The Stress and Strain of Family Finances — Wise Words in Tough Times

The Citizens Advice Service is very busy everywhere at the moment. Their website has lots of information on topics including housing, work, benefits, debt, health and family matters. If you are really struggling you can chat with an advisor online, call the advice line, or enter your postcode to contact your local office.

Money saving expert and consumer champion Martin Lewis publishes a range of information on his website

including comparison tables, articles, tips and calculators to help with the financial squeeze. He is a strong advocate of knowing your budget – so that you can keep track of all your incomings and outgoings, and deal with any cash shortfall before it becomes a crisis – so there is a free budgeting tool on his website too.

Martin says: “The biggest problem people have is that they look across the month at what they typically pay for things, like food bills, utilities, mortgage, car lease and all those things. But the average family in the UK spends £600 on Christmas, which is £50 a month. They buy a television, that is £300. They go on holiday, and so on. Rarely are these costs factored into monthly spend. We need to break down these amounts into monthly costs, across the whole year, and add it to our monthly figures.”

Martin advises people to use a system called ‘piggybanking’, where you put money aside each month for different things, including one-off purchases, Christmas and holidays, so that the money is there when you need it.

Meanwhile, author, journalist and antipoverty campaigner Jack Monroe has created a growing collection of healthy affordable recipes for people on low incomes. When she was fac-

Consumer champion, money saving expert and budgeting advocate Martin Lewis

ing difficult times and had only £10 per week to feed herself and her young son, she went on a mission to find the cheapest ingredients possible in the supermarket ‘basics’ ranges. She created recipes for people with very low budgets – for example vegetable curry for 30p per portion – and published them in her cook books called A Girl called Jack and Cooking on a Bootstrap.

You can access lots of excellent and affordable recipes for free on her website www.jackmonroe.com and there are more on BBC Food

RED PINK ORANGE BLUE GREEN PURPLE

EGG FLOUR BUTTER SUGAR MILK