The cost-of-living crisis is well into its second year, with no signs of abatement for the millions of households impacted. Energy bills remain forbiddingly high, even after government intervention late in 2022. The cost of supermarket goods also continues to soar, often at rates much higher than the CPI rate used to track overall inflation.
A Difficult Time for Family
The result is a financial hardship for a great many people – particularly older, pension-age folk with little in the way of income to rely upon for the coming months and years. You might have such people in your own family, relatives struggling to make ends meet for a wide variety of reasons. High energy bills might be causing your grandparents to make difficult decisions about their weekly meals in secret or could be contributing to home issues like mould. If you are in a position to help them, what might you consider doing to improve their condition?
Financial Assistance
Naturally, your first instinct would be to think about financial assistance. But gifting money to your relatives could be a sticking plaster for what might be a much larger, long-term problem. Living costs are made all the more costly by the presence of debt, for example, whether predatory or inflated interest rates can eat into good money and leave someone with much less than they should have.
You might help your loved one by sitting down with them, and combing through both their existing finances and debt obligations. It might be that multiple forms of debt are compounding to create an interest rate trap of sorts, where consolidating would dramatically reduce overall expenditure on interest. It might be that one particular financial product, whether an overdraft or even a savings account, has hidden costs that are eating away at any attempts to save. Here, your attention is worth much more than a week’s grocery money.
Physical Assistance
Of course, while money is the root cause of the affordability crisis so many are facing, it is not the only way in which the challenges of the present day can be met. This is absolutely the case for elderly family members, too; your presence in their home, either in helping to renovate or simply helping to keep on top of housework, can be enough to make a serious difference to someone in need.
A key example might relate to energy, and the relative efficiency of their home. While buying a new boiler might be somewhat out of both your price ranges, there are numerous ways in which your DIY assistance could make their home a much cheaper, more comfortable one to live in. You might re-seal the skirting boards and window frames to reduce draughts, or bring and lay rugs around the house to improve the insulative properties of living spaces.
