A TikToker is going viral for living on an extreme budget, showing in her popular videos how she’s able to make three meals for just $1 a day.
TikTok is a hive for viral content of all types. Whether you’re into beauty hacks, tasty recipes, or even extreme challenges, the popular social platform has something for everyone.
That being said, some of the more unique videos that get uploaded to the site deal with living on a harsh budget; just take TikToker Axel Webber, who accrued an enormous fanbase in a matter of weeks for showing how he lived on an extreme budget in New York City.
Another TikToker is rising in the ranks in this particular vein, and she goes by the handle ‘everylittlepenny,’ because, for her content, every penny does, indeed, count.
The 26-year-old creator (real name Kathryn) shows her viewers how they can save money on a shoestring budget for necessities like food, bills, and more.
To start, Kathryn — who hails from Manchester, UK — wanted to try her hand at seeing if she could survive a day on just £1 (around $1.13 for her US viewers).
Although she’s done versions of this particular experiment at UK-based chains like Tescoe’s, she’s also done her shopping at Aldi, a popular grocery chain that’s also local to the States.
“With the current cost of living crisis and the constant rising inflation, a lot of people are having to cut back just to get by,” Kathryn said in a statement to NeedtoKnowOnline. “For a lot of people it doesn’t matter how much they budget; the real issue is that the average cost of living is consistently rising but salaries aren’t at the same rate.”
Kathryn’s $1 a day challenge saw her try to make an entire day’s worth of meals on just $1. To start, she ate a breakfast of canned peaches (34p / 38 cents), chicken soup for lunch (24p / 27 cents), and a dinner of a jacket potato (19p / 21 cents) and spaghetti hoops (16p / 18 cents).
She says it was “extremely difficult to make meals with such a small budget, and I had to eat the same thing every day which got incredibly boring.”
“I’m not eating enough. I’m not getting any nutritional value,” she added in one of her videos.
Although Kathryn’s eye-opening content can be helpful, some commenters are pointing out the “sad” reality of needing to live on such an extreme budget in exchange for lack of nutrition.
Kathryn’s viral budgeting videos follow another budgeting boom on TikTok where users claimed to save thousands by ‘cash stuffing.’