How I manage my moneyI'm 29, a teacher in Manchester on £31,500, and I save £600 a month

I am 29, I teach a Year 5 class in south Manchester and I earn £31,500 a year. After tax, National Insurance, student loan and my pension contribution, about £2,100 lands in my account on the last working day of each month.

By lunchtime the same day, £600 of it has gone. I don't do anything clever. I set up a standing order three years ago and I have not touched it since.

The day I get paid

Pay day used to be the best day of the month and the worst week followed it. I would spend freely for ten days and then spend the last week checking my balance before buying a meal deal.

Now the standing orders go out the same morning. Rent first, then savings, then a fixed amount into a separate spending account. Whatever is left in my main account is for bills that come out by direct debit.

If the money is still sitting in my current account, I will find a reason to spend it. So it doesn't sit there.

Where the £600 goes

The £600 is split in two. £333 goes into a Lifetime ISA, because I want to buy a flat and the government bonus on that account is the closest thing to free money I have found. The other £267 goes into an easy-access savings account.

The easy-access pot is my emergency fund first and my deposit second. I wanted three months of essential spending in there before I counted any of it towards a home. That took me about eighteen months.

I know the Lifetime ISA has rules about what you can buy and penalties for taking money out for other reasons. I read the conditions properly before I opened it, because a teacher friend got caught out.

Rent and bills

My share of the rent is £650 a month. I live with a friend from university in a two-bed flat, and that arrangement is honestly the main reason I can save at all. Living alone in the same area would cost me close to double.

Bills are split evenly. Energy, broadband and council tax come to a little under £150 each, and I pay around £20 for my phone.

What I stopped paying for

I did not make any dramatic cuts. I stopped a gym membership I was using twice a month and started running instead. I cancelled two streaming services and kept one. I take lunch in most days, partly for money and partly because the staffroom is where everything gets sorted out.

I still go out. I have a fixed £250 a month for food, drinks and seeing people, and when it is gone it is gone. Some months I hit the limit in week three and stay in. That feels fine now; it did not at first.

Teaching does not pay a fortune, but it pays on time, every month. I have learnt to treat that reliability as an asset.

Pension

I am in the Teachers' Pension Scheme, which comes straight out of my salary. I did not think about it at all for my first few years, and I am still not an expert, but I have logged in to see my statement and I understand roughly what I am building.

What I'd tell someone starting out

Automate the boring parts on the day you are paid. Decide on a fun number you can actually stick to. And if you can share a home with someone you get on with, the savings are bigger than any spending cut you will ever make.

I would like to buy somewhere within the next two years. Whether Manchester prices let me is another question, but the money is at least going in the right direction.