All Our Regular Spending From Bills To Entertainment

I love being able to plan, so much so that a lot of our money is automated and regulated. Me and Luke both have our own money each week (or month) to spend as we please. But the vast majority of our money is regular spending and doesn’t change each month.

In our household I get paid monthly and Luke is paid weekly, and we do pool our money together as it works best for us. So most of our bills and subscriptions come from my account where the monthly money is paid into. And most of our regular savings come from Luke’s weekly money. This is why some things I talk about monthly and some things weekly.

Everyone’s regular spending is going to be different, and there’s no right or wrong, but here’s a breakdown of what ours is.

Mortgage and bills

Like most people our biggest regular spend is our mortgage. We’re currently fixed on our rate until early 2025 so it’s not too bad, but this accounts for about 18% of our money.

Then we have the boring bills. We are on council tax band E which is so high for our property (and we did fight it when we moved in), but alas it didn’t work so that’s a big spend (currently £268 a month). Our water bill isn’t too high, and thanks to our solar panels our energy bills are also not too high. We’ve made some changes so that heating our water tank now comes from electricity not gas, so we’ll have to see what our winter gas bills are like.

Regular spending on insurance

As Luke is self-employed we have a few extra insurance policies that we pay out for. We have both life insurance and income protection for him to cover us for the worse case scenarios. I’m really lucky to have good life insurance through work so it’s not something we have to pay for ourselves. Then we pay out for public liability business insurance for Luke and tool insurance as he can’t do his work without tools.

The other two insurance policies we pay out for each month are our home and contents insurance, and pet insurance for our furry babies. For our vehicle insurance we actually save money each month into a vehicle pot which covers the annual payments for those policies.

All together we spend around £100 a month on policies (excluding our vehicle savings and any one off policies like travel insurance). Hopefully they’re policies we won’t need to ever use.

Other household costs

We have a full ring system with alarms, cameras and a doorbell so we pay out £8 a month on our subscription to give us full access to all recordings etc.

Each month we pay out four different payments for our mobile phones. We each have SIM only contracts which are around £20 each and then spend around £90 a month on payments for our iPhones. We did them separately as it saves us between £20 and £40 a month and means we can keep hold of our phones for longer without feeling like we need to upgrade.

For fitness we spend £39 a month on my Peloton subscription and it’s worth every single penny. I do on average 9 classes a week across cycling and strength and it’s the longest I’ve ever stuck to anything. We own the bike itself so that’s a payment we don’t have to consider.

Regular spending on entertainment

All of these entertainment costs are luxuries and something we feel very thankful to be able to spend. We have Disney+ and Prime, but we make those payments annually.

Each month we pay for Cineworld cards as we love going to the cinema. We definitely don’t go as much as we used to when we had one within walking distance, but it still more than pays for itself each month. Then following on the theme of visual entertainment we pay monthly for our TV license, and then a Sky TV package which includes our internet. Our Sky TV service was our household treat when I got my new job back in April and while £90 for TV and internet each month is a lot we do get a lot of use out of it.

The rest of the regular spending on entertainment includes YouTube Premium (£19.99), Spotify family plan (£16.99) and Audible (£8.99).

Loans and savings

On opposite ends of the scale we have a regular loan payment every month which is paying off Luke’s work vehicle. Then we have plenty of regular savings including:

• Vehicle spending, this generally covers annual insurance premiums, tax, MOTs, services etc
• Christmas money. Throughout the year we put aside money every week to put towards presents, food and anything else during the festive season.
• Birthdays. In the same vein as above each week we put some money aside for all of our family birthdays and events such as Father’s Day and Mother’s Day. Having the money aside means we’re never caught out.
• General household savings come out every week and this is designed for anything we need around the house outside of general food and toiletries. This could be anything from a new bin to window tints for our bedroom.
• Cats saving. Each month we put aside around £80 to cover everything to do with the boys from their litter and food to one off spending like new food bowls or medical treatments.
• Our honeymoon. At the moment our only regular saving that will stop in the near future is for our honeymoon. We’ve been putting money aside ever since our wedding to pay off our holiday in January.

We both have our own personal regular savings, for example I have a tattoo fund that gets a regular payment into every week.

Regular spending on food and fun stuff

Each week we have a set food budget, but our spending alternates. We do a big Ocado shop every other week that tends to use up the weekly budget. Then on the in between weeks we do a much smaller top up shop and put the rest aside for our quarterly Costco trips.

The more ‘fun’ regular spends we have include:

• My illuminate and Afterlight book subscriptions. I love books, especially pretty special editions so I love getting these through the door. I don’t get Illumicrate every single month, but most months there will be at least one.
• Cricut subscription. I haven’t used my machine as much as I’d like over the last few months, but the tool gives me so much scope to do projects and get images and templates within the subscription cost.
• Premium Canva subscription. This one isn’t quite as ‘fun’ as I use it for work, but it gives me loads of stock images, and functionality to build anything I want. Although I mainly use it for Instagram.
• Then in the hope that we win big we have play the National Lottery and pay this on a monthly basis.

Do you have a lot of regular spending like us or is yours just the essentials?