Prime Video, Netflix) | 25 |
| Salaries to her & him | 1,000 |
| TV Licence | 13 |
| Baby savings account | 25 |
| Groceries | 550 |
| Takeaways | 240 |
| Transport | 83 |
| Baby Activities | 160 |
| Credit card bill from other lifestyle stuff | 1,000 |
| Expenses | 6,788 |
| Remainder | 412 |
To be honest, typing this out and seeing the above shows us that we could, and probably should, make some changes.
The challenge we face is, it’s not exactly obvious what to change, how and to what end.
That said, we know we could be building more of a rainy day fund.
Plus, we know that we need to save cash to build a deposit, if we ever manage to move to a bigger home. The economic challenge of this will be laid out in a separate post.
We know that we might need/want to upgrade the car (which was a gift) at some point too.
So, we will be making some changes in the coming weeks to get us on the right path to that. We look forward to sharing that with you in the hope that it might get you thinking about your financial planning/budgeting too.