A Slice of Bread and Butter
The voice of The Bread and Butter Thing - with stories from the frontline of the cost of living crisis from one of the UK's leading food charities.
A Slice of Bread and Butter
The realities of self employment and modern family life
What happens when you suddenly lose your main source of income as a working parent? Join Mark and Alex as they catch up with self-employed Niamh, as she shares her story of keeping her head above water whilst balancing being a toddler mum, extortionate nursery fees and rising mortgage rates.
Welcome to A Slice of Bread and Butter with Mark and Alex from the Bread and Butter Thing. We're a charity that delivers affordable food to the heart of deprived neighbourhoods and helps nourish communities and acts as a catalyst for change.
Speaker 2:We provide access to a nutritious, affordable range of food, which means our members can save money on their shopping, feed their families healthfully, as well as access other support too, right in the heart of their communities.
Speaker 1:And this is where we meet, share stories of well, a slice of life with somebody involved in bread and butter, and hear about how they connect with us. So this time, niamh came into the office to have a chat. This is how it went.
Speaker 3:I'm Niamh. I am a mum to a three-year-old toddler, I'm self-employed and I work as a journalist and a communications consultant. I've been doing that for about three years and, yeah, I love it, but it comes with its challenges.
Speaker 1:That sounds like you've got a reasonably successful consultancy that you're doing for yourself. Why did you come to Bread and Butter?
Speaker 3:So, yeah, you'd be right in thinking it is pretty successful. It's been working fine for me for the past couple of years. But I was kind of met with something that was unexpected at the start of the year. So on the 31st of January I suddenly found that all of my income had dropped out overnight and I had nothing lined up for February. That can be quite normal for being self-employed that it fluctuates, but never to the point that I had absolutely zero.
Speaker 3:I was going to have to work really hard to bring in new leads and pipelines, but they obviously wouldn't really pay out until say, march or further on. And for me and my partner we were suddenly looking at all of our outgoings and looking at things like really high nursery fees. Our mortgage rate had changed and everything was just going out the door with very little coming in as a result. Result I was like what am I going to do? We were left with next to nothing to survive on. I knew we wouldn't really be eligible for anything that was like a food bank exactly or something that was income or means tested. So I'd heard through somebody that had worked with bread and butter thing. I looked at it and was like you know what this could just really help us, and they were like it's not poverty, you don't need to be facing homelessness.
Speaker 1:Because this is a really interesting space for me, because I have friends and contacts that really struggle with understanding what poverty looks like nowadays.
Speaker 3:It's a really hard definition, I think, now, because in your mind you'd have said you know that person that's homeless on the street, that's poverty. That person that can't afford to feed themselves but is putting the money for food for the children, that's poverty. But actually I think this would come like a normalized sense of poverty, where you are living paycheck to paycheck. So many of us are facing difficult financial situations, like in the past. I think it would have been normalized to have savings and to put money away for a rainy day, and I just don't think that's possible anymore. But there's so many people that are like I'm living in my overdraft, I've got no way of getting out of it. I don't know where to turn and what to do, because everybody's in the same situation do you still feel that pressure of I'm kind live into my overdraft, sort of thing?
Speaker 3:I definitely do, because even since the beginning of the year, so many things have gone up. So my daughter goes to nursery four days a week in a private nursery because there was no council places. That's incredibly expensive. I get to the 12th of the month before I've paid that off and then I have to then earn for the rest of the month to earn to cover my mortgage and everything else. We've literally just accessed the 33 hours, but it's not really 33 hours, because you're still paying for a certain amount. You still need to pay for certain bits towards it. So it's a slight reduction, but it's not huge in the grand scheme of things. My partner was made redundant in 2021 and he was out of work for a year and in that time we had no help for nursery nothing. So it's really difficult, but it's something that it's an absolute necessity in our life, but it's just so expensive.
Speaker 1:Essentials and luxuries. What do you think you would say nowadays is a luxury that you probably used to think of as an essential?
Speaker 3:A holiday. I know that probably sounds ridiculous, but I grew up we'd have done at least one a year. It's just not really possible. It just feels like the money's going to be needed for something else.
Speaker 1:So when was the last time you had a holiday?
