If you use budgeting software and truly can’t find any highlighted costs you can actually cut, and despite that can’t afford to save money, then you have my sympathy, that sounds shitty and challenging.
My point is and continues to be if you complain about cost of living but you don’t use freely available budgeting tools, I won’t sympathize with you (yet), because every grown adult should just be doing that. It’s a basic part of life and being an adult that people just don’t bother doing.
Itd be the equivalent of someone complaining their car doesn’t work but then admitting they’ve never checked their oil.
If you talk to any financial advisor, having a budget system is always step 1, so if a person hasnt dine that yet, their complaints just sound like whining to me as the person hasn’t even done the absolute bare minimum step 1 yet to try and address or even understand the problem.
I assume such a person doesn’t want to put any work in to get out of the hole they dug themselves into.
IF they do have a budget and their costs simply are just that bad, and they’ve already cut every single cost they can, then they have my sympathy as that means they actually are trying.
But unfortunately, after working with a LOT of people in various industries who complain about these issues, it has become abundantly clear that most people just want to complain and not actually do anything about it, and just keep wasting money.
I don’t know your situation, but I’ve worked with so many people and so so so few of them even could hold a convo about budgeting, let alone talk about what tool(s) they use and tracking solutions they leverage.
So I now, after many many years of seeing how awful everyone seems to be at budgeting, just assume the average person is completely incompetent when it comes to managing money as the default.
For every 1 person I meet who has preferred budgeting tools, I have met dozens and dozens that couldn’t even explain what a tax bracket actually means or is.
So I just assume the average person is at that level for finances. No hate, it’s just facts that most people just… don’t know or care to know how money works, they have other priorities in life, like family and their jobs and hobbies, /shrug