Why does life seem so unaffordable?

Lol I thought the same no mortgage or rent either.
Feel your pain @NotEnjoyingThis my ex was self employed drove me nuts as knew he earned more!

@FedUpOfItA OP is struggling to pay her bills. Not sure you are in the same category!

So true. My income is relatively good when I include child maintenance, at around £3,500. I don't have a mortgage so in theory have quite a lot but with bills and stuff for children comes to around £1,000 / month.

OP I feel you. I've had a promotion which should be amazing but given the amount I lose in UC makes it barely anything but a massive uplift in responsibility and work.
4 new tyres and a overnight trip with the teens has destroyed my budget this month.
Added to the general cost increase, I'm not managing to put anything away although I was previously.

Its worth having a look at moneysavingexpert.com and going through every inch of your finances to make sure you have cut expenses as much as possible. Start with the money makeover

Ah I’ve had months where everything has broken down and it means I have to dip into reserves to pay for items that I hadn’t budgeted for. It does feel like everything is so much more expensive and I have less income left after paying for the essentials. Everything else goes towards food and extracurricular activities.

Im also a lone parent and I’m constantly thinking about how to bring in extra income.

Totally agree- sorry had written my post above before I saw yours ! it is bloody rife. Like you say we'd all be rich if we didn't pay a large chunk of our wages in tax.

Most of them are getting rich by working cash in hand. Was at an old fellas house yesterday helping him complete a form and a guy was hanging a door for him and offering it at a cheaper price if he paid in cash.

If you live in a HA property then check whether your HA has a fund to help with white goods. I recently worked for a large HA and they were giving out new fridges/ cookers all over the place.

That sounds really stressful ☹️

The other day one of the blades fell off the fan in our kitchen. No reason, just snapped and fell nearly on my head... now it looks like a boomerang. Still working, for now...

I learned a lot about fixing toilets in the last year. Some of my self fixed toilets even work now! And I wired up a replacement garbage disposer myself (we are in America, all sinks seem to have them) and it has not (yet) electrocuted anyone.

@HerMammy I may have felt differently except over the years and having to deal with lots of tradesmen ( I say men because they all have been) it's made me exceptionally cynical that they are all hard working, honest chappies. 'Yes have you cash love?' We all know why they want paying in cash. If I didn't pay tax I would be £750 a month better off! Guess what the price of an Audi on lease.

Next door are getting a house extension so have lots of different workmen. They all drive Audis, bmw, you name it.
Do you think tradesmen should be doffing their cap as they alight from their 30 yr old banger and be grateful you've threw them some work??

@Lou670 thank you, I actually think I have seen you supporting us on other threads at times when the doctor bashing starts! If you’re the mother of a nurse then it makes sense that you can see what’s really going on. Unfortunately I don’t think a lot of people who don’t work in the NHS or have relatives that do themselves understand the half of it. And yes, pay has declined generally in the U.K, especially for NHS workers, although it has been particularly bad for doctors specifically, partly because the government is very aware (and so are we) that we would get zero public support or sympathy by complaining about our pay. I am basically paid very similarly now to when I was a junior doctor fresh out of medical school despite having gained a huge amount of experience, qualifications, seniority and extra responsibility over the almost two decades since. And yes what the NHS is expected to cover has ballooned massively.

I do try to ignore the doctor bashing but honestly it has been relentless especially since the start of the pandemic when my work got a billion times more difficult and stressful at the same time anyway (I’m a GP so we come in for a special level of doctor bashing). It’s reached the stage where it’s impossible to avoid these days. I’m really sensitised to it now and the average person probably wouldn’t notice but you can’t pick up a newspaper, watch a current affairs or comedy panel type programme, listen to the radio, browse social media etc. without coming across it. The digs keep coming in the most unexpected places. I remember watching an episode of Would I lie to you? during the pandemic to try and cheer myself up and think about something other than work for a second and one of the panel said something nasty about GPs and I just wanted to punch the TV screen.

