What is your household income, how much is benefits, and how are you coping?

That may Be so - tho as she pays it in one go - it’s still an expense and should be added to the monthly bills

I think she's mistaken - she was very clear it's annual

Yes, I expect the poster meant monthly and typed yearly by mistake.

Even with a single person discount mine is £130/ month

I can’t imagine where it’d be around that for a whole year. Is there no bin collection or street cleaning or lighting?

I’m in shock council tax for the year is £140 where I pay more than that a month

has to be having subsidised by uc/discount surely

You’d have those unable to work due to mental health problems, long term sick, disabled on subsistence level benefits?

The welfare was designed to be contributory. You worked, you paid your NI and for that you got benefits if you lost your job and a pension. But now it’s swung too far the other way. If you’ve never worked and never paid any NICs you still get a pension. If you’ve never worked you still get unemployment benefit. Unemployment benefit is about 11% of pervious salary in the UK. In most European nations it’s 50% or more of the previous salary.

We need to scrap all benefits and reintroduce them as a split benefit. Mere subsistence benefits for those that have never worked or barely worked, and higher benefits for those temporarily unable to work. The work incentive has been eroded in our welfare system and needs to be reintroduced.

The welfare service is for those who need supporting and it’s obvious that more funding not less is needed for social care particularly the elderly, mental health, the disabled and long term sick. The state pension also needs increasing to a level the retired can live on without worrying about not being able to put their heating on.
What services would you cut to reduce the welfare bill?

I agree @SleeplessInWherever - I've just done a bit of googling and am told that wandsworth has the cheapest council tax in the country - and the band A charge is more than £300pm - even allowing for a single person discount that is more than £140 a year....

Before I made the expensive error moving to Cheshire (😂) my council tax was £120pcm, but that was in the North East which is probably one of the cheapest places to live.

Staggered that it can be just more than that a year somewhere else, because I thought the NE was one of the most affordable areas already.

Also feeling hard done by - my monthly bill is more than double @ToffeePennie 's annual one....

Parker "You’d be happy to loose your state pension - it’s a part of the welfare bill." - Yes, if my tax went to a third of what it is now (because the only pension I will have if I live to age 67 will be state pension and as I will work until I die it will then as to about half be taken away from me in income tax anyway. So if my income tax bill reduced by two thirds but I got no £12,500 a year state pension (the figure before tax) I woudl be better off as I am just losing about £6k a year after tax by that and gaining a lot mjore under my scheme of reducing tax by 2./3rds.

where on earth do you live? I can't find anywhere that's that cheap, even at Band A!

EEEEEkkkkk

Feeling hard done by as ours is £246 a month (over 10 months)

Yes. I don’t know what else to tell you. It’s £140, we don’t live in a big house, but it is on a new build estate, so maybe it’s because of the eco friendliness of the buildings or something but we have a very easy price of £140 per year.

So your council tax for the year is £140!?

We don’t have a TV licence, we pay our council tax in one go in April, so I don’t include that in our budget because I basically work extra to pay that in one go so we don’t have to think about it.
We also don’t pay for WiFi, my husband gets it as a “perk” as he works from home it’s classed as a necessity, therefore nothing to pay.
Our gas bill is small as we don’t use the central heating in our house, we have a new build and are sandwiched between two houses, one is an elderly lady who keeps the heat on constantly, which keeps our house base level warm.
Our water bill is partially written off due to my company and the same for electric.
So yeah my bills are about £200 pcm, in April they’re around £340, but we don’t count that as our “regular” expenditure.

You’d be happy to loose your state pension - it’s a part of the welfare bill.

Equal split.

We earn approximately 65k, no benefits, no kids.

Own our house, run two cars and have multiple animals. No issues here.

You can’t afford to get your hair done on £90k a year?

Oh do leave off. 🙄

Some of the bills amounts are amazingly low. My council tax alone is £250. My gas/electric is £130, broadband is £21, phones (X2) are £18. Not sure what the water is it's quarterly but I think about £30 a month.

Oh and I spend about £300 a month on trains to commute!

Id struggle to reduce any of that. My mortgage is stupidly high but that's my own fault obviously. Food is about £600 but I could get that lower if I had to I think.

I count luxuries as anything that’s over food/ heating/ transport/ bills.

That means no Netflix or fast broadband. Phones kept for years until beyond the updates stop. No
hiludays, day trips are too expensive, lunch out too. No coffees out. Yes it’s miserable. But no choice.

What are luxuries? I think social media is just making us look at other people and what they have.

I grew up in a relatively poor household in the 80/90s. Foreign holidays were not a thing and mum was adding up the food shop in her head before getting to the till.

Mass consumerism has meant we now believe we should be driving a new car, have a new iPhone and multiple holidays a year. How did we get here?

I suspect that the split between your salaries might be relevant here - if one is on £40k and one on £160k the marginal rate of tax will be pretty cruel.