It was 9:40 on Tuesday night, Mabel was asleep on the dining table, and I had one sheet of A4, a blue biro and the banking app open on my phone. The decorations were back in the loft, school had started again the day before, and I finally had the quiet to do something I've been meaning to do for about three years: write down every direct debit we pay, in one place, by hand.
You'd think an ex-building society person would have this nailed. I spent eleven years behind a desk helping other people sort out their standing orders, and I couldn't have told you our own monthly total without looking. The app shows everything as a scrolling list, which is exactly why none of it sinks in. A pen is slower, and slow turns out to be the point.
The fourteen lines
This is the sheet, in the order I wrote it, with this month's amounts:
- Mortgage (five-year fix at 1.89%, ends April 2027): £871.00
- Council tax, Band C: £188.00
- Gas and electricity: £151.00
- Water: £39.00
- Broadband: £61.50
- Two phones, SIM only: £20.00
- TV Licence: £14.13
- Car insurance, paid monthly: £44.08
- Boiler and central heating cover: £14.00
- Joint life insurance: £23.40
- One streaming service: £10.99
- Isla's swimming lessons: £36.00
- Extra cloud storage for a phone: £2.49
- A reading app for the kids: £5.99
Added up, it comes to £1,481.58 a month. I added it three times, once on the calculator, once in my head and once on the back of an envelope, because eleven years of balancing a till drawer leaves a mark.
The mortgage is 59% of the whole sheet, and it's the one line that isn't going anywhere this year, because the 1.89% fix runs until April 2027. That date is now in the diary in red, since it's the line that will hurt when it moves. Mortgage, council tax and water together come to £1,098, which is just under three quarters of everything. The roof over our heads is the expensive bit, and there are no surprises in that.
The two I'd forgotten
The last two lines are the embarrassing ones. £2.49 a month for extra storage on one of our phones, signed up in a panic in the summer of 2023 when it said "storage full" in the middle of a day out. And £5.99 a month for a reading app that nobody had opened since last summer. Isla did a bit of a summer challenge on it. Alfie was four when we signed up and has no memory of it at all.
Together that's £8.48 a month, or £101.76 a year, for nothing. Both took about six minutes to cancel. The storage company wanted me to confirm three times (I checked the photos were safely on the laptop first) and the reading app showed a cartoon owl looking sad about my decision. I coped.
What isn't on the sheet
The sheet only holds the fixed bits. The weekly shop (I've set that at £105), petrol, the Tesco delivery for heavy things and the £10 a month we move by hand into Mabel's pot all leave by card or by hand, so none of them appear. Those can wait for another week.
Council tax is paid over ten months, not twelve, so the honest yearly figure isn't £1,481.58 times twelve. Multiply by twelve, take off two lots of £188, and it's £17,402.96. With the two cancelled lines gone it's £17,301.20. I'd never put a yearly number against our bills before, and it looks a lot bigger written down than it feels when it leaves in fourteen small pieces.
I showed Rob at 5:15 this morning, over the kettle. He read the total, said "right", and went to work, which is his way of taking in financial news. The sheet is now taped inside the cupboard door above the kettle, where I'll see it every time I make a cup of tea. I've left a margin down the right-hand side and tied a pencil to it with string, because I know from experience that April rewrites half of it.
The sums: fourteen lines, £1,481.58 a month; two cancelled, £8.48 back; £1,473.10 to go.