Speaker 3:We saved for 18 months and we went away in May. But that was 18 months of planning and saving, even things like family giving us money at Christmas. We put it to the holiday.
Speaker 1:Home-wise. Are you in a flat, in a house, rented mortgage? We're in a two-bedroom house.
Speaker 3:I own it, so I have the mortgage, and then my partner lives with me.
Speaker 1:So how's that been with the mortgage, with the interest rates?
Speaker 3:We were okay. I think we could have been hit harder. For us it's been things like energy bills. To be in a two-up, two-down property, mid-terrace, our energy bills at one point were hitting nearly 300 a month for gas and electric. And when I work from home and it's just me at home I will instead put about three jumpers and get the blankets out because I don't want to pay to heat the house if it's just me. But you don't really have that option when you've got a three-year-old who you can't have the house being freezing cold so she won't get out of bed. You can't have it really cold in the evening. Although our income is okay now, I am worried about this winter because all I hear is that the bills are going up again and I don't think we can face another one.
Speaker 1:What would that mean to you? What would that mean to you? What would you end up?
Speaker 3:doing, we'd cut from somewhere. Typically it used to be things like the food bill. Annoyingly, the things that would get cut out would be things like Fresh fruit and vegetables, because they don't last as long. But it's also then trying to work out what else can you squeeze from? What else do you not have? I remember the days when I could have gone to Tesco and just done a food shop and not thought about it, and now it's very much more considered. I go into the supermarket. I find sometimes with online you get so many like, oh, buy this on offer, and it's a lot easier to get sucked in and then I end up buying things I don't necessarily need.
Speaker 1:Does that make it cheaper?
Speaker 3:The cost savings probably aren't massive, but I feel a bit more in control and I feel like I know exactly what we've bought. We don't tend to do the big weekly shop anymore. We tend to do two smaller ones. That makes it a lot easier to work out what we have eaten by Wednesday and what we might eat by Saturday. My daughter is very used to that, like on a. Wednesday she'll ask now are we going to the shop? She loves the self scanner, so for her, she probably thinks it's a day out.
Speaker 3:I would have loved that as a kid, she loves it, she thinks it's great. It's just stopping her from scanning things twice and being like, just let it it beep once. We don't need four lots of bananas when we've only got one in the basket. So I've noticed as well that because I'll have said to her, oh, we can't get that, oh, that's expensive. Or I'll be like do you want to get a packet of biscuits? She'll say we've got biscuits at home.
Speaker 3:Like she's quite conscious and I do worry that she's picked that up from us.
Speaker 1:Thinking back at three years old, I would just be thinking more along the lines of are there any biscuits in that tin at home? I would never be saying don't buy that, mum, because it's expensive. No, and if your mum or dad had said to you Fill the tin, fill the tin.
Speaker 3:Yeah, if your mum or dad had said, do you want to get some biscuits? You'd have been like, yeah definitely. I'll have two.
Speaker 1:Can I have both Screw tea?
Speaker 3:Yeah, I worry that she's maybe absorbed or like felt that we've been worried about money at some point.
Speaker 1:Yeah, let's talk a bit about social mobility. Then right, in theory, your life should be better off than your parents.
Speaker 3:Oh, that's so interesting. I think so. I'm 33. If I think about when my parents would be my age, I think that we're worse off. So my mum would have had three children by the time she was 33, working as a teacher. My dad was a doctor. They were living in a four-bedroom property. Each child had their own bedroom. We had everything we need, Whereas me and my partner have had serious conversations about can we even afford to have another child? We would love to give our daughter a sibling. We've faced that where we've gone. You know what. We just can't do it, and that's really sad.
Speaker 1:Why do you think you're in the position that you are in comparison to where your parents were at this stage?
Speaker 3:It probably sounds like a cliche, but I think things like inflation, things cost so much more. That really is taking its toll. I also find that the field that I work in has become increasingly competitive, which then makes it really hard to find work, and it's something my parents have remarked on. You know, you guys have got it harder, and that's reassuring to hear, rather than being told that narrative of you know, if you don't buy an avocado, you'll be able to buy a house.
