‘You work like a dog but each month by the 10th your pay is gone’

What's your money worth? A series from the front line of the cost of living crisis, where people who have been hit hard share their monthly expenses.

Name: Constanza (Coty) Rivera

Age: 23

Occupation: Manicurist

Lives with: Her husband Joel Diaz (24) and their son Julian (5) and a kitten.

Lives in: A rented two-bedroom apartment in Avellaneda, a municipality on the outskirts of the Argentine capital Buenos Aires. Avellaneda is part of the “conurbano” region, known as the most densely populated part of Argentina, and among its poorest. The poverty rate there outstrips the national average, sitting at 42 percent versus the average of 36 percent.

Monthly household income: About 180,000 pesos ($915 at the official rate, which has been used in this article; and $473 at the black market rate - about 380 pesos to the US dollar - which is what most people reference and yields about half the amount as the official rate).

Coty earns about 45,000 pesos ($229) as a manicurist and 22,000 ($112) for working at a government-subsidised cooperative that runs a soup kitchen. Her husband earns about 100,000 pesos ($508) working at a water company delivering jugs of water, and brings in an additional 10,000 pesos ($51) fixing mobile phones on the side.

Total expenses for January: About 200,000 pesos ($1,016). This was higher than usual because of a number of purchases they made last year on a credit card that they are now paying off.

Coty Rivera reaches into a kitchen cupboard, and pulls out a pack of six chocolate biscuits - an afternoon snack for her son Julian. The manicurist's glistening fake nails graze over the packaging as she checks whether the treats have expired.

Not this time.

But in an economy that has been squeezing people at an alarming rate with skyrocketing inflation, Coty and her family are always looking for the margins that help them get to the end of the month.

“These were on sale,” she notes. “We are sacrificing on quality, basically. Now we go for the cookies that are on sale because they expire on a certain day.”

The pack of biscuits cost 85 pesos (about $0.43), one of many expenses in a mental ledger of additions and subtractions that Coty and her husband, Joel Diaz, manage every month.

Coty, who wears winged eyeliner and her shoulder-length dark hair pulled into two small ponytails, heads out of the tidy kitchen to the main living area of the family’s simply decorated home.

She settles into one of their new fuschia-coloured dining chairs, Julian on her lap. Until recently, the family used to eat at a coffee table, but late last year, with Joel’s full-time work allowing him to access a credit card, they bought a new table and the set of fuschia chairs.

The purchase of the prized table represents more stable employment for Joel, but it is also a sizeable debt that has taken the couple’s budget past its limit.

“What we earn isn’t enough,” says Joel, who has just returned home after another gruelling day hauling 20-litre jugs of water into people’s homes. He wears shorts and a blue T-shirt and rests his arms on the back of a chair.

“It makes you feel frustrated, sad. You spend all month working like a dog and … by the 10th of the month your whole salary is gone.”

According to the Argentine government, Coty and her husband earn close to the average earned by working people — around 95,000 pesos ($483) a month for men, and 72,000 pesos ($366) for women at the end of the third quarter in 2022. This is reflective of a gender pay gap seen around the world. According to the United Nations, women earn $0.77 for a job of equal value that pays men $1. Salaries have gone up, but not as much as living costs due to inflation, which hit a whopping 95 percent last year. Things are so bad that the central bank decided in February to issue a larger denomination note — for 2,000 pesos ($10) — because of the dwindling value of the country’s current largest note of 1,000 pesos ($5).

Argentina has chronically high inflation, often in the double digits. But 2022 saw inflation reach a 30-year high. There are a whole host of factors behind the long-term problem, among them a recurring fiscal deficit that the government fills by borrowing or printing more money, a drop in exports, and the plummeting value of the local currency. Argentina’s unstable economy has also spawned a dizzying number of currency exchange rates — as locals try to protect their savings by buying US dollars, the government has imposed currency controls, which, in turn, fuels the black market.

The depreciating peso also means that the price of products that Argentines rely on fluctuates frequently. Wholesalers will even put sales on hold as they figure out what to charge customers to cover their costs.

For Coty and Joel, this has meant having to make tough choices about the food they buy, the toiletries they can afford, and the activities they can enjoy, such as going to restaurants.

The family has trimmed back its beef consumption and is opting for more chicken, which is cheaper. Fresh produce has become another luxury.

Last year, they made the difficult decision to move their son from a private school which cost about 22,000 pesos ($112) a month, to a free, public one. The new school offers less variety of instruction to the students, such as music class or enhanced English instruction. The family plans to sign Julian up for after-school lessons when classes resume in March, at a cost that will be less than going to private school full time.

