Netmums family money diaries: the single parent

First published on Tuesday 28 July 2020 Last modified on Thursday 4 February 2021

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Louise Burke

Content writer

Balancing a family budget is always tough and never more so than for a single parent during a global pandemic. We asked a family to share a weekly money diary with us, detailing how they spend every single penny of their hard-earned cash over seven days.

Meet the family

Single Mum of 2: 43, education consultant, working 30 hours a week

Children: Two boys, one who’s grown up and living away, another aged 12

Lives: Exeter, Devon

She says: ‘I have what I consider to be a decent annual income and yet I still have large credit card debts, I took out a loan last year to replace my kitchen and my car is also on finance! My impatience and my ad hoc method of getting paid definitely contribute to my downfall. I never save for anything!

‘If I need something important (like when my car died or the dishwasher broke), rather than struggle without it until I’ve saved enough to replace it, I turn to credit. Then I find myself stuck paying off mostly interest every month.

‘My home is my Achilles heel; I love making my space comfortable and pretty. I don’t go out often (even before lockdown) as childcare is difficult and expensive and it’s quite a challenge for me physically – I prefer to have people over so I spend money I shouldn’t on house plants (like, obsessively!) and on home improvements.

'I have Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, plus several co-morbid chronic conditions that link to this, which means I’m not physically able to do things for myself so have to pay out for a cleaner and gardener.

'I find it most difficult to budget for food. Due to my disability, I have specific dietary requirements that mean I can’t use cheaper shops like Aldi and Lidl. I tend to stick to Waitrose – it's just so much easier to access allergy-friendly foods.'

My income

Earnings: 'My total household income is usually around £25-30,000 a year. This includes a four-weekly, non-means tested Personal Independence Payment (PIP) from the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP), to support a genetic disability.

'COVID-19 will of course have had an impact on my income for 2020, but on the upside, I've seen an increase in demand for my zoom tuition as so many children have missed months and months of school and their parents are understandably worried about them being behind.'

Take home pay: 'In a really good business month I might make nearly £2,000 but other months I struggle to make even half that. I find it hard to manage the boom-bust nature of my finances and the ad hoc way I get paid.'

Benefits: '£804 per month child benefit, tax credits and PIP.'

My expenses

Childcare costs: £0
'One of the many reasons I stopped working as an employee (even though I can earn more) is because childcare was so difficult to find and I found it crippling financially.

'Being self-employed has really helped me juggle work and parenting.'

Housing costs: £300 per month mortgage.
'I chose to live in a less salubrious part of town and opted for a leasehold property rather than freehold, so I’d always be able to afford the mortgage and give my children some stability.

'It was a hell of a journey getting to the point where I could buy my own home and I am so proud of achieving that. I’m hopeful that one day I'll be able to move to a freehold house, with parking on a drive in a better area.

'That isn’t going to happen if I keep spending my spare money, and more besides, on making this one perfect though!'

Utility bills: £50 per month gas and electric, £17 per week council tax, £48 per month water, £120 per month mobile phone for me and one of my children, plus home phone and internet.
'I know I could spend less on broadband and phone bills but my entire business is run from home, so I need a reliable and fast internet connection in order to run sessions and manage a website, plus my son is a gamer!'

Food costs: £75-85 per week
'About six weeks ago I was looking at my banking app and it showed me just how ridiculous my grocery bill was – I was horrified! So, I set myself a budget of £70 a week and since then I’ve found my grocery bill more manageable.

'I do need to look long and hard at my Deliveroo spend though. It’s ridiculous. If I include Deliveroo I’m easily spending £400 a month!'

'I have a lot of allergies and my son has severe IBS so buying cheap isn’t an option – we just both get ill. Deliveroo costs are usually Marks and Spencer’s food hall, or Wagamama and Prét a Manger because we can eat that pretty safely when I’m just too exhausted to cook a dinner.'

Transportation costs: £12.58 a month road tax, £40 a month car insurance, £50 a month fuel, £0 a month public transport
‘I daren’t use public transport – if I can’t get a seat I’m screwed because as I’m not a wheelchair user, people assume I’m fit and healthy and don’t understand why I might desperately need a seat. I use my car to get everywhere - there’s no other option for me.'

Savings and pension: £0
'Pension? What pension?!

'I’m panicking that I’m 43 and have not paid into a proper pension for years. I had a teacher’s pension but cashed that in to help me get on the property ladder. At the moment I only have the state pension as my option – assuming it’s not taken away by the time I retire.

