The government has launched a 'Help For Households' scheme, designed to give advice on what help is available during these difficult economic times.
The scheme gives information on the various schemes and assistance being offered at government and local government levels, so UK households can see what financial assistance options may be available to them.
Below is an example of what you can find on the scheme's website.
The scheme, for example, gives information as below for those looking for help with their bills (links will take you to the relevant website/organisation):
Cost of Living Payment
Households on means-tested benefits, including Universal Credit, Pension Credit and Tax Credits, will receive a payment of £650 this year.
This will be made automatically in two instalments, one in summer and another in the autumn, and is in addition to the £400 discount on energy bills.
Energy Bills Support Scheme
£400 will be taken off your energy bill from October if you live in Great Britain.
This is an automatic grant, which does not need to be paid back and requires no action.
Disability Cost of Living Payment
Individuals on disability benefits will receive a one-off £150 payment in September to help with extra costs, such as for specialist equipment or transport.
This is in addition to the £650 Cost of Living Payment for disabled people who also receive means-tested benefits.
Winter fuel payments and Pensioner Cost of Living Payment
In the winter months, pensioners can get between £100 and £300 to help pay heating bills.
This winter, they will also receive an extra one-off £300 Pensioner Cost of Living Payment, which will be paid as an automatic top-up to the Winter Fuel Payment. Check if you’re eligible for the Winter Fuel Payment
Energy Bill Price Cap
The energy price cap continues to insulate households from even higher global gas prices, so families continue to pay lower bills for their electricity and gas than they otherwise would without it.
Council Tax rebate
If you live in Council Tax bands A to D in England, you’ll get £150 back from your Council Tax bill (4 out of 5 households in England).
For most people, the rebate is automatic; however, if you don’t pay your Council Tax by direct debit, then get in touch with your Council.
More information on the Council tax rebate
Cold weather payments
£25 extra a week, if you’re getting certain benefits, is available during the winter when the temperature is zero or below for more than seven days.
Check if you’re eligible
Warm Home Discount
This autumn, nearly three million low-income households are eligible for a £150 rebate on their winter electricity bills. Check with your energy supplier to see if you are eligible
0% VAT on energy-saving materials
It will be cheaper for you to install energy-saving materials such as thermal insulation or solar panels with 0% VAT for the next five years, helping to improve energy efficiency in your home and keep heating bills down. Find energy grants and ways to save energy in your home
Household Support Fund
£1.5 billion has been made available to support the most vulnerable to cover their essential daily costs, like energy bills. Recipients include pensioners and families with children.
Contact your local Council to check if you’re eligible for the Household Support Fund
Budgeting loans
You may be eligible for a Budgeting Loan if you’ve been on certain benefits for 6 months. This can be used for household items, rent in advance and travelling costs. Check if you’re eligible for a Budgeting Loan
Cheaper phone and broadband
You may be eligible to move onto a social tariff if you struggle to afford your broadband or phone services.
Help paying your Water Bill
Many water companies run hardship schemes or fund independent charitable trusts which can help you pay your bills. Get support paying your Water Bill
TV Licence fee freeze
The TV licence fee has been frozen at £159 until 2024. This means households will not see any change to the licence fee until 1 April 2024.
UK companies have started to come on board with the scheme, with Amazon now having a dedicated page on its website advising on how the company is offering help to its customers during this economic turmoil, such as offering a Tesco Clubcard price match, keeping it's food offerings at a comparable price to Tesco own brand and branded products.
Asda has stated it will help feed kids for £1 this summer in store cafés across the country, any time of day within opening hours, seven days a week.
To help parents to keep their children fed, which can be difficult when the kids are home and eating you out of house and home, and when you normally can rely on the children getting a hot meal at school, the supermarket is giving children aged 16 and under a hot or cold meal for £1 with no minimum adult spend required, meaning the adult could buy a pack of crisps and the kids could then get a proper meal for £1, which would be hard to replicate at home, or at least be harder to offer a balanced meal, for that price.
The offer is available from the 25th of July 2022 and finishes on the 4th of September. However, there are rumours that this offer will be extended until the end of the year.
Asda has also launched a " Living Hub", which is a website advising on how to save money and how to manage your money better, and has also introduced a more comprehensive range of Essential type products at low prices.
Sainsbury’s is re-introducing its ‘feed your family for a fiver’ campaign, set up to help customers with budget-friendly meal ideas to feed a family of four for less than £5, and Morrisons is offering a free kids meal with any adults meal over £4.99 in its cafes to help keep family costs down this Summer. Ikea offers kids meals for 95p on their own or for £1.50 if you also buy a drink, piece of fruit and dessert. The offer started on July 11 and will end on September 3rd. Whitbread Inns, Brewers' Fayre and Beefeater offer two kids under 16 to eat breakfast for free with every adult breakfast purchased.
