The worst thing about having no money

[letsallmeetupinthehyear2000]

is after a hard week at work you look at your bank balance and not only have you no money but you are overdrawn you can't go out and enjoy yourself or even buy yourself a tiny treat or buy any food without worrying about being in debt, you don't know how you're going to pay the electricity bill and any bit of joy or creativity has been sapped out of you you feel anxious and overwhelmed most of the time and you are so tired so tired you can't get dressed and you can't stop crying at everything

I'm dreading getting the new secondary school uniform bill for dd. I've costed it up and it's coming up to £600 so far. Does your dc's school have a second hand uniform shop? Or could sell the old blazer & outgrown uniform to put towards the new?

Yep, can relate to the OP’s comment

Trouble is the Powers To Be including MP’s have no real understanding of what people are going through

Come the GE, they will promise you the earth to get your vote and say they will sort the problems out

Why not sort it now?

I am of a mind not to vote as my trust in politicians is zero, sad really 😔😔

Hi op, I don't know how old you are or if you have kids, but I'm one of those 'zero waste' environmentalists, and have managed to work around tight income by changing my mindset.

I'm not single or childless, but if I was, I would look for a job with a live-in arrangement. They are out there and I would probably do something like that for a bit to top up my savings. I would rent out my place for additional income and come back to my life when I'd saved enough.

Also, right now I grow some of my own food on a balcony plus forage (blackberries and apples!) and preserve.
I hardly buy any food. I go skipping with some other like-minded friends of mine. Skipping is finding good edible food that shops and restaurants throw away. There's a lot of it! And finding a group who can show you how to do it it's not too scary. Just yesterday I filled my fridge with perfect apples, oranges, bread, yoghurt salad, minced meat etc. All in perfect condition, but had been thrown away. Mentally it's a challenge to get started, but ince you go and see what you can come home with, it becomes a no-brainer.

You can also get nearly anything you need for free. My whole 3 bed home is furnished with stuff from free cycle. I enjoy knowing I'm actively reducing the amount of waste in this world, but I'm definitely enjoying financial benefits from it too.

Just a thought. Not for everyone.. I understand.

I have relied on At Vincent De Paul I'm in Ireland.
But they are struggling as well and it's gotten harder to get help from them.

DPs relative was moaning that he won’t be able to afford 2 holidays a year the way things are looking. That’s 4 weeks abroad. We cancelled the 2 nights we had booked in a hotel an hour away because we didn’t have the petrol money to get there, our first holiday in 6 years!

Its the lack of understanding from others that gets me when you say you can’t afford something and they are annoyed. We take it in turns to pay bills in rotation so that things don’t get cut off as fast…. But yea your £400 two night hen do is a priority!

Have been there and what stayed with me most was the depressing thought of every day being the same. Getting up each morning and knowing there would be no treats or surprises i could give myself if that makes sense. It was the drudgery and monotony of being poor that got me down.

Some NatWests have coinstar type machines that pay the full amount into your bank account, so may be worth checking locally - but appreciate that might involve travelling that isn’t free!

Love this. Hats off to you !

Gosh, I can relate so much to all of these posts 😢.

For me it’s constantly having to tell DS “no”. No I can’t just get you a drink from the petrol station that were at yet again. No you can’t have a McDonalds. No, no,no. Even worse is now he gets it and he doesn’t ask anymore.

Its the constant mental load of having to account for every last penny. We’re a 2 working professionals household with a decent income but petrol has cost me £100 this week and that purely for work, dropping DH at the station ( which has cost even more in rail fares) and having to take 2 to school and pick him up today as he had to be there for a compulsory open day and of course the school buses aren’t running. I cried today as DS thought we were meeting at a different place and I had to drive an extra 5 mins to where to was to pick him up. By the time I pulled into the (expensive as there’s only 1 supermarket petrol station in the entire city and it’s pay at the pump only and I don’t have £100 In our account for them to pre authorise) petrol station I could feel the engine starting to cut out as it was so low on fuel.

Its trying not to snap at ‘D’H even though he’s snapping at me and being told to try to save money when I’m already spending the bare ducking minimum then getting snapped at when we’ve no food.

It’s listening to well paid celebrities on TV banging on about “heating or eating” when you know there’s going to be neither by September and it’s actually eating or going to work.

Oh and it’s being hungry all the ducking time and trying to tell yourself you’re on a cereal diet to lose weight for summer when you’re only actually 8 1/2 stone.

It’s listening to baby boomer PIL (not being derogatory just factual) complain about having to buy 3 sets of tires for their 3 motorbikes and tell us about how their friend was deliberating over buying a £60k motor home due to petrol prices being so high and saying “for goodness sake, just buy the motor home” when you’ve just told them how hard it is to manage when petrol prices are so high!

if I could not wake up tomorrow, I wouldn’t.

What I did for a bit a while back when I was struggling was I'd go on the money-saving expert competition forums and enter hundreds of free to enter competitions. It was tedious and time consuming but I won some money, things that I could sell and some treats that I would never have afforded otherwise like a holiday.

Another thing was mystery shopping, some of them do involve you buying a meal and then getting reimbursed, although that's no good if you can't afford the meal in the first place but some don't require an outlay like going to a phone shop and pretending to want a new phone.

I was skint in my 20s/early 30s. It was the sheer, relentless fucking drudgery of it that I found intolerable.

The constant anxiety, always checking and re-checking how you're going to get to the end of the month, the sick panic when something vital breaks, crying when I got a hole in one of the last 2 pairs of tights I had and no idea how I was going to buy some more, getting up ridiculously early to get the bus to work because it was cheaper than the train but took 3 or 4 times longer ...

It's absolutely bloody soul-destroying.

I once unpicked the lining of my handbag because I could hear loose change chinking in the bottom. I was gutted when it turned out to be 3p and not 2 x 50p.

