My last blog post was about how I am planning to buy a house in London and my mission to save £5000 for a house deposit and this blog post is to help keep me accountable to this by keeping track of my savings on here! I have a lot of different side hustles and jobs that I do and so I am using this post which I hope to do at the start of each month to keep track of how I am doing with saving for a house deposit. 

When I was 18 I planned to save 10% of my income every month which I did for a while but then, as a 19 year old, I manged to spend a lot of it on holidays, which was amazing but has left me with very little in savings now as I didn’t get back on to the whole 10% thing. Starting from now, I will be making some changes to my financial situation. Every month I will be saving 10% of my income and splitting it between three savings channels – a general savings cash ISA that I can access if I have to, my lifetime ISA and my Stocks and Shares ISA with Tickr. I am choosing to use ISAs as they are tax free below £20,000 and I won’t pass that limit so I won’t have to pay tax on any returns or interest the money in these accounts generates. 

So that will be happening from May onwards and I will be generally saving to make up to the £3678 that I should have if I had saved 10% since I turned 18 like I intended. This money will also be split between these accounts. Hopefully saving at the moment won’t be too difficult as we cannot be tempted to go and spend the money with friends at the pub as we can’t leave the house during lockdown! 

Plus, recently, I have been doing some research into other ways to save money. For example, thanks to couponing websites like Raise I now know that using coupons can be a fantastic way to reduce the cost of your shopping, especially when making purchases online and on websites like eBay

So to summarise where I am at the moment, 

Lifetime ISA = £445 (plus government bonus = £557)

Tickr Stocks and Shares ISA = £60

Cash ISA = not opened yet. 

So I have £505 saved of £5000, just over 10% there! I would like to save £1000 in May, both through saving money that is coming in and doing some side hustles to earn a little extra! We will see how it goes but I will give you an update at the start of June! I also popped some May goals on my Instagram which include saving £1000, reading at least 3 books and taking up baking bread again now I have finally managed to find some yeast!