The Cost of Living Crisis Resilience Plan: 10 Things to Do This Year

The cost of living crisis, depending on when you are reading this, is either something that happened a few years ago or something that is still happening. Either way, the underlying dynamic has not changed: energy prices, food prices, and interest rates are structurally higher than they were five years ago, and the gap between income and essential costs has become uncomfortably narrow for a significant proportion of UK and US households.

This guide is not about budgeting apps or switching energy suppliers. There are a hundred guides about those things. This is about structural changes — things you do once, or once a year, that reduce your ongoing exposure to price rises, supply disruptions, and service failures.

Ten things, in roughly increasing order of effort.

1. Build a Three-Month Food Pantry

The most immediately useful action on this list. A three-month food pantry reduces your exposure to food price inflation (you bought the expensive things before the price went up), protects you against supply disruptions (you are not dependent on this week's supermarket delivery), and reduces the number of urgent food purchases you make at inconvenient times.

It is not a survivalist stash. It is the food your family normally eats, bought with a three-month buffer instead of a week-by-week buffer.

The key insight: food prices have increased 15-25% cumulatively in the UK between 2021 and 2025. Buying staples — rice, pasta, tinned tomatoes, lentils, cooking oil — three months before you need them means you bought them at the previous price. The pantry earns its keep.

For the full method: How to Build a 3-Month Food Pantry

2. Start Growing Some of Your Own Food

We grew about 40% of the vegetables my family ate from May to October last year. Not from a large plot — from roughly 30 square metres of kitchen garden. The cost of seeds was around £25. The savings in vegetable shopping were probably £300-400 over the season.

The vegetables that offer the best return on effort: courgettes, tomatoes, salad leaves, runner beans, French beans, and herbs (particularly basil, which is absurdly expensive from supermarkets relative to how easy it grows).

The vegetables that are not worth growing unless you have plenty of space: potatoes, brassicas (heavy slug pressure), onions (cheap to buy, slow to grow).

You do not need an allotment. A few large containers on a south-facing patio will produce meaningful quantities of tomatoes and herbs. Start small and expand with confidence.

How to Start a Vegetable Garden for Food Security

3. Learn to Preserve the Surplus

The limiting factor in home food production is not growing — it is using what you grow before it goes off. The courgette glut, the tomato surplus, the runner beans that arrive all at once in August: without preservation skills, much of this is wasted.

Dehydrating is the easiest entry point. A basic dehydrator costs £40-60 and can process courgettes, tomatoes, herbs, and mushrooms into shelf-stable products that take up almost no space and last a year. That reduces waste and extends the value of what you grow.

Water bath canning for high-acid produce (tomatoes, jams, pickles) extends the season further. Pressure canning for low-acid vegetables extends it further still.

How to Preserve Vegetables at Home

4. Switch to a Time-of-Use Electricity Tariff

In the UK, Octopus Energy's Agile tariff charges electricity at dynamic prices based on wholesale market rates. This means electricity can be genuinely cheap (or even negative-cost) during overnight off-peak periods, and expensive during evening peak demand.

For households with flexible usage — running dishwasher and washing machine overnight, charging an EV or battery overnight — Agile can reduce electricity bills by 20-40% compared to a standard variable tariff. The app shows prices 24 hours ahead so you can shift usage accordingly.

Octopus also offers the Flux tariff specifically for households with home batteries, allowing you to charge cheaply overnight and export (or use) the stored energy during peak periods. If you get a home battery, Flux or an equivalent tariff makes it significantly more economical.

Even without Octopus specifically: any tariff with time-of-use pricing rewards off-peak usage. Check your provider's offerings.

5. Insulate Properly Before Heating

Heating an uninsulated home is like filling a bath with the plug out. The government's own data shows that 60% of UK homes have poor to very poor insulation. A poorly insulated home costs 2-3 times as much to heat as a well-insulated equivalent.

The priority order for insulation: 1. Loft insulation — by far the highest return on investment. 270mm of mineral wool loft insulation costs £300-500 to install DIY and saves £150-300 per year on heating bills in an average UK home. Payback period: 1-3 years. 2. Cavity wall insulation — if your home has cavity walls (most UK homes built after 1920). Usually costs £500-1,500 depending on property size. Grants available through the Great British Insulation Scheme. 3. Double glazing — significant upfront cost (£5,000-10,000 for a full property) but meaningful reduction in heat loss. 4. Floor insulation — often overlooked, especially in older homes with suspended timber floors.

The Great British Insulation Scheme (UK) and Boiler Upgrade Scheme provide grants for some insulation and heat pump installations. Check gov.uk for current eligibility — the schemes change regularly.

