Welcome to Money Diaries, where we're tackling what might be the last taboo facing modern working women: money. We're asking a cross-section of women how they spend their hard-earned money during a seven-day period – and we're tracking every last penny.
This week we're with a 24-year-old who recently made the move from industry to consulting. She works in engineering and her male-dominated company was dragging her down. Her boyfriend is at naval college and gets a monthly stipend of £700 that is sucked up by rent. Their lifestyle is substantially lived at the weekends: camping trips, hikes and breaks to see friends and shop in London, Liverpool, and Manchester. These things can get expensive when you're paying for two! She also sends him cash for fuel; he doesn't accept cash for food and booze so she finds ways to get this to him (Graze boxes and buying rounds or giving him her credit card "to look after" on nights out).
Her house sucks up a lot of money. It rinsed her savings – buying it a year ago and decorating and maintaining it is her primary hobby right now. You'll find her in IKEA at least every fortnight and she often sells stuff on Facebook marketplace – it's amazing!
Age: 24
Location: Newcastle upon Tyne
Salary: £30,000
Paycheque: Around £1,700
Number of housemates: Officially, and for the purposes of council tax, none. My boyfriend stays here on weekends and the college holidays but officially he still lives with his parents and rents a room near his college. My spare room is on Airbnb and I have a regular turnover of long-term guests in there. I’ve got a good business going with German medical students and a new couple just moved in. They’ll be here for two months. (I’m not sure how long they’ll need to be here before my friends, boyfriend and I stop calling them “The New Germans”.)
Monthly Expenses
Housing costs: £406 on my mortgage
Loan payments: £56 on student finance
Utilities: £77 on gas and electricity, £30 on water, £86 on council tax and another £30 on house insurance.
Transportation: Up to £3 on buses during the week when I don’t make it in on my bike. I fill up my car for around £30 every other weekend. In theory, I give my boyfriend £50 for fuel to get back home every other weekend. He’s supposed to front the weekends between but regularly has no cash so I have to give him money.
Phone bill: £45.48 for both my phone and the 4G box I use for my laptop. I don’t have broadband; I give the Airbnb guests the password for the Wi-Fi from the student house-share next door.
Savings? I put aside a standing order of £400 every month. This is for holidays, doing work on the house, car maintenance and other large, annual expenses like car insurance and my climbing pass. It doesn’t stick around very long with all my DIY projects, but I try to keep it at a minimum of £1,000. I also put £200 towards my pension that I’m unable to touch ever.
Other: I try to keep monthly costs to a minimum… I don’t pay my TV licence and use my boyfriend’s dad's Netflix login. My friends and I are on a Spotify family subscription so only pay £3.75 each for that.
My only real “luxury” spend is on my cleaner, it’s around £90 a month… It was difficult for me to justify hiring a cleaner for myself, but I did plenty of research and am happy that I have someone who is benefitting from me employing them. I’m able to crack on with more DIY and housekeeping without needing to scrub the bathroom walls or hose out the recycling bin on a Sunday morning.
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Day One
8am: Walk to work. The snow over the weekend has compacted into a kind of ice rink so I make the decision not to cycle in. This means that I have to go straight to work, so I have a little extra time in the morning and spend it heating up last night’s soup for my thermos flask and sorting some laundry out. I also nearly die a total of three times slipping on the ice; good decision not to cycle.
5.30pm: After-work pint, £4.35. It’s an unusually busy day in the office so we debunk to one of my favourite pubs. I get a pint of real ale and a packet of crisps as I’m starving and was once made fun of for being a “girl” when I got a half pint with my old colleagues. There’s plenty to talk about, mostly my new coat I got over the weekend.
7pm: Bus home, £1.50. Normally I’ve got a clear timetable of food shop, housework, cooking and maybe some yoga on Monday, but the work drinks have knocked that off kilter. I go to Morrisons. It is only a small shop and from the sparse selection I pick up some bananas, a couple of leeks, a single courgette and some bread. I also get a new packet of Dreamies for my neighbour’s cat, who comes around most days and is my personal pest control (not that he’s caught anything yet). He’s ruined my IKEA sofa pulling on it but, at only £169, a Klippan is less than the insurance excess I’d have to pay after burning down my house if ever there were mice in it. I have a “Free 5 Pound” voucher from my points card – I’ve been fiercely loyal to the More scheme since Nectar partnered with the Daily Mail – and the shop is less than that. To top it up I pick up some fancy Fever-Tree tonic water as a treat – it’s in the sale anyway and someone bought me a bottle of Hendrick's for Christmas that I’ve been too scared to ruin by mixing with own-brand tonic. £3.16
Total: £9.01
Day Two
7am: Spring has sprung! The snow has gone and the sun is shining! So I’m back on the bike and off to the climbing wall. I’m wearing my new leggings – a late Christmas present from my perpetually skint boyfriend – they’re green and blue and have bright geometric shapes on them. A staff member compliments me on them and I feel awesome.