'I’ve realised I need to get serious about retirement. I won’t be able to work forever and I have no savings either. Last month I decided I would try and save a little every month but three weeks in I had to use those savings to pay a gas engineer to fix my boiler. There’s always something with this house!'

Kids' clubs and activities: £1,000 per year

'I have always made sure both my boys get plenty of enrichment activities because I feel so guilty that I can’t just go to the park and kick a ball with them. I pay for these camps and clubs to ensure they get to do fun physical stuff even though I can’t.'

Other regular spends: £244 per month car loan, £205 per month house loan, £11.99 per month Netflix, £29.30 per month liability insurance, £75 per year Amazon Prime.

My weekly money diary

Weekly budget: 'I actually don’t have one – which is part of my problem!'

Total spend: £729.40 'What the hell?!'

Monday: £10.00
'I forgot to order coffee in my weekly grocery shop and there's no way I was going to try and manage a week without coffee, so I ended up buying some via Deliveroo – due to COVID-19 and my physical limitations, I wasn’t prepared to battle to a shop just for coffee. Because delivery is £4 every time, this made for an expensive caffeine fix!'

Tuesday: £158.00
'Speaks for itself really, doesn’t it?!'

'I had a leak in the kitchen that needed immediate attention so I had to pay a plumber to come out and sort it for me.

'Not even remotely budgeted for, so that’s a real knock to my finances that it will take me time to recover from.'

Wednesday: £13.00
'Completely forgot to cancel my free trial for Weight Watchers, so ended up paying this month’s subscription. I’m a sucker for a free trial and I have put on so much weight over the last few years, I really felt that it was worthwhile trying this. I have to be honest – all it did was depress me.'

Thursday: £42.44
'£10 to Hermes for parcel deliveries for web orders and £32.44 to Deliveroo for cigarettes.

'No excuse for the Deliveroo, I should just give up smoking. I think I am worrying a lot about my weight (every pound I can lose saves something like four pounds off my knees – and they really need the help!) and I'm paranoid that stopping smoking will mean a pile on of the pounds …

'This is definitely something I need to address. I shouldn’t be smoking and that’s all there is to it.'

Friday: £131.69
'£15 to the cleaner, £38 to Virgin Media, £17.70 for Council Tax, £10 Blue badge renewal, £9.99 Twinkl subs, £41 to bark.com.'

'If I am completely honest, the only thing that is optional there is the cleaner … and I can’t imagine struggling on without her.

'Demands for payment or subscriptions can be difficult to manage, as they all tend to be per calendar month, and I don’t get a single monthly payment so some weeks, my monthly payments exceed my weekly income – and that’s a problem I don’t know how to fix.'

Saturday: £165.29

'£43.49 to Deliveroo, £2.80 newspaper, £119 Wayfair.'

'This was a bad day.'

'Much of it was spent in bed feeling awful. I wasn’t able to cook but had nothing ‘easy’ in to throw in the oven. I was in so much pain that I bought an office chair, which frankly I shouldn’t have paid out for this week, because of the earlier plumbing issue.'

'I have realised from this analysis of my week that I need to seriously reconsider how I am managing my food budget. I do have a slow cooker, which should mean I could batch cook, but I have the tiniest freezer. This week I threw food away that had gone past its sell by date. If I had a proper freezer, this wouldn’t happen. It would also mean I could shop once every 4 weeks instead of weekly, which would be much easier to budget around and I could have a selection of “throw in the oven” meals.

'Deliveroo is definitely an expense that needs to go. It’s ridiculous what I spend with them – I could have bought a small chest freezer with what I've spent over the past three months alone!'

Sunday: £208.98

'£85.76 Waitrose, £39.37 gardener for the month, £58.85 Amazon, £25 Microsoft XBox.'

'I am horrified. Nothing seems horrifically expensive on its own, but boy does it mount up.

'The Amazon spend was for an extension lead, a replacement battery-run tin opener, as my old one broke and I can’t use ordinary tin openers and a birthday present.

'The Microsoft spend was my son’s earnings from his chores – he walks the dog and does the dishwasher and, in return, he gets a new XBox game. That’s the first one he’s had in over a month, so he was well overdue.

'Even if I take the plumbing job and the chair out of the equation for this week, that’s still a lot to spend on very little. I am realising why I never have any money and am always in debt. I am shocked by this week and I bet there are other weeks that look like this, too. Time to sit down and write a proper budget.'

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