AIBU to be angry about the benefits system

there are thousands of people out there who are more than diligent in how they handled themselves in education, and later in the workplace, who will struggle to buy a house. This is particularly the case in the southern half of the country. Yet we still need people to do minimum wage jobs and the professional but increasingly poorly paid jobs like social work, social care, nursing, other allied health professionals and teachers. Why are you looking down on us?

Under that premise people will not strive to better themselves or study complicated subjects like medicine or engineering, what's the point of they will end up with the same lifestyle than someone that did not put much effort in? For example the current system benefits people that pay rent, over people that might have been more diligent and make sacrifices to buy a property, why should that end the case? Again, if you are diligent and save you don't get help, so might as well just piss it all up, because ....the tax payer will bail me out if I come into hard times....

That is not take home pay for minimum wage workers, take home pay is around £1700 maximum and that's not including pension contributions.

That's before tax though, it's not take home pay!

Depressing. I am supposedly in £17.81 and hour (salaried but equivalent to that) and after taxes, insurance,and the minimum pension contribution, I end up with just over 2k a month

What? I am sure you won't get anything towards your mortgage....

I less you pay rent I don't think you are entitled to anything. Husband and I make similar amounts and since making that amount we haven't been entitled to any help at all.

“Bottom line: nobody is going to the Bahamas based on their career as a family carer.”

Or even Brighton.

Aren’t you a delight.

To confirm I said practically minimum wage

Which it really is considering most people on minimum wage do 40 hours (4 x 12 hour with an hour a shift taken off for lunch) as opposed office hours.

I do get your point because I’ve been on MN for a long time and I’ve seen some pretty disgusting things posted by people who genuinely believe what they’re saying.

But my problem with this particular poster was not so much the opinions expressed, because I don’t believe for a second that they believed the crap the were posting and most of the ‘factual’ information regarding benefits was massively incorrect. It was the intention behind the posts - to outrage and to offend, and most of all to get a reaction. They were feeding on it.

I don’t know whether anyone else experienced the same thing, but this poster trawled through every one of my replies calling them out, and gave thanks !! It was at that point I realised they weren’t a genuine poster and reported them. Thankfully MN has now deleted most of the offensive stuff. There are some posters here who have very difficult lives and are struggling within a broken system. I don’t see why they should put up with deliberately ableist, offensive and inflammatory crap just because some moron hasn’t got anything better to do that day.

My ex and I had a joint income of MUCH less than £4K a month… we filled out the benefit calculator and despite it saying we were entitled to financial benefits once we applied we earnt something like £10 too much!…..
So chances are the calculator might be wrong… we were struggling financially and weren’t entitled.

Paid carers don’t come free. Most people have to pay and in most cases it’s a lot more than the weekly carers allowance. Carers come in at the most four times a day and only for short periods of time. What is the disabled person supposed to do for the rest of the time if they can’t be left alone ? Many areas have a shortage of places in residential care homes and social services will ALWAYS default to care in the persons’ own home simply because there are relatives there to look after them. In my own experience l look after my elderly mum - she lives with us. Has vascular dementia and cannot be left alone at any point. Cares come in twice a day to get her up and showered and again to put her to bed. She pays £150 a week and the care amounts to about half an hour a day. The rest of the time I’m left to look after and supervise her. How do you think we should solve this problem given that social services will not fund a place in residential care ? The ignorance you show for the people caught up in a broken care and benefits system is utterly breathtaking. And for your information, benefit claimants in the main are tax payers too, so stop with the sanctimonious shit.

Even if that particular poster is a troll,
doesn’t mean there’s not plenty of people who genuinely believe that family carers aren’t just free-loaders akin to ‘on the ‘sicky dole’’ from years back. Plenty of ignorant posters on MN when a parent of a sen child is asking any financial advice ‘but why don’t you work when they’re at school??’. The level of bare ignorance about being a familial carer goes beyond the openly inflammatory comments from that poster.

Stop being such a dick. Sincerely, a taxpayer with a full time job.

Fantastic, I’d love more of your advice. See, I have 2 disabled children, one of whom is considered severely so. He can’t manage a full day of school, he often has to miss school due to his disability and he cannot go to any childminding services either in or out of school due to to level of care needed. My other child misses a lot of school due to a low immune system. They both also needs nighttime care. So what job do you recommend for me? I can work between 9.30am-2pm and have right to leave at any moment to deal with any instances that come up (averaging once a week per child at the moment), meetings, medical appointments etc? Also work around needing to do the most basic of things that can’t be done when the children are around - for example I can’t go to the supermarket whilst they’re with me, or run the hoover, or go anywhere that isn’t part of their very set routine. Can’t even open the front door to people when they’re home, so have to arrange all that for school hours. But thank goodness you’re here to motivate my lazy backside! I absolutely am ‘hiding behind family disability’, it’s so easily done when living the high life for all this money, and all I have to do is not sleep, still have to be giving full physical care to children that are in school, rarely eat a full meal because I’m meeting the needs of others, have wasted thousands on my education for no reason, have an empty cv and zero gratitude for saving social care a huge amount of money for doing the jobs of several health care professionals for 0.1% of the pay.

Id love to see you have to put your money where your mouth is. Because if all familial carers had to go to work, the tax bill for social care would go to the heavens.

You might want to think about speaking when ignorant. Because you clearly are. Now you can add patronising too.

Carers allowance is meant for the carer. You clearly have no idea how the benefit system works and even less idea of how local authority care services work. If it wasn’t for unpaid carers the care system would be on its knees, so maybe think about that before you talk about those people in such ignorant and insulting terms.

But why? Why is being a paid carer seen as a valid career choice, but doing the same thing for barely any money seen scrounging?

FWIW the only funding my friend could get was for 30 mins twice a day. She needs a hoist to do anything, and can only move her arms from the elbow down. This means if she can't reach something she can't have it. So if the carers put her drink out of reach in the morning she can't have a drink until they come back. Even if her mum hadn't been happy to give up work and live off carers allowance she would have had no choice. At least this way my friend can contact her mum (who lives 5 mins away) when she needs something.

I’m not upset. Challenging your ignorant, abhorrent, patronising posts doesn’t equate to being upset.

I didn't say they don't think the money they get is a pittance. Its a disgrace frankly.