As Chancellor John Healey puts the final touches to his first Budget, how are the “squeezed middle” feeling after years of cost-of-living pressure? <\/p>\n
Dawn Fazackerley-King is trying to work out how she and her family will pay higher mortgage costs anticipated in a few months’ time.<\/p>\n
“There’s just no more fat to trim,” says the mother-of-two.<\/p>\n
The interest rate on their Ipswich home loan could rise from 1.4% to about 5.3%, which, Dawn says, could add “about \u00a3250 extra a month just for living in the same property”.<\/p>\n
“We just have to find that money from somewhere, but when you look at the direct debits every month, there’s nothing fancy in there,” she adds. <\/p>\n
The BBC has contacted HM Treasury for comment. <\/p>\n
Dawn lists the usual monthly bills, including their mortgage, council tax and energy costs, adding “there’s no regular meals out or anything like that”.<\/p>\n
Over the past few years of increasing costs, Dawn says her family \u2013 which includes two children aged six and eight \u2013 have been “trimming the fat accordingly”.<\/p>\n
“It’s quite worrying… where that money is going to come from when we’re already feeling that squeeze,” she says.<\/p>\n
Dawn, 42, works as a full-time self-employed Pilates instructor in Ipswich, while her husband works in an office and the couple have a household income of about \u00a370,000 a year.<\/p>\n
Is she part of the “squeezed middle”?<\/p>\n
“Yes. Life is definitely getting more expensive,” she says. <\/p>\n
She is not alone.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"As Chancellor John Healey puts the final touches to his first Budget, how are the “squeezed middle” feeling…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":813327,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[96,59,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-813326","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-entertainment","tag-gb","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/813326","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=813326"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/813326\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/813327"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=813326"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=813326"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=813326"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}