Dunelm offers children eating at its cafes a free main meal, two snacks and a drink for every £4 spent on other food.
Many other restaurants are also offering Summer discounts for kids to help keep them fed and to offer better value for adults wanting to take the kids out during the school holidays.
Theatres in London are uniting for Kids Week, an initiative giving children the chance to see a West End show for free throughout August with a full paying adult, with half-price tickets for two additional children in the same group, while Vodafone is promoting a mobile social tariff of £10 a month.
What you can do to save some money while supermarket shopping
The shopper can also help keep their supermarket bills as low as possible by shopping more frugally. Think about tips such as the ones below while you are in the shops:
Look down! Supermarkets are a bit crafty, and you will generally find that products on the shelf, at eye level, are generally the higher-margin products that the supermarkets want you to buy! You will find that if you look down a few shelves, you will find similar products, only cheaper! They may not be the big brands, but generally of a decent enough quality, and every penny not spent is a penny saved!
Do you really need to buy the big brands? Yes, sometimes there is a taste/quality difference, but as an example, recently, I heard how a worker in a cheese factory would cut up large pieces of cheese, and this same cheese would then be split into different packages for different supermarkets, and the same cheese was going into the value range bags, as was going into the premium cheese bags, which is why I will never not buy the value range cheese again! Needless to say, it's not just cheese this happens with, which is why value ranges are, on the whole, well worth considering switching to in order to save money. Read my recent report on the value ranges for more information on how value ranges stack up.
Slice and grate your own cheese! Look at the price per kilo difference between blocks of cheese, sliced cheese and grated cheese. The image below shows that exactly the same cheese is up to £2.75 per kilo more expensive by buying it already sliced/grated. Sure, I know it's handy to have it grated/sliced for you, but is it worth the extra money? The extra cost is often well hidden as well; if you don't look at the price per kilo information on the price ticket, you will often find that the pack price is similar. Looking at the images below, all the packs are around £2, so the supermarket hopes you will think it's the same price, so I might as well buy it already grated, but you are getting less cheese, so losing out while the supermarket is raking it in! Also, grated and sliced cheese has added potato starch to prevent it from sticking together or going into lumps, so you are paying more money and not even getting as much cheese, as some of the contents are potato starch! Invest in a decent grater, grate your own cheese and save money!
Of course, it's not just cheese that costs you more by buying it pre-prepared, sliced chicken breast ( it's the same chicken as the whole chicken breasts), so cut your own; it's on average around £1.50 a kilo cheaper to slice it yourself!); pre-prepared vegetables and marinated meats are cheaper by buying the products un-processed and preparing and/ or marinating them yourself. I've come across meat with a marinade, nearly £3 more expensive per pack, purely because it has spices added to the pack. Invest in a value brand spice jar or a packet mix, and it will work out cheaper to spend 5 minutes marinading it yourself!
Frozen is cheaper! You will often find that a frozen product variant is cheaper than a fresh version, and often it's the same thing! Frozen meats, ready meals, pizzas etc usually are less expensive than the fresh variant and here's why: When a fresh product, and by fresh I mean refrigerated or made with ingredients that haven't been previously frozen, the supermarket will add a surcharge to the price, and this is to cover wastage. The extra amount added to a price for buying a 'fresh' item is there to cover the cost of the fresh items that have to be thrown away because they didn't sell or had to be reduced in price to clear. They don't want to lose profit, so they initially overinflate the prices to cover these losses, to keep their margin as high as possible, even after throwing items away! Fresh items are often more likely to be damaged in transit, so this surcharge also covers this.
A saving is only a saving if you actually needed it in the first place, otherwise, it's an expense! The BOGOF, 50% off, 2 For £X type deals are only great if you actually need those products! The manufacturers pay the supermarket an eye-watering amount of money to have their products on the end of an aisle or a promotion shelf because the manufacturer wants to boost sales. The supermarket loves a manufacturer-funded special offer (it's not the supermarket discounting down those deals, it's the manufacturers, and they have to pay the supermarket a fee to make sure the supermarket doesn't lose margin on the product), as it's a great way to make you spend extra money, and boost its takings! Try not to be drawn into these types of deals, as you didn't intend to buy that item more often than not, so you have now spent money you didn't need to spend!