Speaker 3:um, you know that kind of thing of like you just need to work a bit harder, because I work six days a week, grafting as hard as I can, and sometimes it just doesn't feel like I'm making a dent in it so what would you change if you were Keir?
Speaker 3:If I was that person in that position of power. I mean there needs to be much better childcare support. There needs to be much better support for mums and dads in the workplace. Parental leave could be a lot better the fact that you're most likely to be off for an entire year when you have a child. If you go on maternity leave, but only nine months of it is paid. For me, that meant that my daughter went into nursery at eight months old and I wasn't ready to leave her, and that's when I actually started to be self-employed, because I thought it would give me a better work-life balance. I'm working six days a week, so I'm not entirely sure I've cracked it, or yeah, I don't think.
Speaker 3:I've landed it properly. But at the same time it gave me more freedom in the sense of I can work around things and I'm not necessarily having to ask a boss to kind of have that afternoon off to go and see my daughter and her nativity play.
Speaker 1:Looping back around to bread and butter then. So how often do you use it nowadays, or do you not anymore?
Speaker 3:Not really as much anymore.
Speaker 1:When Not really as much anymore. When I initially found out about it and went out in February, we used it every week. I always like to know what the strangest thing you've had was in your bread and butter bags and the best thing you've had.
Speaker 3:Oh, OK, the best thing. I think my partner would definitely say we got four packets of scotch eggs once in one bag. But we were made up because like that's a really nice thing to have, but isn't something we would have bought for ourselves Every day that week. We were like, let's get a scotch egg.
Speaker 1:More of a luxury item.
Speaker 3:Yeah, In terms of weird things. We got a Wagamama's salad dressing which definitely made us think creatively about how we could use it. I think I caught my partner having it with toast one day and I was like I think that's pushing it um but he was just like I, really like it, so I was like fair enough salad dressing on toast is a new one for me yeah, I mean for him.
Speaker 3:I was like well, do you know what, as long as you like it and it's being used, because that was more my concern was that we'd come home and things would go in the cupboard and then not get touched and I'd be like this is pointless, like we've turned to somewhere that's helping against food waste and then we're just taking it home and wasting it. And it's always made us think much better, like we'd go and get it on a Monday and then from that we'd then meal plan and then go do our Tesco shop to top off on anything.
Speaker 1:You've triggered me now as well, because you mentioned waste right as well.
Speaker 3:Because you mentioned waste right, so do you waste much at home food? Wise, I'd say there is still some waste definitely not as much as we used to have, say, last year. We're much more conscious. We will look at stuff and go do you know what that could do for a lunch tomorrow? Or we have a toddler who is a picky eater, so there'll be lots of times that we plate up food for her and then she'll have two bites and push it away.
Speaker 3:In the past, we'd have gone okay, scrape that into the food bin and it'd go wherever. Now we'll be, like can we reheat that tomorrow and can I have it for my lunch? For me, it's even just been things like plastics and cardboard and like I can't believe how much we go through in a household, like it's horrifying, and we're two adults and a child. I think that's another reason why I've started to shop less online, because everything arrives about four or five different layers of packaging and I think why, and are you really going to use that Amazon cardboard box again? Probably not, and we're definitely not in a position that we can be spending all that money.
Speaker 2:So our leave story really hits home a little bit. There's a few parallels that I see myself with Niamh. Obviously, the sort of job choice being a toddler mum, which isn't easy, and extortionate nursery fees I mean that is a subject that me and my other half could bang on about for quite some time, as well as mortgages. So yeah, I really felt Niamh's story. It really got me.
Speaker 1:You got little ones too. So what really struck me was when she was out shopping with a little one and the biscuits. The biscuits.
Speaker 2:The biscuits, oh knife to the heart.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that was tough listen. I don't think any three-year-old should be so aware.
Speaker 2:An old soul at three.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Niamh made a point, didn't she? She about her little girl must have picked up on, because they're such little sponges, aren't they? They are they absorb everything, even when you don't think they are so.
