Cost of Living - How are you handling it?

With the news of more increases such as Mortgage, Energy, Council Tax, National Insurance, how are you managing to balance your money?

I must admit that I still live on my own so I am starting to worry, I am already looking at ways to save, I wont be upgrading my phone, I have gone back to shopping at Lidl, I have cut back on Huel purchases (which means I am replacing it with more unhealthy foods). I am looking at new releases of video games and having to hold off pre orders unless I find a deal.

What about you lot?

I currently do my main job four days a week and run my own business on the side. Really concerned that I might have to go back to being full time, if I don't want to compromise on the amount I put into savings + pension.

Price increase for fixed rate gas would triple if I committed to the rates EDF are offering, and electricity would double. Council tax set to rise significantly and God knows what my service charges will be. Overall, I think our two person flat is going to have to find at least another £120 or so a month for bills.

Just managed to get the Virgin Media price increase cancelled though, so small wins are available.

Sunak's "rebate" isn't enough for you?

If I'm honest, we extremely fortunate in that we won't be too badly affected, it'll like just impact how much we save each month. We don't spend excessively but I guess we will try to be more careful with certain things.

I've already switched from BT to Vodafone for broadband which is going to save us £20/month. I'm also going to be digging the smart meter out later and going round switching stuff off to see what the impact will be. The PS$4 for example is plugged in and switched on but no one ever uses it.

Last edited by Zilnad on Thu Feb 03, 2022 1:39 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Tomous wrote:If I'm honest, we extremely fortunate in that we won't be too badly affected, it'll like just impact how much we save each month. We don't spend excessively but I guess we will try to be more careful with certain things.

This is pretty much my situation. I think we'll still be living relatively comfortably but I still find it really depressing when I think about all these increased costs

Was hoping to start making regular overpayments on our mortgage this year but now it might be safer to keep saving instead.

Time to sell those ps5 games amirite guys.

Psychologically? Really badly.

I always find anything to do with money incredibly stressful and how everything has been heading recently has not been good for that. As a household we're in a position where we should be able to cope without too much stress, but I know for a fact that not too many years ago I would have been a complete wreck in the face of these increases.

In practical terms I already run a relatively tight ship in terms of energy usage, fuel usage, weekly shop etc. but I'm still looking at ways to tighten the belt further to cushion the blow - fewer outings with the family, probably knocking any form of holiday on the head, cutting down on things like game purchases (silver lining: might actually help clear the massive backlog! :lol:

)

Basically it's not going to be a fun year

I'm hoping (without any reason) to get a pay rise to cover/close most of the gap to the 7% inflation.

I guess I'll likely having to eat the 1.25% NI increase, which is a bit of a pain, but my rent hopefully won't go up so I guess that might balance out a bit.

More worried about the huge YoY increases in house prices basically eroding what I have saved up.

We would have been fine if it wasn't for the baby, but now we've lost my wife's salary (only receiving statutory maternity pay now until September) and she doesn't want to go back to work because it'll cost just as much as she earns to pay for nursery fees :dread:

.

Me and my partner keep discussing it, but I think we are fine we don't rent and my partner sold her house last year. We both have well paid and reasonably secure jobs. There are things we could cut back on to save more money (takeaways mainly), we've started shopping at Lidl again (huge difference compared to Asda), and I'm going to finish doing the insulation that I can next week as we're spending over £100 on gas each month.

I am strawberry floating furious at how this is affecting other people though. Loads of people around here must be strawberry floated through no fault of their own.

Oblomov Boblomov wrote:We would have been fine if it wasn't for the baby, but now we've lost my wife's salary (only receiving statutory maternity pay now until September) and she doesn't want to go back to work because it'll cost just as much as she earns to pay for nursery fees .

Have you factored in the £500 contribution from childcare benefits over 3 months you get? Not huge but does help a little.

Tomous wrote:
Oblomov Boblomov wrote:We would have been fine if it wasn't for the baby, but now we've lost my wife's salary (only receiving statutory maternity pay now until September) and she doesn't want to go back to work because it'll cost just as much as she earns to pay for nursery fees .

Have you factored in the £500 contribution from childcare benefits over 3 months you get? Not huge but does help a little.

Every time we start talking about it we end up getting a bit stressed and agreeing that it's still far off enough to not worry about it :slol:

. Will definitely look into that though, thank you.

andretmzt wrote:I am strawberry floating furious at how this is affecting other people though. Loads of people around here must be strawberry floated through no fault of their own.

Same.

We might be able to cope but there are so many people that are going to be destroyed by this.

I'd be strawberry floating ashamed of myself if I had voted Tory in 2019. The selfish strawberry floating bastards have seriously harmed millions of people in this country.

Just started paying for nursery for my son, so with that on top of all these other cost of living increases, I'm really worried about just what this is going to mean.

We're trying to cut back on as many of our monthly fixed bills as we can, but beyond ditching Virgin and moving back onto ADSL or unreliable 4/5G mobile home broadband, there's not a lot of fat left to cut there anyway.

I'm just going to continue never looking at my bank account statement and hope things are working out.

Sensible idea to separate out from politics megathread. This issue is going to dominate 2022 and unless inflation gets under control, it's easy to see it also dominating the next election.

As I can WFH, I effectively have zero usage of the tube so save £150 of post-tax income so rising living costs have largely been offset by this saving, but its getting to the point where this saving is eaten up entirely by other bills having gone up so much.

Haven't yet received my council tax letter to confirm what 22-23 will be but last year had something ridiculous like 7% so I'm expecting similar. Likewise the bullshit Service Charge on my flat tends to be steep too.

I'm on a tracker mortgage (intentionally) and the base rate has increased again which is very annoying but the total interest rate is still lower than the rate I had on either the 2 year fixed rates I did in the previous 4 years of owning.

At least my gym membership bill hasn't changed in 4 years!

Aren't council tax rises capped at 2.99% without a referendum still? The Mayor's charge increased by like 6% last year, but it's not a huge percentage of the total?

Working from home massively helped me sav loads of petrol money.

Petrol prices are the biggest problem for me now as I'm doing a lot more miles with my new job. The promised pay rise will also be eaten up by the government's rise in taxes.

Godzilla wrote:Working from home massively helped me sav loads of petrol money.

Petrol prices are the biggest problem for me now as I'm doing a lot more miles with my new job. The promised pay rise will also be eaten up by the government's rise in taxes.

I can see that helps some, for me I cycled to work so im losing money being at home using my own gas and electric. I used to shower at work too so WFH worse for me.

Cost of Living - How are you handling it?

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