What does feeling skint mean to you?

[ssd]

Honestly?
Just asking after recent conversation with someone close who feels skint (3 days ago) and today told me they've just spent £500 on furniture.

It makes me realise my skint and their skint is world's apart.

So what does feeling skint mean to you?

@Timeforabiscuit

There are levels below skint though;

Skint - no money and need to get essentials

Brassic - not enough to cover some direct debits or essential bills, before even getting to food and toiletries

And then fucked - no income, no prospect of paying bills, in rent arrears

As an aside skint and brassic are the same word. Brassic comes from Boracic Lint and is rhyming slag for skint.

I always had enough money for bills but only just enough for food, then that was it.

More going out than coming in! Eating small portions to make meals last over a couple of days. Tracking every penny as you go.

My friends don’t seem to understand what my skint means, I was talking about having no money with one friend - £47 between two of us to buy a fortnight of food, she agreed she was also skint and then suggested we booked a holiday! When I mentioned I had no money her response was that we could go self catering. As a follow up she suggested alternatives to what we could do instead which I still couldn’t afford which eventually got me down because I was sick of having to say no - in the end I gave her my online bank details and told her if she could find the money I would do whatever she wanted!

Wearing flip flops in the winter because the soles of your boots were flapping when you walk.

Choosing between gas or electric

Pretending your not hungry when you dc ask you why you aren't having any tea.

I used to rent a telly that had a coin machine on the back , four hours for a pound. Many times I've prized it open.

Thank god this was over five years ago now. I'm by no means flush but I can eat when I want, I have shoes and can always buy gas AND electric.

To me, ‘skint’ meant being the only one of my friends who qualified for free school meals. This was at a bog-standard comp, not some middle-class grammar school. My friends were decent people, and they never humiliated me for it, but the memory of being the odd one out, the poor kid, still stings and it always will.

The problem with the word skint is that affluent people who have no lived experience of genuine poverty use it as shorthand for ‘I have used up this month’s budget for discretionary spending, so I can’t do XYZ until after payday’.

my monthly shopping consisted of a big bag of rice.

i was proper skinny in those days.

Luckily I have never been Skint but unfortunately I do work with people who cannot afford unexpected expenses ie prescription,vet bills ,car failing MOT etc ...people are actually still poor and I am still trying to understand why !

Skint to me means I have nothing to buy bread and milk with

Skint to my DSis means she has less then 10K in her savings.

There is skint and really skint.
To me skint is only enough to cover the basics until the end of the month by being careful and going without so the kids have enough.

Really skint is not having enough for above.

If I had enough, including enough for me but not enough to buy treats I would say I was a bit short.

Only heating 1 room in the house, even in the depts of winter when you can see your breath in your bedroom.

1 pair of shoes, 1 'good' outfit.

That was probably luxury compared to some. We never went hungry.

Skint for me was shortly after separating from my exH, got to the bottom of my £1,000 overdraft and had to ask my dad for money so I could feed my kids.

Some of the responses have reminded me of things I didn't mention earlier such as ice on the insides of windows, orange/brown mushrooms growing up through the skirting boards and not being able to have a bath - only a strip wash at the kitchen sink. When we did have a bath it was maybe twice a year and we all shred the same water, me first then mum and then dad.

@Grandmi

Luckily I have never been Skint but unfortunately I do work with people who cannot afford unexpected expenses ie prescription,vet bills ,car failing MOT etc ...people are actually still poor and I am still trying to understand why !

What are you struggling to understand?

she agreed she was also skint and then suggested we booked a holiday! When I mentioned I had no money her response was that we could go self catering.

I used to work with a really lovely girl who had grown up the daughter of an ambassador. Her parents wanted her to understand ‘real life’ so made her get a couple of retail jobs. She worked in the same shop as me a couple of days a week and then in Sainsbury’s on the weekend.
Back in those days when you had enough points on your Nectar card they would tell you at the check out and you could take £2.50 off your shopping.
She genuinely didn’t understand why anyone would choose to take £2.50 off their shopping when they could save the points towards a skiing holiday.

To me proper skint was years ago living in a homeless hostel, had to quit job as hostel was an hour from where I worked and no way of getting there. The ‘social’ put me on hardship payments because I had deliberately left my job so I had £25 for the week, of which £7.50 had to pay to the hostel for breakfasts, £5 to get back to my home town on the bus to get to mw appointments, the rest was for anything else I needed. I spent most of the pregnancy eating toast and porridge as it was warm and filling and I didn’t have the money to buy cooking equipment/utensils for the shared kitchen. Sometimes I’d have enough at the end of the week to scrape together the £1 or however much it was for a child’s portion of chips, that was great.
Wonga was my savouir on many occasions after dc1 when money ran out and no one to borrow from, only ever £20 here and £30 there but without it I don’t know what I would have done.