Speaker 1:Even if they call the tail end of conversations that have happened in the home or around her about money and about we can't do that because of xyz, she's taking it all in yeah, I really reflected on neve because it it was one of those questions about what is poverty, because I wouldn't say neve's poor, but she's stretched and struggling right, they've got their own house with their own mortgage and childcare costs and they're definitely trying to do everything they can to stand on their own two feet. But because she's contracting and suddenly she's no money, because she's no work for February, because nobody's deciding they want work, they're so close to that edge. That's when they have to dip in and that's when they really have to tighten their belts. And that's when they have to dip in and that's when they really have to tighten their belts and that's when they have to make some really tough decisions about what they can and can't do.
Speaker 2:It just goes to show you're always on the knife edge. You're always one, two paychecks away from really tough times.
Speaker 1:Living in your overdraft, paying credit cards month on month. All this sort of thing is a growing problem, and we know this. So we've seen a rise in debt post-COVID, and whilst the cost of living has gone up, when we survey our members, we've seen so many of them telling us about the fact that they're using credit cards simply to buy food or to pay their electricity bill. These are not things that you should be relying on your credit card for, really, but when you get to the end of the month and there's nothing left, what else can you do?
Speaker 2:Exactly. It did make me laugh when you've said about the stop buying avocados and you'll be able to afford a deposit for a house. Mentioning no names Kirsty Allsop.
Speaker 1:Really Torsten Bell talks about this in one of his books and Torsten's now a Labour MP. But one of the interesting things that he said, he drew comparisons, because actually the generation that talk that way which is my generation and for the record, I don't talk that way, but we used to spend all our money on fags and booze Nobody draws that parallel. It's like stop buying avocados. Avocados whether a damn sight better for you than the cigarettes we used to smoke I hadn't thought of it like that, but yes, you're right.
Speaker 2:I've had similar chats with my mum and dad as well and hearing their almost blessing that we're allowed to have a little moan to them because they agree it is tough out there and it's a very different world.
Speaker 1:It definitely is. I think the other one that we talk a lot about that Niamh drew on for me was online versus personal shopping and the control and how it can be kind of more expensive online, and it's really interesting because I've heard a number of people I don't think I've heard Kirsty Alsop say this, but who knows, she may have done. There's no need for there to be difficulties in low-income communities where there's no access to affordable food, because everybody can buy deliveries. You can always get an Ocado or a Tesco delivery to your low-income home because they'll deliver in and it's like well, actually it's more expensive because you can't be as savvy a shopper online.
Speaker 2:That is true, although I have heard the other argument that going online removes any temptation of any impulse purchases. Now, neve's Little Girl is an exception. I was going to say you don't have the impulses with Neve's Little Girl have the impulses with Neve's little world, no, those retailers that know exactly where to put the toys and the sweets for the pester power. I can absolutely see both sides of the argument.
Speaker 1:Do you experience the pester power?
Speaker 2:then yes, yes, we are quite fortunate that we live right next door to an Aldi, so we have the luxury of not having to take the kids to the shop, because it's just a rip around the corner.
Speaker 1:So you can just pop next door.
Speaker 2:Yes, yeah, and for that we are truly thankful. But we do worry that we can never live anywhere again, unless it's right next door to an Aldi.
Speaker 1:Well, you could always go and live next door to a Lidl.
Speaker 2:Yeah, we'd take Lidl, we'd take, lidl, we'd take.
Speaker 1:Lidl.
Speaker 2:Right Move need to include that on their filters. So if you'd like to know more about the bread and butter thing and what we get up to, you can find us at Team TBBT on Instagram, twitter and LinkedIn and TikTok, or online at breadandbutterthingorg.
Speaker 1:When did TikTok happen?
Speaker 2:It's been happening.
Speaker 1:How rude. I clearly missed this, and if you have any feedback or thoughts on the podcast or any ideas for what we should talk about actually, then drop us a line at podcast at breadandbutterthingorg.
Speaker 2:And finally, we're always, always open to new members at all our hubs and if you or someone you know would benefit from our affordable food scheme, you can find your nearest hub on our join us pages on the website.
Speaker 1:And please do all those things that you know all the other podcasts ask you to do as well Like us, subscribe to us, leave us a review and share us with your mates, chat about us on social and tell your mum and tell her to tell her friends too. We're getting better at this, Alex Whee. See you next time. Bye.