My heart goes out to you all, it really does. And it makes me really angry, that so many are so poor, in what is still one of the world's richest countries.

It’s shit OP. We are spending another weekend in the house, doing nothing as we can’t afford to go out anywhere. Last weekend was harder as it was the town carnival and the dc knew the fayre was on the park, but we just couldn’t afford to take them. Luckily it’s throwing it down today, so it doesn’t feel as bad not going anywhere with the dc, but I’ve declined going out for lunch with friends Today as it would be £15ish, dh didn’t meet his friends in the pub again last night. Being poor is relentless and boring. I think even the dc are bored of walking, playing board games and using up the craft supplies we have. They love baking and cooking, but that involves putting the oven on so even that’s limited now.

i met a friend for a walk earlier in the week and she was moaning how hard it is for them having no money, they’ve just bought a brand new car and have had 2 takeaways and a meal out this week as it’s ‘so stressful’ and busy at work at the moment So They didn’t have time to cook. I don’t remember the last time we had a takeaway but it definitely wasn’t in 2022.

I bought my DDs uniform from the preloved sale the school had - £150 worth of uniform for £15. It was all in good condition, some even still had the tags on! And it was busy - lots of other parents doing it.

Worth asking your school if they are planning one.

I'm sorry OP.
I'm not in this position anymore but when I was, it was absolutely horrendous. We had the bailiffs come round years ago for a tax bill.
The guy at HMRC was absolutely brilliant when he found out Dh was working all the hours he could ( self employed, ) and we had been methodically shit on. Slowly things did get better.
I hope things gets easy for you. I remember the stress and either not being able to get to sleep with worry or waking up several times in the night with problems just going round and round like a record.

I had the same and it drove me insane.

I was literally eking out a tiny jar of pesto over 3 or 4 dinners, walking everywhere so I didn't have to spend a quid on the bus and living in a shitty flatshare with 5 other people. Like, where exactly was I meant to be cutting down?

I think anyone who has never been poor should be banned from giving financial advice. So many people started off on their feet and just don't understand what it's like to truly have nothing.

I had a few worst things. Not being able to treat myself to a coffee on payday-sometimes that was even that was out of the realms of possibility, worried all the time, being the person in the group that can only do the free/dirt cheap things and them all thinking I was exaggerating how skint I was, even replacing the smallest of essentials-think £6 work trousers was a big and worrying outlay-I longed to just be able to not think about it, friends telling me I should be earning more and questioning why I couldn’t.
The futility of the situation and not seeing a way out.
Cutting/dyeing my own hair.
Feeling like a shit person as I was so, so envious of people in duel income households who had another person to share the load.

Its the poverty tax that gets me.
fuel meters always charging the highest tariff.
Having to get large items on finance because you cant pay outright so you always pay more for everything
Cant buy the large box of washing powder that works out at 10p a wash so you have to buy the small one that costs 15p a wash
not being able to buy items in sales because you don't have the savings to take advantage of it at the time
cant buy the bogof deals

In the 80's/90/s there were shops that had large drums of dry goods like rice,pasta.cereal.washing powder,soaps. herbs,spices etc and you could just buy what you needed for a set price per weight. they were a godsend. but they disappeared, something like that as a community shop would be really helpful.

Shared housing, only being able to buy unexciting cheap food, parents having to bail me out once or twice-that was truly humiliating. Never being able to buy family and friends really nice gifts.

I know op, it's rubbish. My daughter cried sore last night because I couldn't give her money to go to cinema with her friend. It made me sad.

I've lived through 3 times of financial hardship.
In the 70's when I was very young, but still remember my mammy in tears trying to stretch the food between us 3 children.
Then mid 80's when dad, who had had a couple of promotions lost his job due to downsizing. Then I remember him getting a job as a night watchman and DM trying to get bank shifts , they were desperate to not loose the house. I was invited around to my aunts house a LOT for meals, again because of food costs and fuel costs. Being called into the headmaster's office and asked why I was wearing a cardigan instead of a coat in December and pretending that it was a teenage fashion choice, desperate not to let on that I didnt have a coat to wear even when I was freezing.
Early 90's, first DC. My employers pissed about with my SMP and withheld it, DH was TUPE'd over to a new position and had his hours cut from 50 to 16. Eating toast 3 times a day for weeks on end, dh walking 5 miles to work and back. Walking miles to the supermarket that accepted milk tokens because my milk dried up early. Holes in my one pair of shoes.
So why is this fucking happening again in 2022? How can this be allowed ?

Yup - thankfully it was long ago and far away that I was getting paid minimum wage on 3 different part time jobs, rode a bike in all weathers to save on bus fares and 3/4 of my monthly take home was supposed to go to my student loan with an interest rate of 18%. And then there was the rent, the bills, food. so the only solution was to ignore the loan.

And when I tried to get a decent full time job that paid well the woman interviewing me told me she didn't know why she was bothering as I hadn't provided a freshly printed copy of my cv. That would have cost me the equivalent of working nearly half an hour and I had chosen to take the bus to the interview as it was a blisteringly hot summer day and I wanted to look nice. Amazing the lack of empathy one can encounter.

And people lecturing on not eating so many carbs. I eat carbs because they are cheap and filling.

Not being able to tell anyone incase they think you're hinting for money.
The worry if your washing machine/fridge breaks because you have cheap second hand ones anyway.
Saying no to your kids, even getting a bit cross with them for asking for something like strawberries in the supermarket, when you're only saying no because you can't afford it.
Making up silly games to keep you warm because you can't afford to turn the heating on.

Yes.
Bread pasta bread pasta!
Cheap and filling.
Add in a bag of apples and that'll do.

We have had pasta every night this week in some form and lots of sandwiches.