Some expenses are impossible to reduce. Every month, the family buys four 20-litre bottles of mineral water, because as Coty puts it, “what comes out of the tap is impossible to consume.” Sometimes it looks green, she adds. In the past year, the price has crept up from 2,000 pesos ($10) to 4,000 pesos ($20) in 2023.

They buy cheaper lotions, which cause their skin to break out, while the purchase of a new television set to replace the one that recently broke will have to wait. There is so little financial room to manoeuvre that a couple of extra credit card purchases puts them in the red.

They look to make extra cash wherever possible. Coty saw a spike in manicure and pedicure appointments during the Christmas holidays, and into the southern hemisphere’s warm months, while Joel has been picking up extra shifts by going in two and a half hours earlier, at 7am, and ending at 6pm. When he is not at work, he has started repairing mobile phones for a little more money.

But none of that seems to be enough, and with a week left to go in January, Coty was struggling to fill their refrigerator. The cost of this financial strain goes beyond numbers. Now, a trip to the grocery store is considered an outing for Coty and Joel — precious time together in a day otherwise packed with work and child rearing. On Sundays, they go out as a family to church or a park.

“We are all doing what we can,” she says. “There are days that I [want to] collapse [from exhaustion] - between taking care of [Julian] and all the other things that I have to do. You feel like you want to explode.”

The national government subsidises a number of services, from utilities, to public transit, and offers financial assistance for low-income families. There are also donations through the school system that help with school supplies or clothes. Reviewing a grocery store bill for about 15,000 pesos ($76), Coty notes that a child subsidy from the government shaved almost 4,000 pesos ($20) from her bill.

“The discounts that they give us make a difference,” she says. “But like I tell my husband, they are good to have, but they also disguise a terrible problem in the economy.”

Over the course of a month, from January 1 to January 31, 2023, as part of a collaborative project, Coty and Joel tracked their expenses with reporter Natalie Alcoba.

Here are the expenses that tested their finances the most.

Rent

Coty and her family moved into their spacious apartment in November last year. It is on the second floor of a two-storey house on a residential street with a barber underneath and a vegetable stand nearby. They enter their apartment via the creaky metal gate at the building’s entrance and a concrete staircase.

They previously lived with Coty’s family, but felt they needed their own space. Their initial rent was 22,000 pesos ($112) a month. In January it went up to 25,000 ($127) and in February it was 30,000 ($152). It’s a stressful scenario for Coty and Joel, because as Coty says, “at some point, we’re going to end up paying way more.”

Rent in Argentina is pegged around inflation — which makes for astronomical increases over the course of the year. Rent rises must abide by a government-set calculation. Reports suggest that the annual increase is around 80 percent as of January.

Despite concerns about the safety of the neighbourhood — Coty avoids going out at night because of muggings and robberies — the family hopes to stay in the unit. The rent is much cheaper than other comparable units because the landlord is a friend of her mother. And most importantly, there is space for her son to grow - he has his own room, and a patio on which to play with a small wading pool that they bought him for Christmas. A small room at the front of the apartment functions as a workshop for both Coty and Joel. She paints nails; he repairs mobile phones at a station by the window.

“Finding rent around here is very complicated,” Coty says. She shares how having a home to call their own is important to her after leaving her family home when she was a teenager and being homeless for about a year, couch surfing with Joel as she finished school. “What I want is for my son to have a roof over his head.”

January 2022: 14,000 pesos ($71) if they were renting at the time*
January 2023: 25,000 pesos ($127)

Groceries

Coty and Joel had a system that was working for them. Ever since Joel got a permanent job last year at the mineral water distribution company — along with benefits, expanded health coverage and a regular salary — they were able to buy groceries in bulk at the start of the month. This saved them money and ensured that they had enough to eat, regardless of what other expenses cropped up.

But in January, with multiple purchases to pay off on the credit card, Joel’s salary went to paying off their debt. That left them with Coty’s earnings to cover food and hygiene products - and it meant they had to go back to buying food on a smaller scale, at least once a week.

The federal government has tried to rein in inflation with price control schemes. The latest one, unveiled in November 2022, froze the prices of roughly 2,000 products for four months. But access to those products depends on the grocery store. The price of food still went up almost 5 percent in the month of December alone, although the increases varied wildly, depending on the product. Cookies like the ones Coty fished out of her cupboard for Julian went up 13.8 percent in December; lettuce jumped 130.8 percent; chicken was up 2.5 percent and diapers cost 20 percent more than the previous month, according to the National Institute of Census and Statistics. 

