What's the most privileged/off the mark post/response you've read?

[waywardways]

I've name changed for this, just in case anyone does an AS and accuses me of getting DM fodder.

Me and the DC had to flee our home several years ago and we were moved into a tiny 2 bed flat temporarily. I made a thread at the time, saying me and 3dc had had a traumatic move and were very overcrowded and asked for advice on how to store our daily stuff in an efficient way.
Several posters replied helpfully, linking shelving units/freestanding storage, but one poster replied along the lines of:

"Your DH must be high up in the army and you have to rough it in officers housing until your 5 bed detached home is ready".

Another poster quoted the above with "This was my immediate thought too! It's so hard OP, but we've all been there".

I found this both amusing and perplexing because a) I would never have assumed the above and b) it was so far off the mark.

There was another thread very recently about food guidelines where the lack of awareness and privilege was quite frightening!

I’m a sahm and you all know how badly that goes down on here. As it turns out one of my DC does have additional needs and it’s the best thing for my family. On one particularly memorable (to me)post where sahms were being discussed one poster said that if herself or her friends met a sahm they would be unable to have a conversation with her as they wouldn’t have anything in common and what conversation could they possibly have with a woman with no career. And I agree with the previous poster who says that in reality these type of comments just make them look a bit thick and people to be pitied rather than anything else.

Your understanding is correct, but only for the moveable estate. The children can claim a percentage of one third. Most don't, to be fair, but they can. There are very specific rules.

When I married, I was on the point of changing my bank account to a joint account. My bank manager was a woman. She asked whether it was my first or second marriage.

I explained that it was my first; husband's second. She enquired about children. As soon as I told her that my husband had two adult children, she told me not to change my account. If it had been in joint names, his kids would have been entitled to a percentage of it upon my husband's death.

My DD 28 who lives in a one bedroom flat in a posh part of London with her city boy partner can not understand why I don’t have a cleaner! After all she has one!

Well exactly. Which is why it’s an ‘off the mark’ comment.

Haha yes very true! And if I did have a garage, I’m sure it would be full to the brim with crap!

You can put anything you like in your will, but it makes no difference to a child's legal rights.

My husband left everything to me, but his children were still legally entitled to one third of his moveable estate. (He also gave me some verbal instructions which I followed: for example, he told me what to give his grandchild.)

The procedure is that after the death the children have to be asked whether they want to claim their legal rights. There's a form letter that solicitors use. Where it's a married couple who have stayed together and who jointly have children, most children decline.

In my case, I asked the solicitor to send the kids their cheques with an accompanying letter.

His children cannot claim from my estate when I die, since they were adults when I married and were never adopted by me.

https://www.harpermacleod.co.uk/insights/legal-rights-in-scotland-what-are-they/

Gah! I’m answering the OP question.
’what is the most off the mark comment you’ve seen on here?’
my example of a comment I’ve seen on here …was ‘£400 is NOT an expensive watch.’
It was a thread on here a while ago where someone said her partner was wearing an expensive £400 watch and there was a pile on about how £400 was NOT an expensive watch.

Because you typed it without context or putting quotation marks around it, people are thinking that it's your own opinion, rather than something you'd seen and disagree with.

Apologies, I didn't realise that wasn't your own response, without any quote marks or context of 'X said this'.

I suppose, also, amongst the Rolex crowd, they would see a £400 as truly cheap for a watch.

Fml.

There have been several people on this thread who have gone on to prove themselves as exactly the kind of people whom the thread is about. None of us are inside your head to know that you're quoting others and are not one of those people, hence the very easy confusion.

Where did 'despise' come from? And do you realise that no matter how many sacrifices some people make, they could never afford to send their children to a private school? You are demonstrating why this thread is here!

Oooh let me see:

Being able to afford lessons.
Being able to afford a provisional licence.
Being able to afford a car and all its associated costs.
Being physically able/medically sound to drive a car.

For the first ten years of my adulthood, the first three applied and are now moot points as the last one applies.

Of course one has to put in some effort, but for some people it wouldn't matter how much effort they put in, they couldn't overcome those problems.

Agree, and it's not even just the lack of financial awareness that annoys me but the sense of moral superiority and thinly veiled snobbery that often accompanies such comments. The message is that if you cared as much about your child as we do about ours, you'd do the same thing. If you were as enlightened as us you'd know better than to be spending your money on gel nails and all inclusive holidays when you could be investing in your children's education.
There's so often that inference that you're selfish if you're not following suit. The imaginary outgoings that could be sacrificed to provide private education if you were a good parent always seem to be luxuries that the original poster disapproves of. The picture painted is often binary - there are humble, self sacrificing private school parents in battered old cars and threadbare clothes or selfish spendthrifts in leased Porsches who visit Dubai three times a year whilst their children languish in state schools in special measures.
I am sure that both those stereotypes do exist but reality is a lot more nuanced. Plenty of parents care very much about their children and their education but they have to prioritise putting food on the table and paying the rent. And plenty of people who possibly could afford private school have made an informed decision not to do so, because in their circumstances they have decided it's not the best option for their child. They aren't necessarily throwing money away on fripperies - other ways of investing in your children are available.
I'm not anti private education. If people have the money and think private school is the best use of it then that's their business. But that does not automatically make them better parents than people who cannot or choose not to do the same thing.It's that attitude which angers me. (And yes, I know, not all private school parents, but I've met more than a handful!)

