Over a million households have trouble making ends meet

Nearly 1.1 million Dutch households struggled to make ends meet last year. A massive 41 percent of the estimated 718 thousand households with an income below the low-income line had to forgo regular expenses, such as heating their home or buying new clothes. The same goes for around 10 percent of households above the low-income line, according to figures released by Statistics Netherlands on Wednesday. Households with a low income regularly deal with financial constraints. In 2014 76 percent of these households indicated that they have insufficient money for one or more common expenditure, ranging from 13 percent who could not heat their homes to 61 percent who could not replace worn-out furniture. Half of these households did not have enough money to buy new clothes on a regular basis and two-thirds could not afford unexpected necessary expenses of 1,000 euros. 31 percent of the 6.4 million households with higher incomes dealt with at least one of these financial constraints.