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Soaring bills leave families just £50 a week
Harry Wallop, UK Telegraph
The average household with a home and car has £2,427 a year to spend on child care, clothes, holidays, household repairs, credit card interest, telephone calls, medicines, alcohol and eating out.
This equates to £46.67 a week after bills, taxes and the mortgage have been paid. Statistics show that costs have soared over the past year at a far faster rate than wages, leaving most families unable to afford many key items.
(17 May 2008)
Saving for survival
Nikki MacDonald, The Dominion Post (New Zealand)
As the cost of living stretches household budgets to breaking point and beyond, many people are reassessing their spending habits and lifestyles in order to make ends meet.
‘Sides to middle.” It’s a phrase evoking vivid memories for a generation of New Zealanders – memories of cash-strapped mums running scissors down the middle of worn sheets, flipping the halves and sewing the edges together to eke a fraction more life from the fabric. And when the mattress again began to scratch through the fraying threads, the sheets became curtain lining.
“It wasn’t a case of being thrifty. It was just what you did. Things were not available or you couldn’t afford them,” says 77-year-old Mollie Brown, of Lower Hutt, who grew up during the Depression and struggled as a young mother in postwar shortage years.
… It seems extreme in today’s disposable culture. It’s hard to imagine young sophisticates even contemplating cutting up old linen, rather than popping into Briscoes for a new set, much less piecing together a patchwork of curtain lining out of old cloth nappies.
But spending attitudes are changing. With petrol prices up more than 30 cents a litre on last year, a basket of basic groceries up 25 per cent and fixed mortgage rates pushing 10 per cent, many are feeling the pinch and looking to their parents and grandparents, as well as new technology, for ways to save money.
(17 May 2008)
I Don’t Believe in Market Fairies: The Tinkerbelle Economy Starts to Falter
Sharon Astyk, Casaubon’s Book
Here are 10 Things Americans are doing to help deal with higher energy and food prices. These are getting nasty. Among other things now mean that the average American family will spend 6K on gas and other oil prices (and don’t think other energy sources, like electricity, are going to get cheaper either), and will struggle to deal with rapid rises in food prices. What they amount to is pulling out all the stops to keep things going – and once those stops are gone, they are gone:
1. Putting it on the credit card: This is the overall winner, as US credit card indebtedness rose to 6000 per working American. The dramatic rise in the first quarter of this year seems to reflect people falling back to the only resource they still have. One analyst argues that many Americans don’t ever expect to pay – and this may be true of some. But I suspect more likely most Americans have no idea *how* they will pay, but hope to. That hope is likely to be in vain.
But the truth is that most Americans have only the vaguest sense of where their money goes, or how to use it effectively. Poverty will not magically make them better at it.
(16 May 2008)
What if gas cost $10 a gallon?
Shirley Skeel, MSN Money
Forget pizza delivery. And cheap airfares. And bottled water. In fact, forget a way of life that looks much like today’s. But would that be so bad?
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In four years, U.S. gas prices have doubled to more than $3.70 a gallon, and crude oil has tripled to around $125 a barrel. Allowing for inflation, that’s higher than prices were during the 1978-83 oil shock that triggered a recession and sky-high interest rates. But . . .
What if gas cost $10 a gallon?
Thousands of truckers would go bankrupt. Airplanes would sit idle in hangars. Restaurants and stores would shut down. Car-pooling, hybrid vehicles, scooters and inline skates would swing into vogue. And telecommuting, rooftop vegetable gardens, home cooking and recycling would proliferate.
Yes, it would be painful.
… In the longer term, we might even be better off.
As the economy adjusted to functioning with new energy sources and more-efficient energy use, jobs in engineering, science, alternative energy and conservation would boom.
(16 May 2008)
Interesting and well thought out. -BA