@Britneyfan Sorry I didn't mean to offend or upset you. I am the Mum of a nurse and it broke my heart to see her striking, not only for better pay but for better conditions and care of the patients. Her ward is seriously understaffed to the point it is dangerous and patients are not getting the care they should/deserve to have. It is so totally demoralising. My daughter qualified at the start of the pandemic so has just entered her 4th year of nursing. I do not 'doctor bash' and you should ignore those that do. They don't know any better. In real time I think everyone's wage has decreased inline with inflation. It really is a sad state of affairs. When the NHS was founded it was adequate for the average person's lifespan and the population number of the country. Several decades on and people are now living longer due to advancement in medical research and the population is growing and growing. The NHS is no longer able to support the sheer number of people. It has not grown inline to accommodate the increasing number of patients. I have days when I wish my daughter had chosen a different career path as she certainly did not go in to nursing for the salary!

*hard

Stop with the sob stories re. tradesman. We all know there are excellent have working tradespeople and then there are the ones who enjoy ripping off the weak and vulnerable.

@Lou670 NHS wages have always been poor but they have never been this poor. The average doctor’s earnings have declined 30 percent in real time since the crash in 2008. But I agree you can’t compare, that was exactly my point. However there are still a lot of people who are naive enough to believe that doctors wages are good because this used to be true.

And I agree the NHS is way beyond broken. The problem is that it’s being artificially propped up by the little goodwill left in the system, the fact that it’s a monopoly employer and the new “NHS religion”. So it’s not being allowed to “break” properly. As a patient and as a doctor I don’t want to see the health service become totally privatised. I’d rather see it fixed. But that’s not going to happen and so as an exhausted demoralised and broke human being and someone who stands to have much better pay and conditions when that happens (I mean it can hardly be worse!), it can’t come soon enough for me.

And yes there is nothing that the average person can do about it except for not voting the Tories in again (although I’m very disappointed in how Labour are talking about the NHS and they aren’t exactly holding out any beacon of hope), not being abusive to their exhausted doctors trying their level best to help them in a totally thankless job, and generally recognising that doctors are poorly paid and we are not “greedy” when we demand better pay and conditions by striking etc. So actually there is quite a bit the average person can do. Just not joining in with doctor bashing would be a start (not saying this applies to you personally, just saying in general this would massively help the morale of myself and nearly every doctor I know, it’s dragging us under). I can only tolerate mumsnet in small doses these days because of the sheer volume of it.

Single mum here too. Prices are stupid. Just bought 3 hot chocs for £12 quid. What a rip off.

Have you calculated whether your self employment is really bringing in as much as nmw?

A huge proportion of self employed people would actually be better off employed on nmw but also receiving:

• min 4 weeks paid holiday: value £1,662
• at least 3% pension contributions: value £650 a year
• sick pay, often other benefits etc

Lots of self employed people will say "oh i brought in £20k worth of invoices last year but aren't accounting for loads of the costs they incur like fuel, transport, equipment or tools, an odd customer who doesn't pay etc.

@Britneyfan But that is nothing new is it? NHS wages have always been poor and can't be compared at all to what people charge in a totally different field.

No we are not naive enough to think that all doctors are highly paid. We know they are very poorly paid, we also know there is very little we can do about it. The NHS is not breaking, that ship sailed a long time ago, it is broken.

@pompomdaisy totally agree (I am a doctor) but the thing that’s wrong here is how low doctors pay is not how high plumbers pay is. The NHS is a monopoly employer and has been artificially depressing doctors wages for years whereas plumbers are able to charge the market value for their services. And it gets away with it because everyone always thinks doctors are rolling in it. Which we are not at all.

In fact I came here to empathise with OP, I am also a single parent and life is just becoming completely unaffordable. I think most people are struggling with this cost of living crisis but I do think single parent families are being hit particularly hard and there is no specific support out there for us.

@pompomdaisy Yes it is wrong but there is nothing I or you can do to change that fact, therefore I don't sweat it! I only worry about things within my control, not out of my control.