How To Live Well On One Income In The UK

Trying to live in the UK on one income can be challenging but it isn’t impossible with proper planning.

There are so many reasons why you might have to make do with a single income. From being a single parent, bachelor, widow, nursing mom and more, the reasons are endless. But you can still live a pretty good life with your one income source. How?

Keep reading to learn some tricks and tips to follow on ways to make do with one income.

1.      Plan your budget

Having a budget is very essential whether you have single or multiple sources of income. As soon as you get your payment, you should try out the piggy bank budgeting method.

With this method, you are required to split your bills for separate purposes and create a budget for each of them. That is holidays, clothing, food and more.

When the time comes to pay for these things, you will have enough money to sort them.

This reduces situations where you don’t have enough money for one purpose and have to borrow from another.

As soon as you start tracking down your needs and wastage, you will be more intentional. You will know where and what to spend money on.

You should experiment with different budgeting ideas and stick to the one that works best for you.

2.      Plan your lifestyle spending

Now that you have made a budget and are spending money intentionally, you should also level your lifestyle according to your income.

If you spend more than you earn, you will end up in a bad financial situation. So you must plan your day-to-day life’s spending and be intentional about it.

You can build your lifestyle in such a way that your spending will be much lesser than your earnings, and you will still have enough to save.

If you are the social type and love visiting everywhere you can, you might want to scale back on that. Also, you can spend less on food by reducing your number of trips to the supermarket. You can also embrace meal planning and prepping.

You can try out frugal living and minimalism as this will help you to transform your spending patterns. Even if you can afford to go out to a fancy restaurant, try saving money and go to an everyday restaurant instead. This way, you will be able to enjoy yourself and also save money for the future.

3.      Start saving

After making a budget and scaling back on your lifestyle, you will see that you will always have extra cash even after paying all your bills. When this happens, you should start saving it. Even if the amount is small, save it still because saving small amounts will later become a pretty good amount.

This will also help you during rough days. Because let’s be real here, life doesn’t always go according to plan. If you need money urgently, you can use your savings. You are helping your future self with your savings.

4.      Accept your situation and not compare yourself to other people

This is perhaps the biggest tip yet. It is important to accept your present financial situation and live within that means.

You will meet different kinds of people every day and some of them will be of a higher income bracket than you. Do not let that bring you down.

It is normal to see people spend crazy amounts of money on buying food, clothing, gadgets and luxurious accessories. You may also want to emulate that. But it would be best to accept your reality and stay through to your income and spending.

Accept your situation and be thankful for the things you already have. Because if you continually keep thinking of spending more, your life will be full of stress.

Live within your budget, save every penny you can and enjoy your life to the fullest with the things you already have.

5.      Plan for the future

When you know that you will need some money for future endeavours, you should start saving for that as early as possible. Planning for the makes your life so much easier. For example, if you are going to have a baby in the future, you should start saving as much as you can from now.

6.      Know more about taxes

Learn about the taxes you are paying and if you are eligible to still pay those taxes. If you have a child, you can check if you are required to pay child tax credits and if you are married, look if you are paying unnecessary taxes.

Also, you can check if you are eligible for working or childcare tax credits.

If your spouse is not working, you can transfer joint accounts or investments in their name as they will be paying less tax than you. You can also register the non-working partner as a non-taxpayer.

7.      Get a side hustle

Whenever you are free, look for some side hustles which you can do. This extra income will be added to your primary income and consequently, you will have more. You can try out website testing, freelancing, daycare jobs, blogging etc.

Living in the UK can be expensive if you depend on your one income; getting a side hustle can ease your income stress.

8.      Use free things

Look around and find things which you can get for free. For example, you can use Facebook Marketplace to see if someone is giving some item for free. There are also many shops and stores like eBay and Freecycle where you can find free and cheap stuff. There is no point in getting expensive items that you can get at a bargain.

You can also look out for sales happening around your neighborhood or church.

Final Verdict

There are so many ways to live and survive on one income in the UK. A few of them have been discussed in this article. With a little bit of sacrifice on your part, this shouldn’t be too much of an inconvenience at all. Planning a budget, saving, and being mindful about spending will help you a lot.