To wonder how the COL crisis has impacted others?

[Helfs]

I see quite often on here people posting about how ‘not everyone’ is impacted and people need to just get on with it when it comes to dealing with the financial impact of the COL crisis.

Despite being high(ish) earners, DH and I have been severely impacted so I feel a bit odd when reading those comments as surely most, if not everyone is impacted to some degree. Food prices have shot up and everyone needs to eat, lots of people drive and insurance costs are going up etc.

At the start we weren’t majorly impacted, our food bill doubled and our car insurance went up a lot but other than that were fine, that was until December last year when our fixed rate mortgage ended and DD started nursery a month later. All of a sudden we had to find an extra £2500 a month and it’s heavily impacted our day to day lives. Obviously the nursery fees we knew were coming, but I don’t think we quite realised how bad it would be until the first months payment came out at the same time as the highly inflated mortgage payment (that we are now fixed into for another 2 years)

I wanted to ask how the COL crisis was impacting others, as I think sometimes people downplay on here how bad it might be for them atm.

So how has the COL crisis impacted you and your family? Any tips on how you’ve managed to cut back?

im a single disabled parent. I’m getting everything I’m entitled to, but finances are tough. I’ve come to accept that I will never afford to take my child on holiday

@Bluevelvetsofa I am not asking the amount but just wondering what % of your savings you gave your children. This is the one thing still open to decision making with mine and my DH retirement plans. I was wanting to be more generous and give around 30% of our savings whereas DH is more for giving about 10%.

Just under 60k between us. Savings have reduced but honestly, we live modestly and own outright so no discernible impact. Our power bill has gone up but still less than £150 pcm for a small 3 bed semi.

75k combined income, utilities have gone from 79pm to 295pm, mortgage increased by 270pm, food obviously has gone up (we are extremely frugal/batch cook etc but estimate this has gone up from 75pw to 100pw.

Single working mum with a disabled child. I get tax credits and have received £300 about 4 times from the government as COL payments for low income households. There's lots of funding going round my area - household support fund and vouchers for gas/electricity and Tesco vouchers along with charities helping with white goods. My son got given an annual free bus pass too as apparently we are low income. Find it mad tbh. I'm doing more than OK.

I have no mortgage, don't run a car, no childcare costs.
I have really noticed my food bill increasing dramatically. I try to eat seasonally so don't but buy things like expensive berries- I have an allotment with established fruit trees and bushes so we mostly eat what we grow. But that really only saves a few pounds.
I have got a new job since last May with a hefty pay rise.

So overall I'm OK. But I don't have an extravagant lifestyle.

I'm a bit aghast to see people earning similar to us struggling to be honest. Jointly earn around £160k and take home £7.5k after sizeable pension payments and the car payment which is through my work. From that we can pay private school fees for one child and a mortgage of £1400 and still save. There is no denying we have cut back from what I would consider quite a privileged position where we didn't think too much about eating out and buying new clothes etc. We did a few long haul trips before Covid too. Now we rarely eat out, I food shop within a strict budget and our holidays are a bit more budget too but I actually prefer being a bit more sensible with cash. I think we wasted a lot before so it's been a mindset shift.

@PensionMention it was about 40% and at the time, we couldn’t have anticipated that DH would lose a couple of years income. He’s always been self employed, always had a pension, but lost most of it when the company failed.

Mostly, we don’t need the size of house we have, although we’ve had happy times here. I’d love to release this house for a family and have something smaller, easier to maintain and cheaper to run. Our council tax is completely ridiculous.

My DH works but I'm disabled after a stroke. Our DS has ASD & ADHD and we have a teenage DD. We don't eat out, we live in social housing, energy costs are high, rent and council tax are large. We don't drive. DH travel pass is expensive for work. We try to save money by buying cheap as possible but it's hard. Our rent is increasing by £10 per week in April. 😫Still cheaper than private but still a struggle 😪

I really relate to this. I’m a disabled single parent and I’m also in social housing. I’m on the outskirts of London and my rent for social housing is still almost 1k… it’s ridiculous. I recently got the increase letter and it’s going up by another £50 a month. Crazy how council/social housing is no longer ‘affordable’ anymore😭

I earn £13k per year PT but I don’t have mortgage or rent so it does last me. I’m buy everything bar knickers off Vinted but dress like I’m rich because of it😆 I don’t feel like my utility bills are as bad so not much to complain about.

However, food prices are insane. This is my biggest bill. I used to eat so well (organic/Waitrose) & go out for tea reasonably often but now I just don’t eat that well & we go to wethers every few months. I also don’t save anything currently, which I hate because I’ve always saved.

