You know your really skint when......

[boilingpoint]

You go to tescos to get a few bits to last the week before payday but you have to put some of it back as you don't have enough money....

You have pasta every single day for dinner...

You cash in the change pot....

Am i alone?

My FIL used to eat bread and dripping for tea "because he liked it" Wasn't till my OH was an adult that MIL said it was so that the kids could eat decent food.

My grandfather, carpenter, and grandmother, who could knit/sew/crochet, used to make all their childrens' gifts.

People didn't really expect much, though.

I once asked my dad about that Dolly Parton song 'Hard Candy Christmas'. He said, 'Oh, it's when you're poor and you get homemade gifts and a bag of boiled sweets for Christmas and that's it.'

It was one of the few occassions in the year my dad ate meat growing up. Tamales can be made from very cheap cuts of meat. At Easter, they'd have fajitas, which is the skirt of the cow. It's naturally quite tough, so needs tenderised and marinated, so he was surprised in the 80s when fajitas became popular. He exclaimed, 'That's what peor people eat!'

'My FIL used to eat bread and dripping for tea "because he liked it" Wasn't till my OH was an adult that MIL said it was so that the kids could eat decent food.'

MIL calls that 'fried bread' and yep, she's eaten that for tea plenty of times.

being glad its time for work as the tea and coffee is free

people at work buying to much food and announcing there is a few spare sausages in the microwave (trying not to run is difficult)

going round iceland with £17 to feed 5 people for a week (i managed this more than once!)

I've never paid back DD's money, though she's never had huge amounts and if I take it I will buy her a small treat from it.

Actually DD gets lots of small treats, because £1 I can come up with but £££ for days out and holidays I can't.

So many things on this thread are just normal for me, and that's exactly why I buy small treats (I started a thread about it the other week). It is crushing, and it's a shit way to live. Those small things are what keep you smiling through it.

Walking to openings of things to have a "day out". I, my other OH and friend once walked to an opening of a furniture store for a free glass of fizzy wine and a feeling of going out somewhere.

I agree you still need "treats" of some kind.

...the clothes you put in the back of the wardrobe as gardening clothes are better than the ones you now wear day to day so you get them out again.

..the kids money boxes only have IOUs in

...you become a reluctant vegetarian

Plebshire - i did the same as your brother last christmas. The lady was trying to buy gas/elec and very humble food shopping. Before she could protest i handed over the cash (£30 - she would have had a little change too) and said merry christmas and left. I felt embarrassed but the thought of her kids cold and hungry on Christmas day was too horrible to consider.

I can't even cast my mind back to my skint days - shudders

"I have seen poverty abroad yes, and national disaster too. But when my parents lost everything overnight and we slept in tents waiting for the Red Cross there was a big sense of community and altruism (sp). I think it is harder to be poor in a 'rich' capitalistic place."

But in poor places where the Red Cross is not, when the harvest fails you just starve to death. I have seen terrible, shameful poverty here in the UK but nothing to compare to life in rural Nigeria.

'Shameful' as in 'we as a country should be ashamed', not suggesting it is shameful to be poor.

have done most things on this thread, especially DH and I eating bizzare combinations of food from back of cupboard and freezer so that DC can have the "proper food", and raiding change jars to pay for school trips, petrol etc.

Remember as a kid my Mum (she was a single parent) not being able to afford things. To save on utility bills the three of us used to just use one room of our flat and I can remember the suitcase that doubled up as a dining room table, going round the shops with her and counting what money we had left and what food we could afford.

I always knew that she had had it tough trying to raise us but didn't realise the full extent until just before she died and she told me some of the things that happened. I always knew she was a great Mum just didn't realise how great.

Funny thing is I've never thought of my childhood as sad or that I was missing out, maybe because I had such a wonderful Mum.

Hope my kids can say the same one day.

I'm shocked to be honest especially those in work - are some of paying off debt?

No, we both work but there are some months when we haven't done overtime, I've been on maternity leave or it's Christmas, lots of birthdays, car goes wrong etc when the money just doesn't stretch. So you have to get creative.

fiddledee it is very easy to have two people working, no debt and still struggle. e.g. both work 35 hours a week on minimum wage = £415 then minus tax and NI around £300 or £1200 a month. My rent for a 2 bed flat (zone 3 London) is £850 that leaves £350 to pay travel, electricity, food, water, council tax and tv licence. Just think

I think when you are on a very low income you can often get along ok with careful budgeting Haribojoe. The real problem comes when you have to make a bigger unexpected purchase that is essential e.g. cooker breaks downs, that you can get major problems.

Also when I was really skint was before WTC. You only got child benefit, housing benefit and equivalent of council tax benefit - and there was no minimum wage.

