MANY people know the pain of having to watch the pennies when their income is slashed.

For some it will mean cutting down on the number of meals out they eat while others will have to ditch foreign holidays or swop their favourite foods for own brands from discount supermarkets.

Pity then new City Treasurer Philip Braat who has the unenviable task of leading the team trying to find how to trim £86million from the City Council's budget for the year from April.

The council blames the Scottish Government for cutting the amount it has to spend, Holyrood lays the blame at the door of Westminster and our MPs blame the credit crunch.

Whoever is responsible for the crisis facing the council, the bottom line is the same and savings must be found.

The situation facing politicians and finance bosses in the City Chambers is nothing new as in recent years they have been forced to deal with annual cuts to their budget.

Since 2009, Glasgow has made cuts and savings costed at a massive £230m.

Over that time, Scotland's 32 councils have been faced with an average cut in their spending of 10.6% but the cut in Glasgow's budget has been 17.5% meaning other parts of the country have not had to deal with such drastic savings as Scotland's largest city.

Councillors have repeatedly said they do not want to harm front line services and have given a commitment to no compulsory redundancies.

Instead they introduced voluntary redundancy and early retirement for staff over 50 resulting in around 3000 employees choosing to leave.

Those schemes will not be on offer offer in the next two financial years but around 1500 staff leave the council each year through natural wastage resulting in thousands more jobs being lost.

In a further bid to help bridge the spending gap, the council has also opted to bring services together and has sold off a number of valuable city centre buildings.

Despite previous endeavours, the city council faces the biggest cut in its budget yet with council leader Frank McAveety describing it as the greatest financial challenge ever to face the local authority.

Few firm details are yet available about how Philip Braat and his team will find the necessary money but they will be looking at changing the way council departments work to see if they can be made more efficient without affecting front line services.

We will have to wait and see if the public will also be hit by the demand to make the books balance.