Budget: 'I can't afford to leave home on £1,500 a month' and other claims.

[dessertz]

The BBC are focussing on a few brave volunteers to see how they will be impacted by the budget. Today's headline focuses on a 23 year old apprentice who is hoping for a rise in pay so he can leave home:
BBC News - Budget 2024: 'I can't afford to leave home on £1,500 a month' - BBC News
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cwyv8y68e25o. Surely £1500 would be enough to afford a flatshare in Newbury? I mean, it might not stretch to a batchelor pad, but a flatshare should be affordable. It's more than most students live on at the same age. He is being paid reasonably for an entry-level job, and his pay will presumably go up when he qualifies.

The other one I didn't understand (in the same article) is the single mum earning £150k who thinks she is being punished for having children because she's earning too much to qualify for child benefit. 🤔

Hopefully the beeb just took their comments out of context. 🤷‍♀️

Hmm. Quick search on rightmove shows most rooms in flatshare are about 750pcm. 1500 after tax is 1334 per month assuming auto-enrolment pension. So that would leave 584 per month to cover bills, food, travel, all sundry expenses (clothes, shoes, socialising) and any savings/pension top up. I'd say that is very tight.

I looked on spare room and saw prices range from around £400 - £900 pcm. Some with bills included. He could easily afford to move out.

Cheapest I can see on gumtree is £650, an HMO and grim looking. You'd also still need to pay towards utilities etc. It would be a real struggle and you could never fund a car, which at some point an apprentice in Newbury might need.

I read the article too and thought they had picked their people very carefully.
Someone on an apprenticeship, a pensioner who still has a mortgage, a student single mother, a person with disabilities with huge rent, mostly single people (of course much harder). I guess these are real people living real lives and some people's circumstances ARE very hard, but I think I would expect pennies to be really tight when still an apprentice or as a student and paying your mortgage off before retirement has to be a goal for everyone.

No it wouldn’t. I don’t think you have any idea, respectfully. Times have changed

Its doable. I live near Newbury, income is about £1800 and that's for 3 of us.
DS1 pays his own phone bill.

It's tight and we don't have many luxuries, but it's doable.

Having said that my rent is very cheap.

£900 pcm rent, even with bills, travel, etc I’d say it’s tight and leaves no option to save, because the majority of his wage would go in rent with nothing to show for it, I can understand not wanting to move out unless he absolutely had to.

There's one listed on that link for £390 pcm inc bills. So yes, he could afford to move out.

I thought it was odd it never mentioned how long the pensioner had left on the mortgage, I didn’t think mortgage companies generally gave mortgage terms going into retirement?

Rent is ridiculous in that area. My friend works and gets UC as she's a single mum of 2 children, and ended up homeless as there was nowhere she could afford to rent

Young people have no chance of getting on in life if they can't save from an early age, as they won't have the 'safety net' of a decent state pension (not that any of us do!). And they won't have a chance of buying a property without a substantial deposit. So it's much more fiscally responsible to stay with parents, save for deposit and pay into a pension, than to move out and spend every penny on living expenses. He can't afford to move out on that wage if he doesn't want to love hand-to-mouth for years. It's not unreasonable for people to aspire to more.

He obviously wouldn't choose something that expensive. There's a double room with bills included for £635 pcm for example.

He's only on apprenticeship wages, so once he's qualified he'll be earning more. If he doesn't want to leave home, that's up to him, but it's not true he can't afford to.

Oh, have they taken the article down? I read it earlier but the link isn’t working anymore.

That one is mon-fri rent only, for a 'mature lodger'. So the young apprentice would not be considered.

He wouldn’t be able to afford to pay that and save enough to have a decent deposit to buy, it makes no financial sense to move out and be in that position if he doesn’t need to.

I can still see it on the BBC website. I copied the link from there. Not sure why it's not working when you click on it, but it works for me if I copy and paste it into an incognito browser.

May be a cookie issue.

With people on benefits able to earn around £30k a year and minimum wage going up it’ll soon all be ok. Dossing is the new way to live under Labour.

I lived like that for a long time when I left home. Earned very little, after every bill was paid, every spare penny went on going out as cheaply as possible. Had very, very little for clothes of luxuries or much of anything. I lived like that for a long time until slowly I worked my way up and began to earn a lot more. I used to think about people who stayed living at home and wished I had the same, so I get it, the not feeling like you can move out because why would you, if that’s what it’s like?

But it is completely doable, and lots of people do and have to, and I do think there’s a nuance here of it not being that a lot of these people literally could not afford to move out, but more of expectations of living standard. Which is fine, I get it - it was miserable at times! - but lots of people don’t have the option of staying at home and manage.

The article isn't about him saving up to buy a house. It's about whether or not he can afford to leave home. He can afford to leave home.

I suppose technically he can afford to in the sense that he could spend every single penny he earned on living expenses and not get into crippling debt (assuming he never ever had any unexpected bills such as needing a root canal, or his laptop he uses for studying breaking, and never went on holiday, and never socialised). But living hand to mouth with no safety net isn't something anyone should do if they have a choice to do otherwise, is it? And it's definitely not a state that we should teach young people to expect as 'normal'.

The lady on £150k with two children is not eligible for:

• free hours (£4k)
• tax-free childcare (15 per child at the moment, so let’s say £9,600 a year)

So that £13,600 in benefits lost (not including childcare benefit, that would be another £2k).

Due to her income level, she needs to earn £26,000 JUST to recoup the value of the lost childcare support.

To pay £2,600 pcm in childcare she will need to earn ~£60,000.

I would put money on her being paid to some extent in bonuses - I know a lot of people who have a higher overall salary due to possible bonuses, but month-to-month are paying a very sizeable % of income on childcare with no government childcare support.

Who the fuck wants to work a full time job only to be able to live and make do like a student!

depending on the apprenticeship there’s no guarantee his wage will significantly increase at the end.

What year did you do that in?

@JustAnotherPoster00 they are referring to the lady in the article