Social assistance claimant: Anja Krijgsman (58) lives on a benefit of 1,036 euros per month. “I’ll just put on my thermal underwear.”
‘I have a maximum of 60 euros each week to do my shopping. That was always difficult, but since a few weeks I really can’t get out. The cat chunks have become 10 cents more expensive, a carton of skimmed milk now costs 89 cents instead of 59 cents. I can hardly cut back on cat food, which animals have to eat. The only thing I can cut back on is myself. I browse through the brochures of three supermarkets. I often just eat bread with a slice of cheese.
‘Thank God I have a fixed energy contract, which means I pay 125 euros a month – but I’m terrified that I burn more than what I was charged for. That is why my heating has not been higher than 15 degrees this year. If there were visitors, I would put it on 19, but I avoided that a bit. Because who should pay for that? In January the government promised 200 euros for the minimum wages, but I called the municipality and they knew nothing about it.
‘So I just put on my thermal underwear, a shirt and sweater and then I sit on the couch with my sleeping bag. Of course I worry that everything will become more expensive, but when I think about everything that is happening in Ukraine I think: at least I have a roof over my head.’
Self-employed: Coen van der Hoeven (57) is a lighting designer, had a turnover of 70 thousand euros per year. ‘Of course our energy contract just expired this month.’ 
“Obviously, it’s much worse for the people directly affected by this war, but when I first heard about it, I thought, here we go again. I just had to live on social assistance for two years, because my turnover fell by 60 percent during the corona crisis. I had to apply for tax deferral twice. That is a debt of 15 to 20 thousand euros and the new declaration will be submitted at the end of April.
‘The tax authorities say I have five years to pay that back. This means that I will have to do a lot of extra assignments in the next five years, which will be very difficult. I can already notice it in the theater production that I am currently shooting: ticket sales are not going as well as hoped. Because of corona people were even more reluctant to buy tickets and now they are completely thinking: we are going to sit on our wallets; you don’t know how this crisis will turn out.
‘In the meantime, the costs are skyrocketing. I have to drive across the country for work. The costs for this almost double. I can’t just pass that on to the producers I work for, they too have been hit hard by corona. And of course our energy contract expired exactly this month. We are now going from 200 to 390 euros per month.
“Still, I strongly support these sanctions. Frankly, I am amazed that we are only now taking them, when the thousands of people who are now starving in the Greek islands have been rushed through by the same Russians. And if that costs me money, or if I have to hand in that newspaper subscription, that’s something I like to do.’
Above average: Steven Koerts (44), earns 4,000 euros net. ‘Our money for sustainability is spent on energy.’ 
‘I live in an old farm with high heating costs and I had a flexible energy contract. So when gas prices rose at the end of November, I looked into switching to a permanent contract. The monthly amounts were already 600 euros, so I thought: I’ll just wait until the prices fall next year. Thursday I looked again and I almost fell off my chair. The only energy supplier who wanted to offer me a permanent contract at all asked 971 euros per month. Then I pay more for my energy than for my mortgage.
‘At the end of the year I will have to pay a lot more. That’s going to hurt, really hurt. But we can’t complain, we’ll make it. It is more that you are suddenly faced with a choice: which is cheaper, take the car and work at the office or at home? I just set the heater to 18 degrees and hope the sun will shine.
‘What does feel crooked is that we were actually saving to make our house more sustainable; those are huge expenses. So I foresee that in the coming years my savings will not be spent on sustainability, but on the increasing gas bill. I therefore think that the cabinet should stop sticking plasters by means of compensation schemes. Tackle the real problem and help people make their homes more sustainable as quickly as possible.’