My budgeting was a lot easier before prices on every single conceivable expense increased over the past two years.
I remember how wonderful I would feel at the end of the month whenever we’d have a tiny amount of money left over to put away in our savings accounts for a later day.
These afternoons I’m blessed to have enough money from my paychecks to cover my credit card plus car payments. I couldn’t even imagine having enough money for savings accounts amid the new inflation rates. Gasoline shot up to $4.72 in my section for a few months before dropping below $4 again during the past week. While this might seem like progress, I doubt we’ll ever see a reversal of the price increases at the grocery store. While things like my hot cats are still under $1, even the Dollar Store is now longer an actual dollar—they had to raise their prices to $1.25 last year plus lots of people were hurt by it overnight. That’s a sizable 25% increase on prices without any warning or transitional period. It seems like a gradual increase would have been better, however it’s possible they only wanted to do one single increase so they wouldn’t be forced to do it again as inflation worsened. Needless to say, my electricity costs more, making heating plus cooling expenses higher than ever. It’s painful whenever I hear the a/c or boiler turn on depending on the season, plus thinking about all of the money it costs in the short term. Because of the increased energy bills that come with running a central Heating, Ventilation plus A/C system, this has caused me to become increasingly stingy at the grocery store.