I have also come across people really struggling when they are buying their own modest home (usually because they can't get any social housing) and something goes wrong that they really don't have the money for e.g. other posters post about boiler.

I'll never forget visiting someone in London who had bought a cheap house with a friend. The ceiling in the kitchen was literally hanging down in the middle and looked like it was ready to collapse. But they just couldn't afford to get it fixed.

Fiddledee, ours were not debt. we've never been in any, short of having a mortgage.

our difficulties came from:

• living in a high cost housing area (have to due to DH's work - he can only work in about 3 locations in the UK becuase of his employer type),

• DH having to leave work due to a combination of bullying and it no longer being an option for him (i guess it was constructive dismissal by his boss but no point trying to prove anything, we wouldn't have won - easier to just move on and we misjudged how long DH would take to get another job due to a range of factors... interviewers being slow, security checks being bounced back due to lazy admin - in the end it was almost a year that he wasn't working - we didn't claim benefits during this time)

• MY car gettnig stolen, joy ridden and crashed - my insurance company wouldn't pay for a proper replacement (like for like) and i couldn't afford to top up to something reliable, short of an old banger, so bus commuting costs shot up unexpectedly (although it is cheaper in the long run now, no MOT/tax/etc obviously)

• Tax bill from me being self employed during maternity leave which had been unexpected - only a few hundred pounds but when it hit we were bringing in the same as going out

• Taking in my sister's child in an emergency, but she now lives with us - we hadn't factored this into the finances e.g. childcare,, and the costs of helping my sister (disabled), obviously I wouldn't change any of this for the world but in practical terms this did mean I wiped out our "rainy day fund" - which meant that when aynthing broke etc we had nothing there

• Primarily, not speaking the financial risk of the household. This was the biggest impact on us. When DH was essentially forced out of work, by that point I'd been out of my "career" industry for 5 (nearly 6) years - couldn't get back in for a while, we'd made the mistake of basically putting me in the position that I couldn't cover his drop in pay by ramping up my earning potential after being SAHM - massive massive mistake

I guess you could say that it was a mixture of bad luck and timing with us. Both DH and I have been to uni (we met at uni) so we're actually in a far better position than most, i'm lucky DH's job after he quit his first (badly paid, bullying one) job he got a much better one.

But it was a struggle for a while, and we were both working too. Shocking really.

i remember having to put back tampons in the supermarket because we didn't have enough to cover it (and it was those or food to choose from), i've done the "using rolled up bits of toilet paper thing" too - Ithought I was the only one

There were moments of good luck to though. I remember it pissing it down walking home one day and finding a five pound note on the floor. I used it to call into a supermarket and buy a chicken and some veg - we had soup and cold cuts spread thinly that week - a godsend.

Jessikart- I am pathetically grateful for the tip re Milk & More. I've just set up an account so that I can get a couple of bits delivered tomorrow to tide us over until I get some money on Friday :)

I was about to take the change jar and scrape together the cash for something cheap (pasta and tin of tomatoes), which would have been paid for at the self service till, of course.

Ironically people who are unemployed can be better off than those working. Especially during the often long periods of time while you are waiting for the council to sort out and pay you benefits.

lesley, that's really the problem

you're totally at the mercy of other people's effort

in our case, effort on lazy admin at new employer not sending off his security checks (delayed DH gettnig new job so it meant 3 months between offer and getting a contract! stupid!)

at the mercy of the advice given on benefits

at the mercy of whims at the supermarket - if you go to a store that closes at 10pm to buy all the food on its sell by dates, finding out that the nice woman who reduces the bread has gone home ill, so no one marks them down, so you can't afford the bread this week

and still having to pretend everything's normal to colleagues, friends, parents, neighbours, etc due to pride at not being able to admit you're struggling. because you've done nothing wrong to get yourselves in this situation in the first place!!

And then there are people like me and dh who have made choices (size of mortgage, me being a SAHM, insurance, pension payments) who are not really poor at all but don't have much available cash month to month. So when the car needs work, or the washing machine conks, we resort to quite extreme measures to get past the bump. That's our choice though - short term pseudo poverty - not a bit as bad as the real thing.

oh yes neverforget, throughout the winter when we were truly broke we pretended the boiler was broken when people came to visit. and tutted when we all agreed how cold it was and we should really "give that engineer a mouthful if he really thinks the part delivery will taken 3 or 4 weeks" - we couldn't afford the bill. that was quite bad! still, you don't have to get dressed in the morning if you've gone to bed with your clothes all on!

neverforget, please call Consumer Credit Counselling Service or National Debtline. You can ring them for free. They can provide you with free, quality advice and help for your debts if you are struggling to pay.