Saving in theory. Living in practice.
Welcome to Outgoings, a weekly series where we speak to Yonder members about their weekly outgoings. Real people, real money, real spending habits.
This week: a 21-year-old software engineer on a placement year, living rent-free at his parents' in Slough and genuinely trying to save before he heads back to university. Then the week happened: a food-truck date, rounds in Finsbury Park, a summer party that ended at 3am, petrol to Norfolk for a mate's 21st, and a shakshuka for eight and the diary quietly turned into evidence. Let's get into it.
Key facts
Diarist: 21, associate software engineer at a tech company (placement year)
Location: Slough, commuting into London
Take-home: ~£2,500 a month
Biggest spend: £77.68 (a group Just Eat order on board games night)
Smallest spend: £0.52 (the onions he forgot)
Yonder member since: 2025
I'm 21, and I'm an associate software engineer at a tech company – a generous way of saying I'm an intern on a placement year, taking twelve months out of my degree to write code and, apparently, bring youthful energy to an ageing office. I finish at the end of July, and then it's back to university.
I live in Slough with my parents, in the family home, and my cat Lyra. Rent is a beautiful £0, though I chip in where I can. My take home is around £2.5k a month, which, for someone with no rent, should make me a formidable saver. It does not.
My relationship with money, in one line: I try to be frugal, but I like to live life to the fullest, and my bank account has opinions about that. Think debt-ridden student who's stumbled into a bit of income and wants to spend it on the people he likes. The catch is I can see the finish line: the internship ends in a few weeks, so I'm meant to be saving hard. This week was a test of that. I'll let you score it.
Take-home: ~£2.5k / month · Rent: £0 (lives at home) · Week total: £257.85 · Transactions: 14
Day 01 · Monday · London & Hertford — £32.10
Day one, and it opens with me under the weather. The kind of morning that clears by lunchtime but makes you question everything until it does.
11:11 · £6.10 — TfL. The classic day-after tap; yesterday's travel catching up with me. I keep forgetting that going into London to see friends is a thing that costs money, and the reminder always lands like a small slap.
20:46 · £26.00 — Dinner from a food truck in Hertford. Part of why the day turned around: a date, a few weeks in now, and some very good Indian food before heading back to mine, warm and full. Two proper meals for £13 a head, no complaints there.
A shaky start, a free coffee, good company, and a bank balance still very much intact. I'll take it.
Day 02 · Tuesday · London — £77.68
Tuesday is board games night at work: pizza in, social deduction games until gone 11pm. Some people think staying in the office until midnight is unhinged. Those people don't understand the value of free food and a well-timed accusation.
18:11 · £77.68 — Just Eat, for a group of ten. I volunteered to place the order (I asked very nicely), the total climbed north of £120, and then I remembered Just Eat sitting in my Yonder rewards. Points deployed, a decent chunk knocked off. Naturally, I also won the games.
Home just before midnight, straight to bed. Fun, but a school night in the truest sense.
Day 03 · Wednesday · London — £37.99
A chill day, in theory. No plans, just work then home to bed-rot for a couple of hours. Sorely needed. In practice…
18:33 · £10.99 — A notepad from WHSmith. I'd realised I hadn't bought my friend a birthday present, and the plan is to handwrite her a personal cookbook of recipes she'd love. Genuinely proud of the idea. Less proud of the price. Since when is a notebook £10.99? I'd already walked out of another shop over exactly this. There's a limit. I'm not made of money.
19:53 · £13.60 — Two pints at the Plimsoll, Finsbury Park. I'm starting to think this diary is a bad influence, because the one thing I don't want to be is boring, so I texted a friend, who says yes to everything the way I do, and out we went.
21:51 · £13.40 — Two more at the Faltering Fullback down the road. If you're near Finsbury Park and haven't been: go. It looks tiny from the street and opens out into something enormous inside: multiple rooms, a multi-layered terrace. Underrated. It's funny how good company makes £27 of pints vanish without complaint. After a year in London you stop flinching at £6.80 a pint, though I still miss the £3 ones up north.
Made the last train by a hair and crashed straight into bed. I've a feeling I won't get much rest this week.
Day 04 · Thursday · London — £6.70
Woke up tired (shocking) for a big one: the work summer party. Roof of the building until dark, free food and drinks (everyone says it's the one not to miss). I already knew I wouldn't make it home, so I packed a bag for a friend's sofa.
03:06 · £6.70 — TfL. Another day-after tap, technically from the night before. At this point it's less a surprise than a subscription. I'm a little afraid to total up what I've spent on transport this year, so I'm choosing not to.
The day was a gentle write-off: team lunch, a long chat with the new interns, then the roof, boiling hot and brilliant. When it wound down we kept it going downstairs. I may have left the office at 3am.
Day total: £6.70 — and that's yesterday's money, so it barely counts.
Day 05 · Friday · Slough → Norfolk — £55.54
Somehow no hangover. Home for a work-from-home day, which is just as well, because tonight we drive to Norfolk for my friend's 21st (yes — the notebook friend). She's booked an Airbnb for a few of us by the sea.
18:06 · £55.54 — Petrol. Workday done, car packed with the essentials (a badminton set and a lot of beer) and a full tank for the 3.5-hour drive. Fuel is genuinely eye-watering now, but the passengers have offered to pay me in drinks, which is a currency I accept.
Arrived to find the place lovely: right by the beach, quiet town, good pubs within stumbling distance. First pint bought for me, in lieu of petrol money. This is going to be a good weekend.
