Quick question for you guys in the U.K....are your bills actually this cheap?
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UK here. These are my current year numbers. Do note OP numbers are from 5 years ago.
Electricity: £100 or so normally, £200 during autumn/winter. I dont have gas, everything is electric and I use my PC 8/7.
Internet: £50 for basic 1GB speed nowadays. You can try playing around with new customers contracts just to go down to 30 again but it's more trouble then it's worth. Avoid Vodafone though, they cancelation process is cancer.
Mobile Bill: £10. Sounds about right. I dont do much calling around though.
Council Tax: £110. It keeps growing 3% every year for the last decade.
Car Insurance: Dunno. I cycle everywhere.
Food Bill: £300 without takeouts. With takeouts it might be 400.
TV license: You don't pay for that unless you're dumb. Everytime I recieve a letter I regret not collecting them because I'd have enough to make a wallpaper.
Getting out of paying a TV license after you've already been paying at the same address is actual aids to do.
They expect you to "prove" it with photos and shit. And because they've overstretched if you take any photos of a TV/computer or laptop they'll deny it.
Moving address is the easiest way, you just don't pay from day 1.
Wow, and I thought I was frugal. Granted, I'm not sure what a council tax is or what the American equivalent of that would be. It sounds like a property tax, but you pay it even when you're renting? The food bill definitely seemed low to me, but not impossible I suppose.
I knew y'all don't have formally allocated levies but that's actually worse than I thought.
Other than the $10 mobile bill, you could do all that in a small apartment in America. Or at least you could until recently. I just say small because your electric bill on anything I think more than 1BR is going to top ~$120 . Electric bills have gone up 30% for me this year.
We don't have council taxes, though, though there are all kinds of other taxes. Typically that would be built into your rent, assuming you rent. Rent is really expensive. Car insurance is a lot more than GBP45 a month equivalent.
These days, I feel like you'd be very limited what you could eat on a $300 food budget a month. If you need 90 meals a month, that's $3.33 a meal. You can't buy a meal for that, hardly anywhere, for good reason. I'm sure you could do it and not starve, but it would be a lot of beans and rice. Yes, it is substantially cheaper to buy and cook your own food, but we're looking at the ingredients cost quickly approaching what you have to spend without, certainly, any extravagance like prepared foods.