Every fifth of the month for more than 465 thousand pensioners in FBiH starts the same. Post office, pharmacy, market and shop. And the inevitable surprise due to the new prices.
“When the bills come, I go to pay everything to the end, then we pay for the medicines that need to be paid for, we pick up the prescription ones and that’s it. My wife and I have a fairly good pension, but it’s very expensive, every day more expensive, every time we go to the store, there are new prices, God forbid,” pensioner Božo Vučković told us.
When it comes to new prices, they mostly relate to food, and the basic one at that. So bread is about 2.5 marks, a liter of milk is 3, a liter of oil is about 4.5. There are also drastic differences when it comes to the prices of meat, flour, vegetables and fruit. This is best seen by comparing it with 2021. Back then, you could buy more than 30 kilograms of rice for 100 marks, today it’s 21, for the same money then you could buy almost 7 and a half kilograms of beef from the butcher, today it’s not even 4 kilograms. When it comes to milk, for one hundred marks you would have 71 liters, and today it’s 45. The bags are noticeably lighter whenever they return from shopping, pensioners say.
“It’s difficult only for pensioners, nothing more… This is just a way of life, nothing else. I pay everything in order, when I pay, what you have left to buy to eat and be healthy. If there were no children to help, die, God,” they say.
Although the pensions have been adjusted, so that now the lowest amount is 666 marks, guaranteed 795, and the highest more than 3300 marks, it is still not enough, says Salih Skitlić. Especially when it comes to the lowest incomes.
“I think that the relief is very minimal, as far as those minimum pensions are concerned. People who have a pension of over 1,500, they are fine, but it is very difficult for these little ones… Especially if the health condition is not right, then medicines, these are the basic things that relieve pensioners, but what are we going to do, our social policy is at zero”, he stated.
However, there are also those who are satisfied.
“Even if it is regular, what can I say, the more the economy works, the more pensions can grow”, they say.
And everyone together hopes that there will be no worse days, aware that price increases due to global conflicts would again greatly endanger this category of the population, especially those with minimum incomes, he writes N1 BiH.