Once I’m showered at work and doing my makeup in the loos, I check my phone. The standing order has gone out to my cleaner for £22.
1pm: It’s the first cosmological day of spring and the sun’s still shining so to celebrate I walk over to Boots. For the past couple of weeks I’ve had a rash that’s started to worry my boyfriend. The pharmacist says it looks like a fungal skin infection and flogs me a tube of stuff that says on the label that you’re supposed to put it on nappy rash. I get a new tube of Nivea day cream too. £12.85
5.30pm: Home time. Cycling home I nearly die once when a moped undertakes a car turning right and doesn’t do a head check, he just swerves straight into me. I apologise because I’m British and he apologises because he nearly took some well-loved limbs off me.
I go to my friend's for tea, I promise to take gin but accidentally pick up a bottle that only has one measure left in it and now I look stingy. I have a feeling that the boyfriend drank the rest of it at the St Paddy’s Day party after he finished a bottle of whiskey – also mine.
A pharmacist friend is also there and I ask her to check my rash, she diagnoses it as something completely different and tells me that Boots won’t accept returns for that kind of cream. It’s crushing.
Total: £34.85
Day Three
7am: Time for a climb! It’s colder today and my shoes really hurt my feet. I got them in a sale last year, they’re two sizes too small but I haven’t found a good enough reason to get new ones yet – climbing shoes are expensive af and these do the job. The boyfriend thinks that they’re holding back my performance; I like to think that they’re developing my strength so when I wear better shoes I’ll instantly be the best climber ever.
1pm: Lunch costs me absolutely nothing because I’m glued to my desk finishing off the pub quiz for later tonight. I made a sandwich and salad for my lunchbox today. I had to squish into the corner of the kitchen to make it this morning as the New Germans were prepping some elaborate oatmeal smoothie bowls. I feel kind of sad this afternoon and miss the boyfriend. Mondays are usually fine, I like spending some time by myself, but Tuesdays and Wednesdays are lonely.
7.30pm: Pub! I work late so go straight to the pub and get a pizza from the food truck they have there every week. Newcastle’s food scene is a total hidden gem, and these pizzas are the pinnacle of it. They give me a mate's rates pizza for £5. While I’m working, I run a tab and the guys keep the low-strength “weekday” real ales coming. Again, I don’t like drinking halves for social reasons and don’t like drinking pints because I’m working and drinking slow and the beer gets warm. A few months ago the bar staff and I reached the perfect compromise: they serve me any beer in two-thirds. The New Germans come along and my friends teach them some Geordie slang while I work. We walk home together in the kind of strong wind that makes me think of scary movies. £9.60
Total: £14.60
Day Four
7am: Lie-in. Thursday mornings are perhaps my one true indulgence. I drink coffee and finish my book in bed before work. Total bliss.
1pm: I cycle to town to go to the bank. The sun is shining and everyone seems really happy. Grey Street looks like some kind of Croatian citadel with the sun bouncing off all the stone and I feel like I’m in a movie. I have £60 in cash from working at the pub and left over from a night out a couple of weeks ago where the event turned out to have a free bar. I pay it into the bank on one of the hole-in-the-wall machines. I really don’t “do” cash. As soon as I get at least £30 I pay it into the bank. I feel like I don’t own it until it’s on my statements. I think that this is a hang-up from when I was saving for my house – at that point I had a spreadsheet, where I would download my statements, copy them into it and categorise every outgoing. I had a strict budget with percentage deviations against every category. I’ve stopped that now, it was such a painful experience. It didn’t stop me overspending. But it gave me good management habits like never using cash and handling different costs on different cards.
I then head to the outdoors shop; the hike I have planned this weekend is a long one and I don’t have my own map for the area. When I’m picking up the map, £14.99, I overhear a sales guy selling a girl some hiking boots and talking about the importance of socks. I’ve been struggling to break into my new shoes so go over to join in their chat. Somehow, and I still don’t know how, I end up buying a £17 pair of socks that are hand-wash only.
8pm: Night in. I drink my fancy gin and tonics and read Harper’s Bazaar in bed. If you have a mortgage through my bank, you get a free magazine subscription… They don’t often feature women of colour but I think that my career goal is to be in one of their “At Work” profiles.
Total: £31.99
Day Five
7am: Climb. I make scrambled eggs and revel in the sunshine and the novelty of not having to put the lights on my bike. Climbing is awesome, I wear my snazzy union jack leggings and am so happy. My boyfriend is home today!
10am: My boyfriend’s allowance, £40. I give him a little less this week because he’s earned some fuel money carpooling with a college friend. After I send it to him I text, asking him to eat something. He says that he will; I find out later that he bought a single chicken sandwich.
