Rising costs and young adult life: The hidden toll on mental health, friendships, and future plans

This blog is part of a series written by Becky, junior designer at Rethink Mental Illness, called ‘5 things damaging young adults’ mental health that aren’t social media’  

Rising living costs probably cause me the most distress with my mental health.

I am not from London. I moved there because there’s not many job opportunities (not like there’s many up here either to be fair) where I am from in the very south of Devon.

To see my family, I have to spend £80.00 and that is with a rail card that I have paid for. If I didn’t have a rail card, it would cost me around £115 to see them. On my current wage, with my current rent, this makes it almost impossible to see them regularly.

I am also very lucky to be friends with my landlord’s son, so they are incredibly good to us. They haven’t upped our rent in three years even though they absolutely could have like the thousands of landlords across the country. If they did up our rent to current market value, we wouldn’t be able to afford to live here. Full stop.

My partner and I would probably have to move back to our individual family homes - which would have a huge impact on both my work and social lives - or we would have to move into a shared house.

I lived in a shared house at university for three years, and then another in Tooting when I first moved to London for about a year, so I have done my fair share of that, and moving into a shared house as a couple again would not be an enjoyable experience.

The quality of these affordable shared houses is not great either. My house in Tooting was covered in mold, paint peeling everywhere, overrun by foxes and rats, and we couldn’t get a hold of the landlord. He didn’t care, but we were lucky to have a place to live at all.

Every time we do the weekly food shop, I'm shocked at the cost. We shop as cheaply as possible at Aldi and still it costs us a fortune every week.

Commuting costs have also increased dramatically. I get London Weighting in my job, a salary allowance paid by employers to staff working in London to cover the city's higher cost of living, but travel has increased so much that even the London Weighting struggles to help me get to the office twice a week.

The charity sector is struggling right now as donations are dropping in the financial climate, and the increase in National Insurance in 2025 has led to many redundancies across the industry. But I know many people in junior roles in other sectors who are also struggling to make ends meet.

It costs me a lot to see my friends too. There’s not a lot of things you can do nowadays that cost absolutely zero money. We tend to go for a walk over the weekend, which we can obviously do for free, but other than that we struggle to find things to do that don’t either involve money for a commute or for the activity itself.