Budget advisers in the Whanganui region say some of their clients have no wriggle room to make a budget work and rising inflation often means choosing to go without necessities.
Annual inflation hit 6.9 per cent for the year to March 31, the largest movement since a 7.6 per cent annual increase in the year to June 1990, StatsNZ said on Thursday.
One of the biggest increases since December was food prices, up 3.1 per cent, with fruit and vegetables up 9.3 per cent.
"It's just nuts, it's just crazy," Whanganui Budget Advisory Service manager Sandy Fage said.
"We see people coming in here saying I cannot run my car five days a week, I'm having to walk my kids to school."
Fage said she was seeing new groups of people cutting back, ones who were just managing before.
"The reality is for some people - [they] were having bread and marge for dinner, now it's just bread."
Marton Budget Advice co-ordinator Christina Marcroft said it was obvious everyone was feeling the pinch from inflation.
"Food is one where it's making a terrible impact," she said. "That's a basic."
Tupoho Iwi and Community Social Services manager Tracey Waitokia said their families were in survival mode.
"They're having to go without what their preference is and having to survive, not live."
That meant skipping some bills, Waitokia said.
"If you have to choose between feeding your baby and paying your power bill... naturally they're going to try and feed their baby."
The service had seen a notable increase in requests for kai support, she said.
"Because they are just trying to maintain the roof over their head and the basic things like power and things like that but then they're left with $12 a week to feed a family."
A lot of clients at the Marton budget service had negative budgets, Marcroft said.
"We're seeing people who... we're struggling to find ways to help them balance their budget.
"We've always had clients that are difficult [but] it's not as much as we're seeing now. Cases are really complex."
Debts were common and, in some cases, totally crippling for some budgets.
The Marton service's senior financial mentor Cherie Duncan said they had a client who was short $500 a week.
"Every week's a crisis."
The person had a low income with multiple part-time jobs and there was not enough money coming in to re-evaluate the budget.
"There's only so much negotiation you can do - clients are working to provide for their family."
The service would make sure clients had all of the money they were entitled to from the Government, but also tried bringing debts into line.
After that, there were not many other options, she said.
Earning more money was difficult because people often worked multiple jobs already or had kids they needed to care for.
Clients already felt they were working as hard as they could but were just "running on the spot", Marcroft said.
Another big increase in costs came down to housing and household utilities, which rose 1.8 per cent since December, influenced by home ownership (up 3.5 per cent) and actual rentals for housing (up 1.1 per cent).
Housing costs were causing all sorts of problems, including the threat of homelessness, Tupoho financial mentor Teresa Pewhairangi said.
"A lot of families are living in crowded situations because they can't afford a rental that's out there.
"So they have to live with families... usually the houses are smaller."
Some of those families faced eviction if they were caught with people living there who were not on the tenancy agreement, she said.
Fage said she was enormously frustrated by constant rent rises over the last two years.
"There's been this steady increase in rents. Nothing changes, it just keeps going up."
Duncan said exorbitant housing costs were directly creating poverty.
While benefit rates and the accommodation supplement had both increased, they had not kept up with increases in rents, Duncan said.
"Housing is usually the biggest expense that people have."
Marcroft said there had been a perfect storm for renters in the area.
A lot of landlords not committed to upgrading their rental property to Healthy Home standards decided it was easier to sell, Marcroft said, reducing the stock available to rent.
"As obviously the house price market went sky high, a lot of landlords were just flicking off their rental properties."
The money stress brought about by inflation mixed with and exacerbated other problems in the home, the budget advisers agreed.
"It's going to affect so many people in so many different ways - not just having money - there's the stress, anxiety, frustration that boils over to things like family violence, people not being able to do their jobs well," Fage said.
"If you're not eating well how are you expected to perform in your job if you're working?"
Duncan said the people coming to the budget service were often at a really low ebb.
"We're seeing people at their last straw and they're about to lose their home or truck or whatever," Duncan said.
Clients who were suicidal and had significant mental health problems were not uncommon and the Marton budget service tried to refer those people to mental health services where needed.
"We often are a link in that chain," Marcroft said.
Clients were deciding to not pay for things like insurance or a warrant of fitness for their car because repairs were too expensive, Fage said.
The cost of using a private car was another big climber in the inflation figures (up 6.6 per cent) and Marcroft said people in and around Marton going to places like Palmerston North or Whanganui for work were struggling to justify the travel.
"We don't have public transport here," she said.
"Two commuter buses but they really just fit in with your 9-5 work so if people are working out of town and different hours, they're very reliant on private cars."
The 6.9 per cent annual increase of inflation followed an annual increase of 5.9 per cent in the December 2021 quarter.
Across the annual period, the most significant contributor increase in the consumer price index was housing and household utilities, which increased 8.6 per cent.
The area within housing and household utilities that contributed the most to this increase was the purchase of housing, up 18 per cent. Actual rentals for housing also contributed to the increase, up 4 per cent.
Transport was the second most significant contributor to annual inflation, up 14 per cent.
The largest driver of this was a 32 per cent increase in petrol price.
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