To not accept that there is 'period poverty' in the UK.....?

[rosetree7]

Fully expecting to be told I am BU, but I genuinely do not get this 'period poverty' malarkey.

Some reports say periods cost £42-45 a month (£500 a year.) Never in my life have I - or anyone else I know - spent £42-45 a MONTH on their period. Not even a tenth of that actually.

Some of the things they (supposedly) spend money on are tampons and STs (obviously...) You can get a pack of sanitary towels for less than a pound. Less than 50p in some shops!

And also mooncups.

Although mooncups cost £16 to £22, most mooncups will last 10 years, so you'd only buy 3 or 4 in your lifetime!!! And they also spend on pain relief - but paracetamol and ibuprofen are 16 to 26p a packet from Wilkos. And plenty of other shops sell them for a similar price!

Oh and apparently, they have to keep spending money on new underwear every month. What a load of shit.. I have bought 18 pairs of underpants in 5 years, (at a cost of around £25 for the entire 5 years!) 5 pairs of them are dark coloured - and I wear them for my periods. Never in my life have I bought new underpants for every new period.

So what is this all about? And how on earth are they coming up with such a ludicrous figure as £42-45 a month?! I mean, some girls are apparently using toilet roll as they 'can't afford' sanitary towels? In most cases, toilet roll is more expensive than sanitary towels FGS!

Perfect Have you not applied for FSM's - make sure you are getting the benefits you are eligible for!

Benefits and Tax Credits are provided for people on low incomes to cover the cost of essentials

This is laughable. They dont always cover essentials especially if you loose your job or become ill and you have to wait 6 bloody weeks for the money to come through. How do you suppose you budget round that?
If you are sanctioned for a ridiculous reason and your benefits are stopped for 6 weeks what do you feed your kids with?

Still waiting for someone to explain how you budget with not a penny to your name.

cathf if I had £210 this week I'd be fucked!

£60 in fuel just to get to work

£50 for food shopping

£182 for a car part that I didn't even know my car had so was a fucking shock to discover it was leaking (thankfully the boys at work can do the labour for free or that'd be another £100)

£94 for a new exhaust (at trade prices through work - regular price would've been double that & again free labour or another £100)

So out of my £210 this week I'd be in deficit of £176 but it could've been £470 if I had to take my car to a garage for the work to be done not to include the fact that I'd have needed a couple of days off work to take it to the garage.

That's what people are trying to explain that any unexpected expense like a car repair means that your budget no matter how well thought out & planned can quite easily be fucked... if DD had started her period this week & I had budgeted for her sanpro but then had to find a spare £470 for my car repairs which I need to get to work or we'd have no money where would this magical £2-3 come from?

I for one will never donate to a Foodbank or Red Box on the back of this thread.

What a grown up, intelligent response

Those figures are meaningless without the actual amounts left over
How are you left with nothing? Does living expenses include food! What is your budget?
I am sure you won't want to say, but this kind of post feeds into the nonsense spoken on this type of poverty thread. There is lots of sympathy and virtue signaling without any real knowledge of the sums of money in question.
And at the risk of sounding as petty as some of those who are criticising me, where on earth do you live where £3.60 meals are compulsory for a primary school child?

We don't qualify for FSM's because WTC are supposed to cover school meals. We are getting all the benefits we're eligible for.

£1.80 school meals cathf. I have 2 school age DC. DS2's going into KS2 in September. It's nice to know that you're reading my pps.

@Motherforkingshirtballs
Why would a family be denied HB / LHA because their rent is more than the maximum LHA payment?

Perhaps I have misunderstood what you are trying to say but HB/ LHA is not a all or nothing benefit

Anyone feel like they’re head butting a brick wall?

If your HB amount is less than your rent, then you have to make up the difference, often quite a lot of difference

Whiskey, so out of £210, you normally need £50 for food and £60 for fuel? So you would not be in defecit this week, because you would have been keeping money back from the spare £100 a week to cover weeks like these, wouldn't you?
That's called budgeting .

Schools that have an 'only school meals' policy really annoy me, 2 possibly 3 children in ks2 and the cost is eyewatering, not to mention children like my autistic ds who would have ate nothing at all. I would consider going into the school and saying 'I can't afford it, what are you going to do about the lunches?'

I was most definitely in period poverty (everything poverty!) when I had to wait 9 weeks for my first Universal Credit payment. £1.77 to last nine weeks, with two children. Disgusting. I've worked hard and paid taxes for the vast majority of my adult life, but had to go begging for tampons, soap and washing powder at the food bank (who give enough food to last five days in theory but you're only supposed to use them three times within six months. Not sure what we were supposed to eat the other 48 days - each other, knowing this government's policies towards benefit claimants...). After my benefits were sorted, I was in so much debt that sanpro was not a financial priority over food/electric.