6. Build Emergency Cash Reserves

Three months of essential expenses in an accessible savings account is the financial equivalent of a home resilience kit. It means a car repair, a boiler breakdown, or a period of reduced income does not force you into high-interest debt.

The target: roughly £3,000-5,000 for most UK households (covering rent/mortgage, utilities, food, transport for three months). Build it gradually — £100 per month for three years gets you there without dramatic lifestyle changes.

High-interest savings accounts in the UK are paying 4-5% as of 2025. That is real money on £5,000 (£200-250 per year). Keep this money in an easy-access account, not a fixed-term account — the point is that it is there when you need it.

7. Fix Your Energy Costs Where You Can

Variable energy tariffs expose you to wholesale price volatility. When energy prices spiked in 2022, households on variable tariffs saw bills triple or quadruple. Fixed-rate tariffs insulate you from short-term price movements at the cost of not benefiting from price drops.

The timing of fixing versus variable is genuinely uncertain — predicting energy markets is hard. But having a view is better than having no view. Current guidance from energy analysts (as of early 2026): wholesale gas prices are moderately elevated relative to historical averages, making the case for locking in a short fix (12-24 months) if rates are reasonable.

In the US, switching to a fixed-rate electricity plan where available provides similar protection. Availability varies by state and utility.

8. Maintain Your Key Appliances

A boiler that fails in January is an emergency. A boiler that fails in January and you cannot get an engineer for two weeks is a crisis. Regular servicing reduces both the likelihood of failure and the severity of the consequences when something does go wrong.

The annual service list: - Boiler: annual service is mandatory for most warranty conditions and highly recommended otherwise. Cost: £80-120. Value: early detection of efficiency losses and emerging faults. - Washing machine: descale annually in hard water areas. Clean the filter monthly. - Freezer: defrost if ice buildup exceeds 5mm. Check door seals annually. - Radiators: bleed annually at the start of the heating season.

This is not glamorous. It is the maintenance that prevents a £200 service call from becoming a £2,000 replacement.

9. Reduce Your Single-Supplier Dependencies

Every place in your life where you depend on a single supplier for something essential is a resilience vulnerability. Price rises, service failures, or supplier insolvency all become your problem.

Where multiple suppliers exist: use them. Split your food shopping across two or three retailers — the supermarket for staples, the farm shop or market for fresh produce, an online grocer for specialty items. This is not just price arbitrage; it means one retailer's out-of-stock problem is your inconvenience, not your crisis.

Where monopoly suppliers exist (energy grid, water, internet): build redundancy at the consumption end. Store water. Have backup power. Have a mobile data plan as a backup to fixed broadband.

10. Review Your Insurance Coverage Annually

This is the most boring item on the list and possibly the most practically important. Insurance exists to convert catastrophic one-off costs into manageable regular costs. The problem: many households are underinsured on buildings, contents, and income protection.

The specific risks worth checking: - Buildings insurance: does your sum insured reflect the current rebuild cost of your property? Rebuild costs have risen significantly with construction price inflation. A sum insured set in 2019 may be 30-40% below current rebuild cost. - Contents insurance: does it cover portable electronics, bikes, sports equipment? Many standard policies exclude these or apply low limits. - Income protection: if you could not work for three months, would your emergency fund cover it? Six months? Income protection insurance converts this risk into a manageable premium.

Frequently Asked Questions

Which of these should I do first?

The food pantry and emergency cash fund give you the fastest immediate resilience for the least effort. Start there. Everything else builds on a foundation of having three months of food and money available.

How much will all of this cost?

Level 1 (pantry, basic water storage, some insulation): £500-2,000. The more significant investments (solar, battery, major insulation upgrades) are in the £10,000-25,000 range and are worth treating as long-term investments with real returns, not costs.

Is this worth doing if I am renting?

Yes, with modifications. The food pantry, food preservation, emergency fund, and time-of-use tariff switching all apply regardless of tenure. Structural changes (insulation, solar) are landlord territory, but you can push for improvements if you can show the landlord the return on investment.

Related Guides

Building your food reserve: How to Build a 3-Month Food Pantry Starting the garden: How to Start a Vegetable Garden for Food Security Home resilience framework: Home Resilience Guide: our 4-Pillar Framework

The cost of living crisis, like most structural economic shifts, rewards people who prepare systematically over those who respond reactively. None of these ten things is dramatic. Together, they meaningfully reduce your exposure to events outside your control — which is, in the end, what home resilience is actually about.