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

Poor @intrepidpanda getting 20 pages of notifications from people who cant read and follow the thread properly

You are correct. We are not living on 20k
Never said I was if you read the posts correctly

Well I'm not the only one who thinks your post is unclear.

What do you mean by 'And get around £20k a year between us as I'm part time atm dh full' if that's not your earnings?

UC on top of pay at NMW? Gifts from relatives?

My parents live in a 5 bedroomed house in outer South London, its not worth anywhere near a million.

When they were first married in the 60s, they lived in a room, by the time they had me in the 70s, they were living in a one bed flat.

So you don't get by on 30k at all! You are subsidised by your MIL and the taxpayer, probably to the tune of another £30K pre tax salary. Also, you don't have to pay for 5 people as the older two are working already so you are actually only supporting 3 full people on this amount.

I do wish people would stop posting totally misleading things as you did.

I take it @MyFairLady27 isn’t coming back to answer - unless it was a typo

also guessing rent is paid via uc

i read a comment yesterday from her about her having twins - so even more amazing they cope on that low salary

def some tax fiddle as @intrepidpanda said

Bringing the NMW up is clearly necessary, because it is still not enough for a good standard of living

Should NMW be aiming for a "good' standard of living? I expect it to be a minimum standard of living, not good.

For a good standard of living, it's necessary to get some higher level skills and experience and, consequently, a wage that is higher than NMW. Isn't that how the world works? Some roles warrant NMW, a business would be foolhardy to pay more.

They have seven young children, in fact.

Wow

i just rem her post on the preg moving thread

And my take home pay for full time work is under £2k a month - not much difference in cash and when you look at the additional costs of fuel to work , prescriptions etc - I can see why people don’t bother working ! It just doesn’t pay - unless you are on a high wage .
when you’re just scraping in above benefit levels - it’s very disheartening.

It would probably be more than enough if people lived the way we did years ago. Nails coffees takeaways etc take a huge chunk of incomes.

Thanks for replying with these additional details. As it seems all this is crucial to why you get by on 30k, yeah I think it would’ve been worth mentioning in the first place.

I’ve said multiple times upthread housing costs are often the main reason why low wages make it so hard to live on so if you’re paying £600 less than the typical rent in your area you’re definitely winning and in a completely different situation than most people.

This is my point when you get folks saying they are okay with low salaries often if you look into it further they have various financial advantages that aren’t the norm.

I can’t remember if I said already but when I moved from a one bed flat with £1200 rent to a 2 bed flat with £650 rent my life totally changed financially !

Same job different area - this is why I will continue to defend remote working!

It all comes down to housing for most people!

I don’t know the answer to it - maybe much more social housing and ending right to buy in England like Scotland have done?

But either way I really hope something can be done to bring rent down. Landlords are being disgustingly greedy now. Not all but many.

I stayed in Brixton for 6 months , my rent for one bedroom in a lovely ex-council house was £800pcm. The whole flat rent was £1400.

The entire 2 bed property was going to be let for just under £2k when my housemate left so I wasn’t able to stay on - as £800 was the max I could pay back then. This was 2012.

I asked the landlords dad why his daughter was raising the rent so much, especially as she had no plans for renovation and the flat had been kept in great condition and was only getting cleaned for the next tenants but no other work was being done.

He basically said that his daughter who now lives in Australia hadn’t been paying much attention while her long term tenant (my flatmate) had been there for years . However now she was moving out, the landlord had did her research and noticed rents on that street had increased sharply over the past few years so she was basically joining in the cash grab.

I know from zoopla that she had bought that house cheaply in the early 2000s and the previous owner had bought for it for even cheaper in the 90s from the council. I can imagine her mortgage payments on it was tiny and she was making a huge profit even without raising prices further.

It’s just shocking that houses built in London designed for social housing were sold for a relatively small amount, then subsequent owners get to make a massive profit of it. Often at the cost of the taxpayer where housing benefit is involved.

Absolute madness! Thanks thatcher!

Jobs don’t seem to be paying much more. The most I’ve ever earned is 29k and I’ve worked for a prestige car brand, as an ambulance call handler, for a security firm, retail etc and I have decent qualifications including a degree
handling 999 calls definitely requires skills yet it’s still band 3
when I was made redundant everything was 27-28k with hours creep like 8.30-5.30 or 9-6

So you work 30hrs/week for 38 weeks of the year?
That’s a lot of hours you could fill to earn more.

No, it’s fraud. Someone’s cooking the books. There is more to it than she’s saying.

try living on the state pension of £12.5k that Andy Burnham thinks is too high.

I dont know anybody who goes away 3 to 4 times per year. We must be in different circles.

I am not sure that's right. Interest rates were sky high in the 1990's with a lot of people ending up in negative equity/loosing their homes. Things improved in the first half of the 2000's with house prices rising before the financial crash caused a new set of problems.

It never occurred to me to treat Amazon Prime the same as I do the other streaming services. I do it mainly for the convenience of being able to buy stuff with free delivery whenever I want. Out of all the streaming services, Prime is the one I watch the least.

If I were to just buy a month now and again, say 2 or 3 times a year, I would save quite a bit both in terms of impluse purchases and the subscription. I am definitely going to do this when my current term is up (I used to pay monthly then upgraded to a year to save a few quid). I think it is up in January, I am going to check that now and note it on my budget spreadsheet.

Thank you.

When did he say that? It’s a new one on me.

This has already been done to death on this thread and others.
The state pension is a safety net benefit. Most pensioners are drawing far more than they ever contributed. It is unfair to keep expecting more from the poorer, younger generations.

Do you live on that? Or do you have other household income and a pension pot?

I’m only in working class circles but the majority of them are pensioners who travel more than this.

My colleagues who are not working class backgrounds cannot afford this at all even though they are in households with two working people

That’s only true of those who were low earners, who tend to die younger than their more highly paid counterparts. There are some interesting facts here. One of them is that self employed people are the biggest net beneficiaries on retirement.

https://www.pensionspolicyinstitute.org.uk/media/1crf4ox5/20230110-nics-and-statepen-post-proof.pdf