I’m so glad my going out days are gone, I can’t imagine how this would’ve panned out when I used to want to be out all weekend.

How much are your child 's private school fees. This gives me hope. I don't have a child yet but our take home pay when student loans end in 10 months would be £7200..

I admit i love eating out but we dont have a car.. I was telling dh i dont think we could afford private school and we should just move to be near fortismere (in a flat) instead!

@fluffykittens208 at the moment it's £12.5k a year for primary. Goes up for secondary (£16k) but obvs need to factor in rises. DS starting in August but we've been putting equivalent (and more) away for a year so know we can afford it. He's 10 so we haven't done it from the start. We also have a DD at primary but we're not sure if we'll go down the private route for her yet.

I am in London so its a lot more expensive here. But probably not having more than one child due to fertility problems. Do you worry about school fees going up due to vat?

@fluffykittens208 Yes I do but I've factored it into my cash flow forecasts...I work in finance so I've taken my work home so to speak in modelling the costs out for years to come! It's definitely coming with some compromises but we're not flashy people so nothing that feels hard to do.

🙄

Not impacted yet but I can see it coming. Dreading my car MOT in May because anything to do with cars has gone up massively. Car insurance is terrible, car repairs are unbelievably expensive. We used to have a really lovely lifestyle but it's sort of shrinking, less spontaneous let's go out for dinner etc. Spend huge amounts of time at home.

Oh how I’d love to be the previous poster whose major COL impact is in their shopping switch from Waitrose to M&S (cannot be for real lol).

For me it’s energy bills - what would be £150 at top end (winter bill) monthly is now over £350 some months! I’ve been home a lot since having LO but even then it feels outrageous. Have been bundling us in blankets and shutting the heat off as much as we can manage because £350 a month sure as hell isn’t sustainable.

Car insurance also jumped up from £60pm to £150 (no claims on it or anything to justify this), we rent so no mortgage. I worked so hard through pregnancy and all I’d saved up has pretty much gone now, and that includes selling £1000+ of my things to add to our savings and help with mat pay. Also food costs are higher now which means our food budget doesn’t stretch half as far.

Cossie livs is real. We have cut down our trips to Lakey Ds.

Translation?

I got my Council Tax bill through yesterday.

£18 increase per month; I am Band A.
Car insurance went up by £5, but two years ago would have gone down by a few 100 (accident now more than a year ago).
Food shop has increased by about 25% since last year.
Utilities are up £10pcm each and I'm still waiting to see how much water is going up by.
Petrol seems to be on the up again.
My mortgage will increase by at least £200pcm - again, my house was reasonably cheap (because it needs so much work on it).

I am earning more this year than I ever have, but I have far less disposable money and far less ability to save for any major incidents, like a leaking roof or a faulty boiler. My workplace have been cost-cutting so much that my workload has increased a fair amount, so not only am I money-poorer, but also time-poorer.

I have stopped going on holidays, taking the kids on paid activities out and I do feel that our lives have become so much smaller. My house needs major improvements done, but I cannot afford to get tradespeople in, and with the weather and less time I cannot do some of the work myself right now. It does feel quite miserable at the moment.

Everyone is acting like this is a recent thing. There has been a cost of living crisis for a long time. The only difference now is it affects the middle class as well asThe poor and the working class. Which is why everyone is now complaining about it.

But in answer to your question our joint income is approx 70k. We can afford to pay our bills and have some treats and sometimes we have 2-300 pounds to go in savings after we have paid everything. This is Largely because we live in a deprived area so everything is much cheaper. Our mortgage has just risen from £500 to £750. Our childcare consists of one after school a week so is £30 a month. Gas and electricity are around £200 a month. We are careful with money though. I budget what we spend , buy clothes second hand, shop at Aldi . We have freeview tv and a Netflix account. All our insurance are the cheapest options.

What a shock! People on high incomes not feeling the impact, those on low to middling incomes are.

It’s not a binary situation. When I do overtime, most months I don’t earn the average U.K wage, but I don’t have many outgoings and no debt.

I think there's a difference between not feeling it and not noticing it. We've noticed the rising prices of everything, obviously. We've cut down on some things and are saving less. But we haven't truly felt it because we were living significantly under our means anyway.

Whereas many of our friends on similar incomes are really struggling because they borrowed up to the max for their house, are used to going on foreign holidays once or twice a year, more expensive childcare, more expensive cars etc.

(To be clear, I'm not comparing us to people who were already living within their means or struggling before. I definitely feel for those people)