I stopped making donations to the Red Cross because of something similar. I used to donate in response to appeals but was always clear I couldn't give every month. They used to ring regularly to try to get me to give "even £5 a month can make a difference", even after I asked them not to. I said I couldn't sign up to even that, and they kept going on until I pointed out that I'd had to delay putting petrol in my car until I was paid that month and I didn't think banks would let you set up regular payments when you were in your overdraft.

I'll give to the Red Cross bucket shakers, but I won't fall into the trap of giving contact details again.

When I was still working, a chugger for Save the Children just would not let me go...

I was having a rare day out in Edinburgh, just wandering about the Old Town and was pounced on near Greyfriar's Bobby.

I explained that I was already giving as much as I could afford to various charities - I would be happy to give them a one-off donation, but I couldn't sign up for another direct debit.

In seeming outrage, he called after me "But it's for the CHILDREN!" as if that would shame me into changing my mind.

I just shouted back: "I don't CARE! I'm a SCHOOLTEACHER!"

I've already cancelled some of my direct debits and have reduced others. I'll be cutting some more this month. I figure that I've given enough over the years.

yes, it does , just like when thy close NHS services like breastfeeding support groups... doesn't mean its a good idea.

Through the closure of these schools because of short sighted policies, lots of people have lost their jobs and lots of kids have had their education interrupted. A school just oden the road has closed, - kids are having to move schools in middle of GCSEs, staff all lost their jobs, some their homes.

We've had 4 kids with high SEN needs move to our primary school, just in our year group - who now have to recruit and find magic funding for the extra 1 to1 TAs - that money is being taken away from other things and they kids are not getting in the support they really need - and now us state school parents are being asked for more and more donations...

Love that! 'I AM A SCHOOL TEACHER'!!

I was at a fete with DS1 and we voluntarily went up to a Cats protection stand because I had just won a tenner that morning on a scratch card and we wanted to give it to them. It was not possible to just donate that tenner. She was not allowed to take money. i had to sign up to a direct debit right there and then and commit to a monthly contribution. I said that i simply did not want to do that and her suggestion was that I sign up for the first month then cancel it. I didn't really want to do that either. I just wanted to hand over my tenner.

It went into the bucket of someone collecting for the local hospice instead so that was fine, but I am sure i am not the only one that day who just wanted to sling some money there and then.

Yes. That's my attitude - I'll happily drop money in a bucket, but I refuse to fall for the 'You can cancel!' line.

Poster recently asking for advice on getting her child with autism some help at school. Child was moving to secondary soon and his mum was worried about how overwhelmed he’d be. Anyone who’d read the post would have grasped that this was a single parent family on a low income.

One suggestion was “just go private the classes are so much smaller”.

Since when did driving a car be a "privilege?

Since cars cost money? Since fuel costs money? Since driving lessons cost money? Since plenty of people have health conditions which mean they can't / aren't allowed to drive?

A quarter of UK households have no access to any kind of vehicle.

Yes and it's also becoming the norm for posters to suggest home education as the answer to everything. Home education is, I'm sure, brilliant for a lot of children but requires a high level of time, skill and money that a lot of parents are not in a privileged situation to give.

Private school fees are a huge expense and out of reach for the majority- I think we all understand this, and if course it woud be ridiculous and offensive to respond to other people's concerns about state school or SEN provision with a breezy 'just go private'. But I don't understand why anyone is affronted by private school parents sharing concerns about the huge impact of VAT on their family finances with other private school parents. Threads that were explicitly about VAT and how to manage its impact, and thoughts about which schools were likely to survive, worrying about their SEN children moving into mainstream provision they couldn't cope with, how much VAT different schools were passing on etc were regularly taken over by jeering, gleeful, spiteful comments. We've had it on this thread- 'whingeing ' and 'whining' which seems to be what happens when someone you perceive as more privileged is unhappy about something.

I've lost count of the number of times I've seen this- you shouldn't have chosen such an expensive school, you should have planned better, you shouldn't have bought a house in your part of the country, you should move to a different area, you should stop eating avocado, now you can join the plebs, 'our' kids are looking forward to your precious kids arriving in our school, time to pay up etc etc etc. All of these were said to me on MN.

After 25 years in the military, moving house every 14 months on average, and using boarding school to reduce the disruption to education; finally retired from the army with 3 years left of school and enough saved up to cover the fees so they could stay at the school they were settled in. VAT has cost us an additional £40k per year that we didn't have saved and that has caused stress and turmoil. That's part fee increase and part loss of bursary, for two DC. Is it unacceptable to vent my stress to other parents on a boarding school board, and on a thread about VAT? Why does anyone else care? People who are never going to use private schools don't need to engage- nobody is asking them to commiserate. Why is this whingeing?
If it cheers people up, I'm now quite a bit less privileged than I was, and although I couldn't afford to buy a home in an area with great state schools, if I cut my DC off at 18 I may be able to afford avocado again by the time I'm 80.

@SelbourneIdentity You’re paying £200,000 a year in school fees???

Oh for fucks sake, go and start your own thread if you want to whine about private school VAT.