To be sick of sneezing and spending £20?

[ghicks]

Anyone else? I feel like everything costs more and more and I’d just like to moan about it. Every day it seems to be something else!

I don't know, I was born in 1964 and I remember going to our local cafe with my mum quite often. Buttered teacakes and tea! Deffo not a greasy spoon - waitresses in black dresses with white aprons. Lovely.

This in spades!!

Beginning of the month, we have proper meat, cheese, veg... I am flat broke until payday. OH went to Lidl today and bought a load of cheap UPF to get us to the end of the month. Breaks my heart to feed it to the children. I understand about nutrition etc and think it's really important, but can't magic a load of wholegrains and fish out of thin air. And before anyone says it, yes we do also eat lentils, chickpeas and porridge 🙄I also cook from scratch when time permits, but that's the problem with families having to work so many hours to make ends meet. Plus, cooking from scratch still requires ingredients, and is more expensive than a pile of chemicals in the shape of a Swiss roll...

She doesn't have to buy one jumper she can look vinted depop etc. Search for her favourite brands etc and can find many brands avaliable some with tags on

if money is tight teenagers need to be told these things too. and understand where money comes from how many hours to earn taht etc

@Wexone she really isn't interested enough in clothes to do that. She likes a colour or pattern but really wouldn't have a clue what brands to look for. She wasn't even with me in Primark. I know what she's roughly after and I grab it. I work a long week, I'm not fannying about online for something that she may not like it fit and have to return. The point is that the savings made in ££ cost in time, which I don't have either as a FT working single parent.

Of course, I was generalising. Tea-rooms were a thing.

But it sounds like going for tea was a treat, even if a fairly frequent one, not a habit every time you went shopping. Today the 'normal' is to get a take-away coffee and a packaged sandwich or meal deal, or stop at a café or fast-food place, nearly every time you are out of the house for a few hours.

That casual pit-stop buying drinks and food instead of thinking ahead and taking a flask and packed snack is what people are having to grapple with - adjusting to a new normal.

I've never heard this saying before,I thought you meant you were buying those "stop your cold before it starts" sprays.
I totally understand,it's mad at the moment and I haven't even thought of Christmas yet.

I try and remember we are still paying a lot less than many European countries and USA plus what our Grandparents paid for food back in the day relative to household income but, by heck it's easy to spend £100 on pretty much nothing nowadays. Doesn't seem that long ago when £20 covered a simple pub lunch out for DH and I now it's more like £50.

I do think I have a better standard of living than my parents and grand parents had at my age though with a warm home, time for hobbies, less domestic chores etc which I'm very appreciative of.

Lots of things people mention on here aren’t needed. No one needs to stop in cafes all the time or buy stuff everytime they leave the house. It’s a want and not a need and if you can’t afford it then people need to stop doing it.

Tons of clothing online such as vinted. I got my son 6 pairs of winter pjs from one person for £8 posted! Took less then 10 mins to search and find something suitable.

@honourspren "...maybe even a reduction in obesity in the long run". Research shows that poverty leads to people being overweight but undernourished - that is, too many calories but deficient in vitamins, minerals and protein. The poorer a community, the more pronounced this is, as a general rule (even globally). Of course this doesn't include when populations are so poor they're in an actual famine, but everything up to that point. It's because starchy, carb-heavy foods are the cheapest (along with the cheap vegetable oils they are usually baked with).

You also have to factor in other things such as people comfort eating, rather than say, going for a massage, and being priced out of things like doing sports or going to the gym.

@ghicks ONE piece of cod, one portion of chips, one portion of mushy peas...£19.

Nineteen Pounds. -take away , not London.

For one person.

{We shared}

It was absolutely outrageous.

A lovely cafe used to do good coffee.

NOW, they have put the price up and the coffee is weaker and not as hot.

I think ''Fuckit'' and just don't buy one.

£3 for an unpleasant coffee is £3 down the drain.

If it's hot and rich flavoured, fair enough.

Shifts in how we live/eat/spend have always happened. The specifics of how we spend and save will constantly shift. But now we’re in a position where people who have incomes that should leave them feeling comfortable don’t. It’s not unprecedented. We’ve had economic squeezes before. It doesn’t mean it doesn’t feel uncomfortable. The equivalent is not whether your father could have afforded to eat out every day but if your middle class father could no longer save or afford to live on one income - currently people on decent incomes cannot afford to do what is currently considered the norm for that amount.