This is why women are very hesitant to leave/kick out abusive partners - which is what put me in that situation initially.

cathf
Again you are accusing posters of lying
Many schools do not allow packed lunches. Just because you havent experienced it doesn't mean it isnt true ffs!
Which part if being down £470 in one week dont you understand?. Many people rely on.a car to get to work or get out and about for shopping etc and large bills can wipe out a months budget no problem.

Just where are people who live week by week supposed to get more money ?
Part time minimum wage plus tax credits for a single parent doesnt cover kids clothes, school meals, bills and food. It just doesnt most weeks there is nothing left you cant save for emergencies cos there isnt anything to save left.

You can take packed lunches for medical reasons. Your DS would be fine. My DD, who has sensory issues with food but no diagnosis, usually doesn't eat on a Friday because it's fish and chips and she'd rather starve than eat an alternative she doesn't like.

They got what they were given in EYFS, once every 3 weeks for 2 years, she'd say, "It was jacket potato with cheese, but I only ate the cheese." Catering staff were supposed to notice that she wasn't eating and bring her the alternative. They never did.

cathf I haven’t commented about your own situation, but I find it ironic that you expect sympathy and are upset at posters who don’t have empathy for you when you post absolutely ridiculous and nasty things like you have been.

Of course period poverty exists. I can well believe that some periods cost that much - when I was a teenager my periods were heavy, irregular and very painful.

My local library has free sanpro in the loos there with posters in the cubicle doors saying it's to help combat period poverty. I've never used it because I don't need to but it's great to know it's available.

perfect that is just rubbish, it is bad enough having to pay for them, but to pay to eat nothing is just wrong.

Dd2 isn't a great eater but luckily they do have options, so she seems to find something to eat, though apparently eats 'nothing' whenever I ask.

I spend a fair bit on sanity towels as have extremely heavy irregular periods. I have to double up on towels and tend to use night ones for length. Can’t use a mooncup or tampons before anyone suggest as suffer with huge clots.
I live on outskirts of an area and it is only a small town so don’t always have access to cheaper brands as they sell out fast in my area same with cheap pregnancy test so annoying. I tend to online shop now or travel further out of area and stock up, I’m lucky I can do this but people whom are on a tight budget may not.

No cathf I'd normally need to use another £15 to give DD2 school dinner money, £20 for DD1 to get a bus ticket to get to her part time job & £20 for DD2's activities which would leave £45 a week out of which I'd need to top up with basics like bread & milk, any extra fuel I might need for other journeys like DD's activities or the food shop as the original £60 only covers my journey to & from work, anything I might need to pick up that isn't an every week shop item such as laundry & cleaning stuff, any clothes/shoes/school supplies that DD2 might need so that £100 a week you think I should be saving doesn't really last all that long!

However I don't have £210 a week as that's Frequency's income - I'm just trying to illustrate the point that IF that was what I had this is where it would go... I understand that although Frequency's income is different to mine it can quite easily be swallowed up by things that I can afford without having to worry about where I'm going to get money from for other things... it's called understanding, empathy & knowing how the real world works for other people!

I'm really intrigued to know exactly how & why your business has gone bust as I deal with accounts for 3 businesses & have a fair understanding of the process therefore I don't believe for a minute that it isn't partly your fault & down to your bad management & budgeting so I think it's extremely hypocritical of you to come on here banging on about budgeting household income... but as my granny used to say "you couldn't paint a red face on some folk"

@CantankerousCamel
That wasn't what I was asking about HB / LHA.

In fact I wasn't actually asking about it at all as I have already helped around 70 families to claim the benefit so I think I know how it works thank you.

I was asking the poster to clarify what she meant in her post because shockingly enough there are still people who Don't get the benefits they are entitled to because they misunderstand how some benefits work.

I only wanted to clarify that the poster wasn't one of these people.

At least mine are painstakingly honest about what they eat, see the above example! 😂

I don't expect sympathy, I said so in my original post about the business. I took the risks, and they didn't work out.
What I didn't expect was posters making rather wild and specific assumptions on my particular set of circumstances based on nothing at all, because it fitted their view of me.
I am thinking of the pps discussing how I will have protected my assets and failed due to overstretched BTLs, not pps generally being unsympathetic.

Ivalue have you seen your GP? Maybe they could help with your heavy periods?

Sounds like a private message to me. I’m not sure it’s responsible to bug people on their individual experiences or to suggest they post every detail of their lives.

Yes camel, I do realise that. That's why I said the pp would not want to do so.