Cost of living is wild! What’s everyone locked into?

[TravelMamaT]

I’ve been really feeling it lately and I know I’m not alone. Between the rise in energy bills, food costs, childcare and even petrol it feels like there’s barely anything left at the end of the month.
I’ve cut back on takeaways, nights out, subscriptions, even switched supermarkets… and somehow, it still doesn’t feel like enough.

The government says inflation is slowing and wages are catching up but is anyone actually feeling the benefit yet? A lot of these so-called “cost of living payments” are temporary or only for certain households.

Meanwhile, mortgages and rent are still sky high. And don’t even get me started on the cost of kids’ activities, uniforms, school trips…

Mums how are you coping?
Do you feel like the government is doing enough?
Have you found any practical ways to ease the pressure at home?

It’s the “Mums how are you coping?” that stuck out.

I’ve never thought about it before but we rarely address each other that way (despite this being called MN)

Where do you live, petrol prices have been coming down for quite a while now

And, I agree with everyone else, your posts don't read like a person wrote them, also mumsnet isn't an app

Like somebody writing an article, which is fine, if they are upfront about it.

I can't afford my takeaways either OP. But rather than cut them out I've taken to burglary. Every night I don my catsuit (super slinky except for my mum tum) and prowl the rooftops looking for neighbours with choice possessions. So far I've successfully fenced a thirteen year old Vauxhall Meriva, a four foot Lego model of Starship Enterprise, and three cockerpoos. Unfortunately some other things have proved harder to shift. If anyone is in the market for a collection of stuffed IKEA sharks, let me know! You could do a good deed this week and fund my struggling family's Nandos.

Gas costs, for me.

I thought the massive increase in gas and electric was supposed to be temporary? Seems to just be forgotten about now and this is just what we will be paying forever?

my costs have increased dramatically and it’s not sustainable. I keep waiting for my estimate to go down based on spring / summer usage but it’s actually gone up.

Now paying £350 p/m.

will need to remortgage in a few months and that’s going to be a few hundred more per month.

😂😂😂

I’m doing a huge amount of at home made from scratch cooking.

previously I would have used a £6 gammon joint for pea and ham soup but now im using a big pack of bacon/gammon off cuts from Home Bargains. £1.75 and it does the soup for 6-8 portions ( packed out with green split pea, red lentils and yellow lentils, fresh wonky carrots/onions/celery). The other half of the bacon does chicken and bacon pasta for packed lunches through the week.

for a roast dinner I buy 2x4 chicken legs instead of a whole chicken. I roast them then strip the meat and boil the bones in the pressure cooker. 1/2 the meat goes to a roast dinner ,1/4 to chicken and bacon pasta and 1/4 towards a chicken ,sweet potato and butter bean curry. The bone stock gets split into 1/2 for the gravy and then I freeze half for soup .

My husbands favourite day is when we have egg chips and beans with bread and butter. His second favourite is sausage, mash and Marrowfat peas ( dried from Asda). The sausage is amazing as we order in bulk from my sisters cafe, works out at £1.80 for 8 award winning Kennedy sausages and they are delicious. We also get 2.2kg of thick cut smoked bacon for £12 from her and portion sausages and bacon and freeze. Once a month I do sausage liver and bacon casserole and serve that with mash and veg and that’s surprisingly popular with all of my family.

i remember when my 4 kids were small, wet had lamb 1-2 times a month. The odd leg, shanks, etc. now it’s Christmas and Easter and very rarely if I find a whoopsie.

I've had to really cut back on the hookers and charlie. Thoughts and prayers.

this is such a weird post! We are just getting on with it just like everyone else because we have no choice.

There's always one.

@baroqueandblue

i don’t particular care if I’m “one” . I save a fortune by cutting corners and reducing costs, not because I need to but because I love saving for holidays and making my money stretch as far as possible. I was in commercial catering when I was younger and ran a kitchen, I know exactly how to save money in the kitchen….. but then I go spend it on a cruise or a holiday . You would be horrified at the amount of people that come into our church for help with food costs and very few of them can cook even the basics. They think food is putting a pizza in the oven or getting a just eat. So please don’t patronise those of us who are actually physically helping IRL and trying to share skills and knowledge instead of just mocking people on the internet.

Yes I am a real person with an average job too. It's nice to find other human women to talk to on here.

We've always been careful with money. Both of our parents were skint (one side had a good income but too many children, one side just low earners) and we have always had a shared interest in making sure it doesn't feel tight at home.

We've always planned meals and shopped at Lidl, bought a suitanle house for £170k when the bank offered us £450k, saved up for two years to pay for maternity/paternity, bought a cheap second hand car in cash. Whatever we're buying, we research online and sort 'low to high' on price. 16.5°C in a fleece is a fine temperature to keep the house in the winter so we've been less affected by gas price increases.

I have definitely noticed some unavoidable costs going up, we are saving a little less including pensions, but our standard of life has remained the same. But that's because we set our baseline costs low.

Agree that there’s something sus going on with the OP and how they are posting!!!

AI clear as day. I also think the poster went back and re-prompted to get the AI to write in a more mistake laden grammatically incorrect style.

The op is probably a nurse. They call parents mum.

Yes but you still wouldn’t talk like that on a chat forum normally??

Try olio

@TravelMamaT Just out of curiosity, did you use Chatgpt to write your posts? What is your level of education and your IQ? Your EQ?

My guess is; either this is an AI generated post, you're a foreign journalist or you are only functionally literate. You seem to have no concept of punctuation nor understand how to converse with British mums using colloquial lingo.

Feeding my family of 4 on one roast chicken and a massive salad a week here 🥗🍗 KOKO!

Same here, we've been cutting back on luxuries too. Our energy bills are so much higher than they were a couple of years ago. I saw Martin Lewis mention that energy costs are only going to keep going up, so we've been trying to be more conscious of our usage. We started using this free app called Loop - it's actually been pretty helpful for tracking what we're spending.

Currently locked into my mortgage 🤣

Hello fellow mums! Is this the new way of writing!
Locked into what? What the devil do you mean op? Locked into being a parent?

Bye fellow mums! FFS no one talks like that. Can you imagine arriving at the school gate and bellowing ' hello fellow mums!' :)

Are you American, @TravelMamaT, or have you studied American English? That may be what's causing the confusion.

Based on my experience here, many people are just fine - experiences vary a lot! Whether it’s a journalist or a non English op, it’s an interesting topic but no specific answer because each household is different. I’m not locked into anything, not sure what that means