A savings card that halved it for a year

What it displaced in my budget was the honest question, and answering it properly took me an evening and was worth doing.

Kate, I have been where you are and I would rather say so than stay quiet.

I paused for two months when things got tight and then restarted, and that is a completely ordinary thing to have done.

My prescriber knew about an option that was cheaper and I had never asked, for a year, out of embarrassment.

What I would say is have the cost conversation. Mine produced two alternatives and neither had been mentioned unprompted.

I read this twice. The second time was for the last paragraph.

Something I got right was deciding in advance what I would do if the cost rose, so that I was not deciding it in a difficult week.

My honest position is that this is expensive and I have chosen it, and I do not need anybody to reassure me about that.

I keep a small buffer specifically for this so that a bad month does not force a decision I would not otherwise make.

I stopped for cost reasons once and I want to say plainly that stopping for money is a legitimate reason and not a failure.

The thing nobody mentions is the ancillary costs, which in my case added up to more over a year than I had allowed for.

My review appointments cost money too, and building those into the annual figure changed my sense of the total considerably.

What helped was somebody here being completely frank about their own numbers, which gave me permission to look properly at mine.