My parents used to do it all the time.
My mum would regularly have a slice of bread for the whole day.
My dad would insert cardboard into the soles of his shoes because they'd worn through. He'd sit and sew patch after patch onto the same pair of trousers. We'd have a bath by boiling some water and putting it into a baby bath in front of the fire in the living room (when we had coal!)
My parents would sell my christmas presents in january.
We'd regularly run of out gas or electric.
I remember one christmas eve, no food in the house. The hamper that my mum had been paying for all year had arrived and we tucked into that by the light from the gas cooker rings because we'd run out of electric!
We'd hide upstairs on the landing from the rent man and debt collectors.
And my dad was working.
Mind you, they always had fags 
and my mum would spend her last pound on a bar of chocolate while we wiped our arses on pages from books/newspapers. I hated that they did that. Of course, now I understand that when you are living as we lived, you do things like that. But it's not the right thing to do, logically. I resent all the paper cuts on my arse while my dad chain smoked roll ups. I really do.
I had hoped that these days, people were no longer living like that, but not only are people still living like that, people are going back to that from a better standard of living.
It's horrible.