Struggling to pay bills can create a huge stress for millions as life simply revolves around money whichever way we look at it.

It’s the one thing that makes the world go around.

There will always be times when we may be struggling to pay the bills. It’s a merry -go -round in what we call ‘life’.

Money is needed for almost everything. Without it the bills don’t get paid, we can’t buy food, buy houses, take a holiday…

The list is endless.

N0 bills 

As children, we never truly appreciate the need for money. There was never a need to learn about the value of it and all that it can bring.

Asking parents for money for sweets, new shoes, ballet classes etc was the normal thing to do, as youngsters, we never appreciated where that money came from. We just knew that for the majority of things we wanted as children, it was a straight ‘yes’ or ‘no’ from our parents.

Usually with the ‘we can’t afford that’ at the end.

”Money doesn’t grow on trees” was often a phrase that our parents used to say.

It certainly doesn’t. We appreciate and use this phase with our own kids when they are asking for things.

The trouble these days is that it’s not just money for sweets at the local convenience store.

It’s to fund much bigger items such as online games, new bikes or the latest gadget that’s been shown on screen.

Struggling to pay bills

Fast forward to 2020 when the biggest pandemic since the swine flu back in 2009-2010, hits all of us. We are either working for ourselves or for an employer.

Suddenly, we are not able to work because our business has been closed and put on hold or the company we work for has been forced to close temporarily.

Sadly, some of the smaller businesses have been closed for good.

A huge blow to so many businesses that have otherwise been hugely successful in the past and have been trading for several years.

The lock downs have come as a huge blow for every individual. No matter who or where we were at the time, a major catastrophe caused such a big impact and at the time, we never really knew of the full extent.

Employees that found themselves out of work or smaller businesses that had perhaps only just started out before the pandemic hit.

There was no way of them surviving. Most businesses make a loss in the first two years of trading.

If you happened to have set up your own small business right at the beginning of the pandemic, it would have taken a miracle to have clung on and still been trading.

The young and old had been impacted in one way or another and we found ourselves looking for alternative sources of income.

Christmas started to approach and we saw the end of 2020 very much alone.

The pressures were felt even more so as we tried to give our children as good a Christmas as we have always done.

Money was very tight and everyone had to re-evaluate how they spent their wages.

Online work

Millions of people began looking for other options as a way to keep afloat during such a crisis. The internet became everyone’s best friend ( alongside TicTock) to find other ways of supported ourselves and our family.

It began to show that we really shouldn’t rely on just one source of income.

Living has become so much more costly over the years and everyday expenses are continuous.

The price of living, food and bills still needed to be paid yet everyone was in the same boat and asking themselves how this was going to be possible.

Over the years, working online has often been criticised as not being a proper job and one that certainly couldn’t sustain a lifestyle of holidays or be enough to pay the bills and keep our heads above water.

Pressures of every day life takes its toll on our mental and physical wellbeing. This has been very evident over the past 18 months as some could not see a way out of such a dark place.