It may precipitate a big shift in how we all live but it doesn’t mean it won’t be painful, and the economic ripples profound. Of course the big issue really is not how many flat whites someone on 40k a year can buy but how the people already living on a shoestring are managing if the middle classes are struggling.

That's only in recent times, though. Not that I wish we go back there, but not many people were obese even 60 years ago, and that is partially down to the cost of food in relation to earnings and the need to walk or cycle more because driving short distances was frivolous. You cannot get obese even on UPF if your portion sizes are small because you have to ration what you can eat, even if you share a whole pizza, but between the family rather than eating one by yourself.
To make it clear, I do not wish for people to be persistently hungry, but it is a rather natural state of being to feel hunger - something we have long forgotten.

I remember real hunger as a child. Actually going to bed hungry- I think it was a lot more normal in the 1970's.
There weren't the snacks.

Real hunger where the belly gnawed for food.
We walked everywhere, and were really skinny.

Only one girl in our class was 'fat' and she was barely fat compared to nowadays.

On the way back from work on Friday after a horrendous week I popped into the petrol station to get a chocolate bar. It was £1.70!!! Wasn’t even a big one. I was going to buy all my family a bar - but with 3 kids and a husband I decided against it!!!
Food is unbelievably expensive. Dreading the cost of half term.

I was very intrigued given the title of this thread 😅 It's beyond crap though isn't it? 😥 Both me and DH (me late 30s and DH mid 40s) are on very good salaries (50-60k each), 2 kids, relatively large mortgage but definitely doable(around 200k left). We are not struggling as such but I'm aware that with our income we should be finding things very easy and yet that isn't the case. I often wonder how people on lower incomes or with more than 2 kids are managing. I'm from a single parent household where no-one worked but I wouldn't say I grew up poor (no holidays abroad, got free school meals etc) but that same single parent nowadays would be struggling badly. It's awful.

DH says 5p per litre rise on fuel duty is likely.
Thats 35p per gallon!

It’s actually a 23p a gallon rise. So, not so bad after all!

A lot of the finger wagging re the restraint showed in the past forgets that it’s not less spending but of a different type. In the 1970s you wouldn’t have bought a takeaway coffee but you would have bought a pint. You might not have gone to a cafe for lunch but you’d probably have smoked like a chimney.

Thanks Labour SPAD. It's still shit.

@towardstheocean true. In fact you'd probably have bought a pint for lunch! In the pub.

(Normal when I first started work.)

I went to the supermarket earlier thinking I’d only be spending £15-£20 but ended up spending closer to £50. Since giving up full time work to be a full time carer to my grandson I’m constantly watching my bank account. When I was working full time me and my husband thought nothing of dropping a couple of hundred quid on things we didn’t need but we wanted. We’re no worse off as we receive guardianship allowance for my grandson but now, I’m watching the bank after we’ve paid all the bills and bought everything my grandson needs for the month- milk, nappies, food, wipes etc. everything is going up and what the government don’t seem to realise is that people are getting poorer because of rising prices and the rich are benefitting

Same here. My husband and I have had big payrises. Doubling income and now seem to have less money

The necessity to lower our expectations is hard to swallow. I can't afford now the lifestyle I had 20 years ago, prices are so out of kilter with salaries.

I've been frugal for pretty much my whole life, I spent decades at working being the only one to bring a packed lunch and coffee in every day. It used to be a once in a week treat for me to spend a fiver on lunch from a local spot and coffee used to be something like 1.40 for an americano. Now that I go to work twice a week I need to get back into the habit of bringing in a packed lunch, but I've noticed pret a manger has brought back 99p filter coffees. If you use your own travel cup it's 50p off. I'd say that's still a bargain and I can't tell the different between that and a 4 pound something americano frankly. I've got to get better at cutting back I think - these companies are all just ripping us off and laughing all the way to the bank

you could probably feed a family an evening meal for the price of a Saturday newspaper these day. Some things seem disproportionally expensive

We thought we’d treat ourselves to a Pizza Express lunch on Tesco vouchers this weekend, we saw they were now offering a set menu so decided to go for that only to be told when the bill came that we couldn’t pay with vouchers because it was an offer despite this not being made clear anywhere (apart from no doubt in some teeny tiny small print). It was a nice meal but not worth what it cost in ‘real’ money. It was a shame because it seemed like an affordable treat but didn’t turn out that way.