To ask, what's one item that you didn't realise was expensive until you became an adult?

[AvocadoHo]

Mine is toilet roll and cheese! 🙈

Mattresses
Holidays
Cherries

Holidays

Nice meat, especially steaks and joints of lamb/beef

Agree with PP about Aldi dishwasher tablets, they are great and about £3.59 for a big bag of the gel-type ones

Flipping petrol! Being a kid, hearing just stopping to fill up the car like it costs 2p lol now its like £15 to drive a mile Lol slight exaggeration but hey ;-)

Pets !

Also, curtain rails, curtains & blinds.

And food, electric & gas.

Children's shoes (and the speed they wreck / grow out of them too!)
Any sort of family 'day out'. HOW much???
Decent quality meat / fish / fruit / veg.
Fuel / cars,
Kids Birthday parties (even modest affairs)
Christmas (even on a budget)

I hate buying loo roll.
I could buy cheese instead.

Turkeys

Food, energy prices, clothes, ect

Bin bags and tin foil

And Lego !

Laundry detergent
Baby formula

Omg printer cartridges. Cost more than my printer did.

Working - commuting, childcare, tax, work wardrobe and shoes

Keeping pet rabbits (buying fancy green hay, repurposing a full size shed and run for 64sqft, vaccinations..) Are they grateful? Non!

I think loo roll is ok. £3.50, 9 rolls lasts a month here. Same with tampons. A periods worth for less than a quid.

Butter is bloody stupid. You needs loads to make a cake too.
Berries are expensive, pears and apples are pennies.
Coffee has got cheaper, hot chocolate more expensive.
Lots of cheese is really suddenly really cheap like feta, mozzarella and Brie.

Petrol is really expensive.
Lamb too.

Plane tickets - all well and good when you're youngish and Daddy is a Pilot - but one day you have to travel under your own steam.

Not paying attention in school!

Food in general. I now understand why having a friend over to tea was alway arranged with the friends mum and a reciprocal arrangement generally made.

And yes to front doors. I’ve just had mine replaced. The needed a lot of glass panels around the side etc but it was £2.5k.
No wonder my mum just bricked their front door up!!

They keep the price of the actual printer down to make you buy it. Then they recoup their costs by charging over the odds for ink.

Curtains and blinds were my big shockers.

Paint was a surprise too but pales in comparison to the sheer effort of painting. My mum could do the hall stairs and landing in a day and used to redecorate all the time. I was so excited to decorate when I got my own place then I spent 3 days painting the living room and was knackered.

Spectacles that don't make you look like Dennis Taylor in the 1980s! Indeed, having shortsightedness generally is expensive.

Why are basic, black framed glasses invariably £70 and up? By the time you have paid for your eye test, your new glasses, new prescription shades and the UV filters to prevent the sun frying your eyes, you're almost £200 worse off!

Food in general and now know why my mum got annoyed when we ate the whole fruit basket at once!

Holidays! My parents always took us away once a year, usually somewhere in the UK or France (once to Crete; very posh). I had no clue this would become entirely unaffordable for me.

But other than that, TBH, what mostly shocks me is how cheap things are. A while back my DD dislocated her shoulder and was in quite some pain; my mum (who was visiting and had a car there) drove us to A&E then balked at the price of the parking. She was delighted to find a pay and display car park five minutes walk away, as this would clearly save us a great deal of money. It was £2 per hour rather than £2.40. My abiding memory of childhood was that parking was so expensive.

Likewise I assumed cars were tremendously expensive, as my mum was always driving bangers that broke down with regularity. As an adult I realise this is just my dad's preferred economy: he just doesn't really care if her car breaks down.

Life...