This looks like a great deal, but did you need all those items? Is it cheaper to buy a couple of frozen pizzas and some garlic bread, which is just as filling and probably a few £ cheaper? Impulse buys can be expensive if you don't look at your other options before buying. If you hadn't actually planned to buy pizza and sides on your shopping trip and purchased this deal because it seems good value because it mentions it's up to £8.85 cheaper than buying the other items separately, you haven't saved money; you've just spent money you didn't intend spending! You are now £10 worse off... Often items on promotion have had the price increased in the past few weeks to 'discount' the product later on and show it as a special offer or bargain buy! I use a price tracker app from Trolley.co.uk, which lets me search prices for certain items at 13 different stores, including supermarkets, to tell me if the price is good, average, or a massive bargain! This means I don't 'panic buy' loads of a product because the signage/point of sale states it's a great deal (save £x, while stocks last, etc.,) as I search for the same product using the app, which shows me the price for the item, at the supermarket's competitors. If it's similar or better, I will curb my spending and only buy what I need! The app has a handy price guide (which doesn't work on everything but is generally pretty good), which shows you a price history graph, which lets you know if the price has recently been increased or decreased and what the pricing was before. It helps you to work out if this offer really is good. As a test, a quick check of a special offer bathroom product, priced at £1.75 today in Waitrose, shows that two months ago it was selling for £1, so I know the deal isn't that special after all, but it also tells me Tesco have it as a Clubcard price for £1.25, so I could get it there and save 50p, or I could nip into Savers and get it for £1, so it gives me options. I wouldn't use it on everything, but it's handy to determine if a deal really is a deal!
Shop yellow! Use the supermarket yellow sticker products to grab a bargain, but try and time it right! Most supermarkets will discount a product twice; once in the morning, at between 10% and 25% off and then again in the evening, on which items haven't been sold during the day, and price them at up to 90% off, depending on the supermarket's reduction policy. The supermarket I worked at, Morrisons, would make the first reduction on products dated the next day, the night before, around 9 or 10 pm. They would either be put out that night for customers to buy at a reduced price, depending on how much was left on the shelf from that's days reductions, or they would go out the next morning. The next evening, from 5 pm, the store would then start the 'finals', which is up to 90% off a product to clear what's leftover. The final discount amount depends on which department of the store you are buying from. Products such as ready meals, fresh meats, dairy, dips and products such as coleslaw, pies and pastries will generally be 90% off. The system only automatically discounts 80% off. However, the store can upgrade the discount to 90% to clear through the excess products at the manager's discretion, which usually goes out at 90%. The produce department, which is fruit and vegetables, typically reduces down to 90% off as this is usually the department with the highest number of reductions and the greatest chance of having items not sell, so they want to get it sold; otherwise, they have to mess around with the hassle of throwing what's left away, which is wasteful, and also very time consuming, and labour intensive. Some leftover items might go into a Too Good To Bag for the next day (more on this in a minute). Bread and cakes usually are 80% off, apart from 'free from' or speciality bread, which usually goes to 90% off to clear, as they tend to be less popular and need to reduce as far as possible, or they will likely have to be thrown away. The butchery, delicatessen and instore bakery departments typically reduce to 80% off at around 7 pm but can be a little earlier depending on staffing numbers and the number of goods that need to be reduced. If there is a more significant amount of goods to be reduced, they may reduce the products down to 90% off, but that's less likely, as the stores try and protect their margin in those areas if they can.
Regarding yellow stickers, try not to get too over-excited with the bargains! Remember, they have a short shelf life, so only buy what you know you can store or use; I've certainly been someone who's gone a bit discount crazy, and got home, had nowhere to keep it and ended up throwing things away, which is a waste of money, adds to the food waste problem, and has also meant someone else didn't get that item, that they could have used because you bought it unnecessarily! Try and have a plan in your head when buying the bargains, and if you know that actually, you may not be able to use it, put it back!
Always use supermarket cashback apps to make savings on products. Apps like CheckoutSmart, Shopmium and GreenJinn, could save you hundreds over a year. Also, ensure you have signed up for supermarket loyalty schemes, and always scan them! I know it sounds obvious, but the number of people who miss out on discounts because they haven't scanned their loyalty card is crazy; it's saving money at the end of the day!
Cashback on your regular food shop is less likely than if you bought a telly off the internet, but there is a way to get something back! If you know how much you are likely to spend in the supermarket, buy a gift card for the supermarket from a cashback site such as KarmaCashback, TopCashback or Quidco, as you will then receive cash back on the gift card purchase. The average cashback rate is about 3% on a supermarket gift card purchase, and so for every £100 you spend, you will get around £3 cashback. Now I appreciate that's not a life-changing amount of money, but its 3% off your shopping bill, and if you were to keep that in your cashback account throughout the year, you could then cash it in at Christmas, and it could pay for your Christmas dinner, with all the trimmings! You can also buy supermarket gift cards to pay for fuel at supermarket petrol stations, and once you start buying your fuel this way, your cashback account starts to grow quickly! Cashback on gift cards is also paid immediately to your cashback account, so there is no annoying waiting for cashback to clear; you could use it straight away!