Day 06 · Saturday · Norfolk — £10.95
Woke up refreshed. There are fourteen of us across four bedrooms, so it's cosy but that's rather the point. Beach today, England v Norway tonight, and a strong suspicion that pints will be involved.
11:02 · £10.95 — Breakfast at a cafe in town. A ham and chorizo sandwich with a bit of salad, after a wander round the centre. Lovely. Hard to be mad at it.
And that was, astonishingly, the day's only spend. We did the beach, then a barbecue back at the house where I appointed myself grillmaster and cooked almost everything to perfection (a couple of items were lost to conversation). Then a local pub, where someone ordered a pitcher (six pints of Guinness in a single vessel, a concept I find faintly deranged) which, on top of our own supplies, meant I barely spent a thing. The football went our way. We went home happy.
Day 07 · Sunday · Norfolk — £36.89
Feeling good, and not too hungover — I paced myself. Last full day here, so we're making it count.
10:19 · £8.93 — Ingredients from a local shop. As resident chef, I'd volunteered my signature shakshuka for the group. This is enough to feed eight, give or take a few spices already in the cupboard. (Recipe below, for the curious.)
14:16 · £5.99 — Spotify. Why does this bill always land mid-good-time? I put up with the ads for too long; I'm calling it justifiable. At least there's a student discount.
15:13 · £0.52 — Onions. From the same shop, because I'd forgotten the onions for the shakshuka. I'm daft. At least they're cheap.
21:31 · £10.70 — Two pints at a local pub. Most people had drifted off, but a few of us stayed an extra night, arriving near last orders, so we double-parked the round for efficiency. Writing this, I've noticed how much of my week involves alcohol. Hmm.
22:28 · £10.75 — A double vodka Coke, same pub. I may as well have had two more pints. I wasn't even sure I wanted it. Feeling: drunk.
We sat up in the living room for hours and fell asleep happy, ready to leave in the morning. A brilliant weekend and honestly, I can't wait to go back to university and live like this again.
What the week says
Three things stayed with us after reading it.
No rent, and it still went somewhere. Our diarist has the setup most people quietly envy: living at home, £0 rent, no fixed costs, and an explicit plan to save before university. On paper, the easiest saving conditions he'll ever have. And still £257.85 walked out the door in seven days. That's the lesson hiding in a rent-free week: when nothing is committed, everything is discretionary. The money doesn't disappear on bills. It disappears on Tuesdays.
The diary as a bad influence. He says it himself on Wednesday: "I'm starting to think this diary is a bad influence", right before texting a friend to go for pints precisely so the entry wouldn't be boring. By Sunday he's totting it up and clocking, in real time, that drinks are comfortably his biggest category, and maybe that's a sign to cut down. The document became the mirror. That's the most honest thing a spending diary can do: not judge you, just show you, and let you draw the line yourself.
He spent it on people, not things. Look at what the money actually bought: a date, rounds with friends, petrol to a mate's birthday, a handwritten cookbook, a shakshuka for eight. Almost nothing he spent on was an object; nearly all of it was time with people. And there's a clock on it: the internship ends in weeks, and he's about to leave for uni. Read that way, this isn't a saver failing to save. It's someone spending, deliberately, on the people he's about to be further from. The one thing he'd take back is the drink he had at the very end, when the night was mostly over. Funny how that works.
The reflections
Most defended: "Saturday's cafe breakfast. Maybe I'd afford a house sooner if I stopped buying the avocado-toast equivalent but a nice breakfast here and there never hurt anyone. Better to live to eat than eat to live."
Quietly taken back: "The double vodka Coke on Sunday. Turns out my decision-making dips when I'm drunk. I didn't need it, I'm an absolute lightweight."
Almost spent on, didn't: "Sweet treats, all week. I prepped and brought food for the barbecue, which kept the weekend food spend right down. I was tempted a hundred times. I held the line."
Surprising: "How much I spend on drinks. I didn't expect it to be such a big chunk of the week. I've thought about cutting down before, maybe this is the sign."
Outgoings is a weekly diary series from Yonder. Every Thursday, one anonymous member takes us through a week of their spending life. To write one, submit an application here.
Bonus: his "feeds 8 for under £10" shakshuka
Ingredients
- 2 red onions
- 2 bell peppers (yellow, for colour)
- A few garlic cloves (use your heart)
- A few tablespoons of olive oil
- 2 tsp unsmoked paprika
- 1 tsp ground cumin
- 1 tsp chilli powder or flakes
- 1 tsp pepper
- 1 tsp shrimp paste (optional)
- A couple of dashes of fish sauce (optional)
- 2 tins of chopped or plum tomatoes (spring for the good ones — they're the whole dish)
- 8 eggs
- Chopped coriander
- Salt, to taste
Method
- Chop the onions and peppers into roughly 1-inch pieces. It'll look like a lot; it cooks down.
- Heat a little olive oil in a pan over medium-high.
- Add the onions and peppers. Leave them until they catch a little char, then stir. About 5 minutes.
- Add the chopped garlic.
- Add the paprika, cumin, chilli (if you're into it), salt and pepper, and stir for another minute.
- If using shrimp paste and fish sauce, add now and cook for a minute or two until the smell mellows.
- Add the tinned tomatoes and simmer with a lid on for 10–15 minutes, until the raw tomato taste has gone. Then simmer uncovered until it's no longer watery. Taste and adjust seasoning here.
- Make little wells with your spoon and crack an egg into each, spaced as evenly as you can.
- Season the top of each egg with a little salt, pepper and cumin.
- Reduce the heat to low, lid on, and cook until the whites are set.
- Garnish with coriander (if you don't have the gene) and serve with toasted bread or rice.
- Tada.