1pm: Trip to toon. Someone in my office also likes the independent food scene and we’ve been planning to try this pop-up doughnut stand for a while. It’s also payday and that’s enough of an excuse for me so we head out there. I splurge £3.50 on the vegan option and then stop by the Paperchase concession stand to get a couple of cards for upcoming family birthdays. They don’t accept my loyalty card – apparently they’re only valid in the real shops, ffs. £4
7pm: I work late again then scoot home to my boyfriend. He’s starving – big surprise – but I’ve got the night planned out and there’s no time for food just yet… we’re heading to Aldi. I need to restock my cheap booze that was depleted at last weekend’s party. We also grab some essentials like the remarkably fancy tissue boxes that I put in the Airbnb room and the food I need for my family camping trip next week. I concede to buying a tub of olives for us to snack on. £49.92
8pm: Dinner’s in the oven and will take an hour. There’s only one thing for it – to the pub! Obviously, I’m buying. This pub’s only a five-minute walk away and when we get there we sit on a bench around which some kids and a dog are playing. It’s truly lovely. £8.30
Total: £105.72
Day Six
11am: Hike. We take my car up to Kielder Park. When we last used it, it didn’t work. One of the rear wheels had seized in the cold weather. We ended up revving the car up and dragging it back and forth until there was this clunk and it started moving. There’s not much I can expect from my car; it cost me £300 and I get its MOT from an unmarked garage in Byker. I’ve never even met the guy – I just leave the car outside, put the keys through a letterbox and when he texts me to come back, the keys are on top of the driver’s side tyre and the MOT certificate is on the passenger seat. There’s fuel in the car so we don’t have to pay for that. I like to keep it topped up. I don’t know why, maybe so that I can be smug if the inevitable fuel crisis hits sooner than predicted, or maybe because if someone breaks into it (which has happened before) and steals it (they did not bother with that) they’ll be able to get far enough away for the police to be unable to track them down and return the car. Gimme that sweet insurance money…
The parking at the lake costs £5 for the day. My boyfriend went through my piggy bank in the morning and got the cash. I always put loose change in the piggy bank. When I was at school, that’s where my bus money came from on a weekend. Last year, we used it to pay off my boyfriend’s car repayments. We didn’t even have the car anymore. Lucky for us, the machine at the car park is broken and, according to a sign, has been since 2015. My boyfriend doesn’t notice until he’s put in £2.
7pm: You can’t go hiking without having a pint and a pub meal to think about at the end… So we go to the pub. It’s been a crazy sunny day and loads of people have been out day-drinking. We’re so shattered that we don’t even get changed from our non-ironic athleisure. I buy two meals and two pints. We order exactly the same thing, which adds to my concerns that my boyfriend’s guilt over me paying for everything has turned into some intense power-play where he agrees with absolutely everything I like and do. £26.50
8pm: We’re buzzed from one pint so walk to a different pub – the one where I work and they serve me everything in two-thirds. It’s the weekend so we get some strong lagers that they’re showcasing, £7.65. Halfway through mine (or should I say one-third?), my boyfriend realises that he’s unbearably tired and starts pestering to go home. I tease him by drinking it slowly. When we’re getting into bed, I notice that the shop downstairs is still open. Yes, it’s not even 9pm.
Total: £36.15
Day Seven
9am: Breakfast in bed. I’m so pleased over the clocks changing and tricking my boyfriend into thinking that I woke up at 9am, not 8am like I usually do (for some reason he hates this). I bring him breakfast and a cup of tea in bed and feel incredibly happy. It is one year today since I bought my house.
11am: Climbing time, £7.50. We go for a couple's climb and I pay for his entry. The guy behind the desk seems to understand my mad face when my boyfriend admits that he forgot his student pass and gives us the student rate anyway.
1pm: Morrisons run, £15.82. We walk home past the shop and I grab some fruit and veg from the still under-stocked shelves (though I have to say, they always have a load of bananas). I get a salad box for lunch and some things to celebrate my house’s birthday tonight – a bottle of prosecco and ingredients to make a cake. And some daffodils, how could I not?
3pm: Boyfriend stays home to watch the F1, I go to watch a rugby match with the girls. The bar at the club uses pre-paid membership cards so I sink a couple of guilt-free beers using the tenner I put on there three months ago. Halfway through I have to call up my boyfriend and ask him to bring the laundry in from drying outside because it’s started sleeting here and the wind’s blowing it towards home.
5pm: Fuck-it pub, £14.75. We go to the pub, the lovely pub. Two rounds and no regrets.
Total: £38.07
The Breakdown
Food/Drink: £148.55
Entertainment: £22.49
Clothes/Beauty: £17
Travel: £3.50
Other: £78.85
Total: £270.39
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