Take carrier bags with you; most stores charge around 20p each for a bag, with Tesco now charging a whopping 30p, which really adds up. Most plastic bags are bags for life these days, so if you have broken bags, take them to the shop with you and the supermarket will replace them for you free of charge, don't just throw them away; I know I'm guilty of just throwing them away, I've probably trashed about a thousand!! Also, if you have fresh meat, as for a meat bag, they will supply you with a carrier bag for your meat at no charge.
Use food waste apps such as Olio or Too Good To Go to take advantage of great clearance pricing, or even free food, that would otherwise go to waste. You can pick up some great deals and reduce food waste. Supermarkets will use these services to eliminate as much excess food as possible. Supplying these app services with products is tax-deductible for the supermarkets. In the case of some supermarkets, they can claim money from their suppliers to cover the food they couldn't sell and had to give away, so it's actually beneficial for them to be involved in these initiatives financially, as well as not having to throw so much away, reducing their wastage cost and labour costs, plus makes them look good in the public eye because they are helping to prevent food waste, and to help feed the nation!
Don't shop hungry! There is a reason many supermarkets have counters selling hot food or that the bakery bakes all day long - the smell! Yes, indeed, the supermarket knows that by pumping around the smell of freshly roasted chickens, or freshly baked bread, your brain will go into a 'feeding frenzy', and you will be drooling. Your tummy will rumble, and even though the counters generally make a loss financially, all the other things you pop in your basket while in your 'feed me' phase makes up for it! I used to work in a restaurant, and our manager always made sure we had onions frying in the kitchen, as the smell was yummy, and it got people hungry, and they ordered more... same principle with the supermarket!
Watch out for the impulse buys at the till! Many checkout lines are lined with racks of yummy-looking impulse items such as chocolate bars, drinks, crisps, sometimes bakery products, and products such as batteries and mobile phone SIM cards. You, especially the kids, may well reach for these high-margin products while waiting to be served! They can make a dent in your food bill, especially batteries and other 'essential items' - The margin on batteries and SIM cards is enormous; it's no coincidence they are by the till; we've all thought, oh, I might need some batteries, I will get some while I think about it... Kerching for the supermarket, ouch for your wallet! New rules were due to be implemented to ban the unhealthier (the junk food phrase is being used for products that will be affected), items being offered as multi-buys. You often find these by the tills (the buy two chocolate bars for £1 type offer) in October 2022. However, this has now been postponed to 2023, in theory, to help people with the cost of living crisis, so it will likely change in 2023. Still, I'm sure the supermarkets will have a new trick up their sleeve to make sure we part with as much money as they can get from us!
The best thing you can do to save money when shopping in a supermarket and not be sucker-punched into buying stuff you don't really need is properly look at what you already have in your fridge and cupboards and make a list and stick to it! Yes, it takes a bit of planning, but the financial ramifications of not sticking to a list can be huge! The supermarkets know that, on average, a third of all shoppers with a shopping list don't stick to it and buy extra things, and the supermarket head offices have whole departments full of people thinking up new deals, special offers and marketing ploys to try and get you to part with more cash then you wanted to spend and buy more items than you intended, as it makes the supermarkets millions of pounds every year! The supermarkets are very good at what they do; once you are in their store, they will do everything in their power for you to spend as much money as they can squeeze out of you, so be wary, think twice before adding a product to your trolley! Do you really need it, can I find it cheaper, could I earn cash back on it, is the deal as good as it seems, and is it the most affordable way to buy this type of item today in this store? If the answer is no to any of those questions, pop it back on the shelf, go and get the other things you need (from your list!), and if, after a few extra minutes to, think about the product rather than being spontaneous. If you still really want it, fair enough, still, chances are you will have forgotten about it or decided against it, and you just saved yourself some hard-earned cash, and these days we all need to reduce our spending as much as possible, bills aren't getting any cheaper!
The cost of living and rising inflation means that we simply aren't getting what we did a year ago, an example being milk; 2 pints of milk is now costing what 4 pints cost at the start of the year, and that's creating a knock-on effect on other dairy prices, with 1-kilo tubs of butter hitting £10 each!
Prices will likely increase again month on month, with another significant energy price rise due in October this year, so if there were ever a time to look at your option in regards to financial assistance and shopping more frugally, now would be a great time to investigate your options...