Dear LPG,

I suspect that many of us will look back on Christmas 2021 as one where getting out and about to look for presents was taken over by doing that shopping on line, as the pandemic that we thought we had all but learned to live with took its Omicron turn at the last minute.

I really miss the good old days when you got paid and your wage packet was an envelope with real money in it.  When you went shopping you really knew what you had to spend and somehow it was much easier to budget. 

We now live in a world where the way you manage what you owe people is as important as what you can afford to spend and it is really hard to keep up with where you are financially.

I have no doubt that there are now many people, pensioners included, who are counting the cost of Christmas present spending which always ends up with those last minute purchases that we just press the button on before considering the financial consequences.

Now that the decorations have all come down, the reality kicks in and I know that I am counting the cost of Christmas, but where do you start?

We all have to take a look at what we have spent and what is left but perhaps it is also a time to take a look at if we are getting all the benefits that we are entitled to.  There are so many pensioners who are not receiving all the financial help they should have and now, as we start to work out how to recover from the results of our Christmas spending habits, this might just be the time when a few extra pennies might come in handy. 

I took an online look at this and found a few websites which could help readers to check if there are any benefits that they might be missing out on.  It may well be that there aren’t, but things change from year to year and doing a check could well show something you might have missed, so I have asked LPG to put the links below just in case they make a bit of difference…

 EC, Forest Hill

EC suggests a look at the following links…

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