According to one recent study twenty percent of mothers are going without food on their own plates so that their children can eat. Furthermore, a massive twenty five percent in the same research group were actually either paying on their credit card or drawing the cash out from them to contribute to putting food on the table and other general day-to-day living expenses.
Mumsnet.com, who instigated the survey, are one of the largest parenting sites in the UK. This particular survey set out to find a very real picture of what civilian life was truly like and gauge a picture of what mums were up against just to give their families a healthy start in life. And the picture we’re starting to see from those first results gets even more damning as more results unfold.
Of those surveyed, seventy percent of households are teetering on the edge, living from payday to payday and struggling to make the two ends meet. Five percent rely regularly on instant cash loan companies to tide them over, whilst a shocking ten percent rely on loan sharks to that same end.
The official verdict for the seven in ten families genuinely struggling is ‘on the edge’; that must be the knife edge from the cuts we have seen so ruthlessly imparted under the current regime and twisting at the very heart of lower income families budgets. We here the government give short term loans bad press every day, but surely the ten percent of families approaching loan sharks would be better of accessing a quick cash advance online than putting them and their families in the hands of these ruthless lenders?
As well as moms going without essential meals, other features of childcare scored heavily as being burdens on the household budget, with seventeen percent worrying about meeting this cost. And unless they want to stay at home, the shocking rise in travel costs bore the chagrin of forty percent of the survey panel, whilst three in ten thought that the phone bill may be in jeopardy, if other factors swayed against them meeting other essential bills.
In conclusion, the actual money people are short week in, week out is approximated at £100 by the survey, according to ten percent of those questioned. More than thirty percent have borrowed off relatives and (once) close friends as sixty percent related that there’s not a week goes by when one sacrifice or another has to be made to keep the budget in any shape, whatsoever.
In a recent interview with The Telegraph, mumsnet founder Sally Russell stated that the epidemic is close to becoming a national ‘catastrophe’ and is in dire need of ‘exposing’. She’s not wrong, is she?