In recent weeks, calls for help from individuals or professionals who have received their energy bill are linked. Many people are struggling to pay the installments requested by their suppliers.
This is also the case of Elke, from Adegem, in the north of the country. This mother of two children has always been careful with her money, but with our colleagues from the Nieuwsblad, she explains that she is, for the first time, worried about her bills.
Single mother, Elke recognizes that she earns her living well, but with inflation, is “no longer manages to finish the months once in two”. And when she received, in May, a regularization invoice of 670 euros from her supplier, she panicked: “I thought I had had the worst…”, she says. Because after having paid this amount, she saw her deposit bill go from 120 to 225 euros. But it was not over: “To be sure, last week I looked again… and the amount had risen to 435 euros per month”.
For the first time in his life, Elke will therefore really have to deprive himself. But the most difficult thing to live with is that she feels that her children are worried about her: “I try that they don’t worry, but at 41, I would like not to have to call on my mother to help me…”.
Elke therefore calls on the country’s politicians not to “let the middle class down”. “They don’t know what it’s like to live with such stress…”