To think it’s crazy that National Minimum wage is £27k

My main gripe with the level of minimum wage is about other salaries in comparison!

I work in the NHS, am a band 4. MW has risen so much that band 1 has disappeared and band 2 now only has 1 pay point else it would be the same at band 3 (and is actually the same as the bottom of band 3, it's just that 3 can increase). It won't be long before band 2 gets removed too due to being below MW.

So my main issue is that every time MW increases, the differential between it and the other bands reduces, to the point where it's barely worth doing the job with more responsibility as you get less and less reward for taking it on! How long til it catches me up on band 4?

It's my biggest irritation with agenda for change scales and no doubt affects other public sector salaries too. We should all get an equivalent uplift when MW goes up, PLUS whatever raise we were going to get else what's the point in different bands??

This…100 times over!

Obviously there are poor pensioners, but comparatively few.

It should be enough to live on but the issue is the high cost of housing, ridiculous utility bills, council tax and transport costs.

Also the fact that so many big companies (the likes of Amazon, supermarkets, care homes, the leisure/retail/hospitality industries in general) choose to pay their staff minimum wage to increase their profits rather than pay decent wages.

The minimum wage was created to make sure there was a minimum employers were legally forced to pay to avoid exploitation and address poverty, but bosses are using it routinely now as a business decision to save money.

So what's the cost to an employer to employ people?

Thank you for spelling this out. It explains why I've been promoted several times over 13 years and still have exactly the same standard of living. I hadn't realised it was that bad.

Because you also have state pensions and no housing costs. Plus that 500 is skewed dramatically by those who don’t have a ‘regular pension’ and who instead have their funds in a SIPP and draw down as required. There can be 100s of thousands in there not being counted because it’s not taken as monthly income and it brings the average down.

A pensioner household has just 500 less per month than a working household. The working household has to pay to live in the home, mortgages are horrendously high now and not getting any easier to pay. The working household has childcare costs, they have costs of getting to work, second cars are needed. Any activities that are done are paid for 4 people but a pensioner household has to only pay for 1/2.

This will continue to be harder and harder for future generations. And they won’t have great pensions to fall back on.

I think HMRC might be wanting a word with your DH… you’ve as good as admitted tax evasion.

Split the bills with who?! Not everyone has a serious partner.

Thanks to everyone calling out the BS on this but on a serious note HMRC relies too heavily on PAYE earners and so many self employed people are taking the piss to the detriment of the countries finances .

People wanting these things is not the same as needing them. You can have what you can afford. If you can't afford it you can't have it.

I genuinely love how she crushed the unions. Needed to be done.

Absolutely - tax dodger!

Plus new clothes all the time ,nails, eyebrows, eye lashes, hair. We had school uniform and 2 tops/ trousers for the rest of the time. I had school shoes and wellies. That was it. I didn't have fashionable clothes, multiple pairs of shoes. We had a winter coat ( dark green, school approved) and a lighter mac for summer. Everyone did. No one went on foreign holidays. My friends were farmers children so they didn't have holidays as a family at all.When I became an adult in the 1980s eating out was a huge treat. We certainly didn't go out for a meal on a Wednesday night because we were tired and couldn't be bothered.Take aways weren't an every Friday thing. People expect to have so much more stuff now.

That's high. My council tax is just under £1500. £739 for electric/ gas, water is £264 phone is £120.

So total £2623

@intrepidpanda self employed declared income then. No-one works for £50 day. You're absolutely not living on £20k. We won't talk about tax and NI....

But many students do have more disposable income than families with DC.

They only have themselves to feed, clothe and entertain, cheaper, smaller housing, student loans, wages from work and parental subsidy, can add up to a decent amount of spending money.

Sounds like a lot of people don't have a clue about how much wages really are/were.

Factory workers didn't earn £12k in 1980 I know this because when I started work in a factory in 1992, so over a decade later, I earned £6.5k, also when DP and I bought a house in the mid 1990s, we both earned about £8k.

The poster who claims her DH earns under £13k as a tradesman with a total household income of £20k for a decent lifestyle sounds equally clueless. You only need to look at a few bills and prices to know that's clearly bollocks. He's either under declaring his income big time, significantly underpricing, or owns his own limited company and pays himself significant dividends on top.

I work 35 hours per week, £26K before tax. My husband works 37.5 hours and earns £29K before tax. so £55K total income before tax, student loan (don’t get me started on the masters loan threshold…), and pension. So after tax a total of approx £3600

our mortgage is £1,100, which is quite high for our area (midlands). We have two children and another on the way. Our children each have sports and music tuition. Im not especially frugal with groceries - I do make nearly everything from scratch, but I buy lots of organic and local produce. We also pay £500 a month for a bank loan which purchased our two cars, which is a massive luxury and not a sensible financial choice. I’d hardly say we are struggling - far from it!! We have a holiday a year and I’m sensible with things like clothes, which are nearly always second hand. DH and I have very active social lives, but we just choose to do things that are free or cost very little. Our calendars are usually jam packed so we’re not suffering for it.

I agree that people seem to expect that they should be able to spend loads of money on holidays, clothes, and going out in a way that would have seemed absurd to previous generations. We live very well and happily on our salaries, and always have money to put away at the end of each month.

I was only 16/17 so it was probably especially low. I worked in Thornton and made up for my low wage in all the bits of toffee I chomped on!

We have more money coming in now than we ever had but we’ve also never felt so poor.

I had more free money when I was a student and that was only 7 years ago!

Of course he does! 😆 🤣 😂

Yes, indeed as Thatcher has worked her magic by the late 80s

although I was earning more in a bar job in the West Midlands, than you in 1989 at £5 per hour, so you were certainly earning a very meager wage

Goatinthegarden

Absolutely agree, I have the freezer space, the oven, slow cooker, spices, nice kitchen to cook and bake in

where as someone in temporary accommodation has a kettle and a fridge, maybe a microwave

I worked in a factory in the late 80s /early 90s and the women there asked me what I did and I said I was a student they said ‘ good for you. You get an education and get out of jobs like this. We are earning the same as we did ten years ago’.

My first job in mid 80s I was paid 1.44 per hour. Which was fuck all even then. No minimum wage then.

It’s easy to live on nothing when you have everything.

When I was starting out in life and complaining about being skint, my mother would say, ‘look, I’ve made this whole lamb curry from a reduced lamb joint and an onion, I’m so happy and content. I don’t understand why you can’t do the same’.

She had a bookcase full of recipe books, a cupboard full of spices and tinned tomatoes, etc. a suite of Le Cresuet, a beautiful equipped kitchen and no worries about energy bills. She was probably planning a holiday somewhere nice.

I was sat in a draughty, damp flat with cheap clothes, an expensive bus pass, nothing to look forward to and £3.50 to last five days.

I’m now at a much more comfortable stage of life and I don’t ’need’ anything. I have nice clothes and footwear that will last years, my house is up together and is a nice place to exist, full of activities I enjoy doing. My car will last another decade if maintained. I have all the equipment I need for my hobbies. Its quite easy to be content to stay in and make do with a cheap cut of meat and a single onion now too.