“We gained a lot of weight because we are buying the cheapest food,” explains Coty, with the family eating mostly stews with rice or flour based dishes. “Lettuce and tomatoes are a luxury, we can’t eat it every day.”

January 2022: 35,000 pesos ($178) for a month’s worth of groceries*
January 2023: 69,000 pesos ($351)

Motorcycle

Last year, the family scrimped to make a downpayment on their first vehicle - a motorcycle that made it easier for Joel to get to work, and for the family to get around. But they woke up one December morning to find that it had been stolen from where it had been tied to the gate out front.

“My husband started to cry,” Coty recalls. “We were both really upset, because it was the first time that we had bought something like that, and to this day we still don’t know if the insurance company is going to give us our money back.”

The insurance company says they are waiting to get an update from the police on whether the vehicle was found. In the meantime, they are still on the hook for monthly installments, which amount to 40,000 pesos ($203), plus 4,000 ($20) pesos in insurance. “You can imagine how hard that is,” says Coty. “It’s basically my entire monthly earnings.”

Now the family is back to getting around on foot, or using public transport. Joel takes the bus to work everyday, which costs about 10,000 pesos ($51) a month in fares. “The motorcycle really saved us from a lot of things, and we saved for months to be able to buy it,” says Coty.

January 2022: 135,000 ($686)*
September 2022: 220,000 pesos ($1,118)

Supplies for Coty’s manicure salon

Coty looks proud as she walks into the miniature nail salon in the room at the front of the house that doubles as Joel’s mobile phone repair station. The afternoon light streams through the curtained windows.

They both dream of opening their own storefront with space for them both, but for now, this room will have to do. Coty organises her counter with the tools of her trade; behind her seat is a shelf with a rainbow of nail polish colours.

Her clientele fluctuates depending on the week and the season. Typically, she books 10 to 12 appointments a week. In December and January, that jumped to 16 to 18 clients per week because of Christmas and the seasonal holidays, when people like to spruce up.

But while she earned about 25,000 pesos ($127) more than usual in January, she spent the same amount on supplies — on nail polishes, disinfectants, acrylics and chemicals used to form the pointy fake nails that are in demand now. The cost of the products change with the value of the US dollar, and there isn’t really a way to make her supplies last longer, as she uses specific portions of each compound.

“This last year, we’ve been seeing an increase of about 6,000 pesos ($30) each month in my costs,” she says. Before Coty was due to buy more supplies on February 1 she comments, “It’s almost certain that prices will have gone up again.” She says that her provider has held off on publishing its price list until the volatility around the value of the peso against the dollar stabilises.

January 2022: 12,500 ($64)*
January 2023: 25,000 pesos ($127)

Five quick questions for Coty:

1. What's one thing you had to forgo this month? Cookies. Small treats that I give to my son. He eats alfajores (a common Argentine treat) for about half of the month. I used to be able to buy them by the pack and he could help himself during the day when he needed a snack. He can’t do that anymore. Now I have to improvise for part of the month, making pancakes or some other cake that I will cut up in portions for him.

2. What’s the hardest financial decision you had to make this month? We couldn’t pay off what we owed on our credit card. We could only pay the minimum, which means that we had to add another installment. Now it will take an extra month to pay it off. That’s because grocery prices were higher, and we had more debts.

3. Which is the most worthwhile expense from this month? Furniture. We’re paying 50,000 pesos ($254) a month (on the credit card) for a new table, chairs, a mattress and bed furniture. It’s furniture we didn’t have before. Every time my husband and I sit down to eat, we have so much love for this table. Because you haven’t finished paying it off yet, you don’t want it to get a single scratch, but you also want to enjoy it.

4. When finances get tough - what advice do you have and what gets you through the difficult times? There are a lot of people who might have a lot of pride, and say I know how to do this one thing, and that’s what I’m going to do. But if you have children, you can’t wait for work. That’s something I learned from my husband, who went from being a cab driver, to doing delivery for an online marketplace. Sometimes pride, or that old way of thinking, doesn’t let you see that we’re not in a position to choose what we want to work as - we just grab what we can.

5. What’s your biggest money worry? Our house. I’m always worried about what we’re going to do the day the owner decides she wants to evict us. How am I going to find a new place to rent, considering most places require that you pay three months up front? I hope that my son is able to grow up well for as long as possible.

*Last year’s prices were either sourced from Coty or are estimates calculated using data from Argentina’s National Institute of Statistics and Census. 

Read more stories from the series: What's your money worth?