Nowadays skint to me means not having any fun money once the bills are paid, having to wait for the following month to afford some I want. Or worrying a bit because of an expensive car bill.
I’m pretty carefull with money and although we can sometimes afford it, I baulk at the idea of spending £50 on a family takeaway or meal out, in the back of my head I’m thinking that’s 1/3 of the weekly food budget! I wear clothes to the death, till they have holes in them, but I just don’t justify them as an important expense.
Hopefully things are on the up again now as I’ve started working again so a little more to play around with each month.

To me, from memory, being skint was

-Owning only 3 pairs of work trousers. When one ripped, not knowing how I was going to afford paying £10 for another pair.
-having tea biscuits and a cups of tea for dinner most nights
-never going on holiday anywhere

I use the phrase occasionally now, but I'm not skint at all compared to when I was actually skint - those days where I had to choose between buying food, paying my council tax or putting fuel in the car to go to work, and only one of those, I just didn't have the money to do all three. A miserable existence.

Living in London in the early 90s. My rent was over half my salary (civil servant). I had an overdraft that was equal to my salary so every month on the 1st, my account would revert to zero.

Looking back, I was quite resourceful, got agency bar and waitressing work for extra cash and sponged off richer boyfriends for meals, clothes and holidays when I could.

15 years later as a FT working single parent, I had to watch my cash and was broke some months so did cash in hand cleaning jobs on the side.

But luckily I never experienced any of the poverty described on here. I always had enough money for food and basics.

I'm ok now financially but having to watch the pennies does stay with you. I still buy all my clothes second hand and worry about money.

As many others have said, there are levels of skint. I’m very thankful that as an adult, being skint has only meant being unable to have luxuries, when me and exh bought our first house, we couldn’t afford a sofa so sat on bean bags for six months and be didn’t go out because we were skint. But we could pay all our bills and afford to eat well.
As a child, skint was being hungry, cold, wearing shoes and clothes that were too small, hiding from people knocking on the door, whoever it was that my mum owed money to.

I'm so lucky to not be in this situation anymore.

But skint for me used to be having less than £9 for a weekly shop most weeks. Not being able to afford a £10 bus ticket for the week so I'd walk to and from work Monday-Friday. 90 minutes each way in the middle of winter. If I needed new work clothes I'd order them from a catalogue online and pay for them gradually because I couldn't afford £7 outright for a cheap pair of supermarket trousers. Getting paid each month and it getting lost in my overdraft. I started working as a delivery driver at one point when my hours at my first job were cut to 8 hours a week from 40... and bought a cheap car with a £400 loan. The tax was £30 a year though and I didnt have it so I paid it monthly at a couple of pounds a month. Near christmas I was getting good tips at the delivery driver job and sometimes on my way home I'd go to the takeaway near my house and spend £1.30 on a portion of chips. I knew I couldn't afford it and would feel guilty afterwards but whilst I was eating them instead of pasta for the 5th night running, things would feel a bit more okay. After finishing university I used a credit card for day to day expenses like food, I wouldnt have eaten without it.

The humiliation of standing at the checkout and deciding what to put back, bread or milk. Thankfully those days are long gone.

Losing my job having just bought a house on a 100% mortgage and signing on the dotted line for a new kitchen (in respect of which I was royally ripped off by kitchen company and then builders). Having to pay them in credit card cheques at extortionate rates of interest and using cards for day to day living adding to my already huge debts.

I’m so so angry with myself when I think back to those days now. I was so stupid and naive.

Thankfully I’m now in a very secure position financially but still worry about money all the time (which DH doesn’t understand). I do still try to watch the pennies and give myself a budget each month which I get very anxious if I exceed (even though that doesn’t make me skint as I have savings). If I see myself coming close to having spent my budget with too much of the month left I get very panicky. Tend to go over then as DH will fill the car with petrol or whatever and everything is split 50/50 - he doesn’t understand why I get panicky.

Thankfully re bills now we both put a set amount into a separate bills account each month and they get paid from there. Since buying our new house in 2017 we always seem to have an excess of 800-1000 in there so never have to worry about not being able to pay the household bills which is a relief.

But this is after years of being in debt from early - late 20’s (42 now) and I just don’t think those worries will ever go away

Feeling skint means not having enugh money in my purse/bank account to make a reasonable purchase

Being skint was living alone in a bedsit, working 60+ hours a week and having to rely on handouts. Walk to work, work, walk home, eat jam and crackers, sleep, repeat!

The humiliation of standing at the checkout and deciding what to put back, bread or milk. Thankfully those days are long gone.

I had this the other week, my partner hadn’t been paid for 8 weeks so money was tight just using my wage, I asked if they would tell me if it got to £47 because I would need to stop - I had added on the way round but a few things didn’t have prices and I realised I was cutting it fine. The woman tutted, told me that it wasn’t her job to manage my money and then smirked and rolled her eyes at the person behind me queueing. I couldn’t walk out because I had no other food and not enough petrol to go elsewhere so just stood there worrying. It came to £44 and as I paid she informed me I needed to be more organised with my budgeting in future. It’s hard to budget if the money doesn’t exist!

minielise that is appalling customer service, I'm actually gobsmacked. Please consider making a formal complaint.

@minielise did you complain? That's absolutely disgusting behaviour from that member of staff.