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AIBU?

Share your dilemmas and get honest opinions from other Mumsnetters.

Original poster

to feel let down by those running/who ran this country?

34 replies

safetalk · 16/10/2010 23:20

OK
I'm going to change some of the details because this is personal so don't pick up if I say he one time then she this is true!

SO far
I have lost my job
dh has lost his job
dsil has lost her job
my best friends husband has lost his job
one of my Mummy friends husbands has lost his
another Mummy friend can't get a new job

we are NHS/small private company/city

out of friends/family lawyers big firm accountants and some architects seem to be doing well/OK I also have a rel. in NHS management and he is fine.

Why I feel let down is that we are supposed to be in our prime earning years and I feel that we will never catch up.

these are the years we should be sending our dcs to private school, padding out our pensions and paying off our mortages and we are all out of work

I hear about CB and uni fees and I think oh no that's going to hammer us, then I think oh well it doesn't matter I'll be on HB etc etc in a little while but it will hammer us eventually we will get jobs might take a few years might not be what we want to do and then we will get screwed, as I pointed out to dh today we have gone from the expectation of a comfortable retirement to one which prob wont be.
We all work hard, none of this was our fault (with the exception of the city boys/girls who will prob get jobs the soonest) yet a number of us face loosing our career which we have worked really really hard for some have built up huge debts studying we have sacrificed time with our children, time doing what we want to study/take postgrad degrees etc etc.
4 people on that list don't own a house/flat unless something changes they prob never will 1 person can't cover their mortgage on the 1 salary they have coming in never mind everything else.

Our parents would never have guessed we would end up like this
what will we say to our children when they tell us they want to be x or y or z?

personally I've had lots of other stuff going on this year (health etc I don't want to go into it all) so I know very well compared to some things that could have happened (or did) loosing your job is kind of OK but we have lost our career our hopes and our expectations sometimes I feel like we've damaged out children's futures too. We've lost our life insurance and our pension too we may even have lost the chance to get a house I panic about the future when I think about it all.
So I've come here (under another name) to see whether you think I'm being unreasonable

OP posts:
Rollmops · 16/10/2010 23:24

Dahlin', you might just have bigger problems than 'loosing' your 'career'... Hmm

stleger · 16/10/2010 23:24

I've been feeling like that for 2 years since the Irish economy collapsed around me. Dh has a job, I have a small bit of work left, just about. We have a lot of multinationals in town who have shed a few staff, if one closes we are screwed locally. YANBU!

virginbolleaux · 16/10/2010 23:29

Safetalk, I have no advice but I have sympathy and anger about your situation.

virginbolleaux · 16/10/2010 23:29

Rollmops, that is SSOOO callous.

Funnys5FootUnderThePatioGarden · 16/10/2010 23:31

no YANBU, the recession is shit. I lost my job - the best part of £55K part time - and suddenly we were down to £33K and couldn't afford to pay the mortgage, or much else come to that. After 2 years, I have another job and the Household income is back up to aprox £90k - which is what we need to live on believe it or not.

BUT the last 2 years were a nightmare.

It's a bit facile to blame it on the government, because it is a global recession. BUT YANBU to feel pissed off

Funnys5FootUnderThePatioGarden · 16/10/2010 23:34

incidentally, I was a solicitor in a Legal 500 firm, so not all lawyers are doing well..............

Original poster
safetalk · 16/10/2010 23:42

rollmops I'm going to ignore your comment I said there had been a lot of other s^%t and health problems going on too that's not what this thread is about.
It's not supposed to be a poor me thread it's poor lots of other people as well
it's just that I certainly thought 'oh loose your job never mind you'll get another' type thoughts in the past but it's not so simple is it? there has been in these cases a whole load of other loss alongside just the job but it's also the waste I suppose

all those student loans
all those taxpayer funded degrees has that money just been pissed into the wind?!!!
then it got me thinking about all those middle class salary earning type people that the gov is going to have to find money for their dcs to do degrees etc etc
You can bet in their sums the gov was not expecting to pay any of us CB in 2013 unless things change they are now paying it to us all!

I'm attributing a fair amount of blame to mainly the prev gov because there is a lot they did which made it worse and a lot they didn't do which might have made it better (IMVHO!)

OP posts:
salizchap · 16/10/2010 23:44

YANBU except the part about the sending DCs to private school. Since when was that a basic need, or even necessary? Plenty of people make a success of life despite going to the local comp!

Hope you and DP etc find work soon. I bet 5 years down the line it will all be fine, the recession will be over and your career back on track.

Original poster
safetalk · 16/10/2010 23:48

funny I can believe you need 90K believe it or not (but that's another thread!) for quite some time our childcare took more than I earned
that's another loss I'm feeling
the time with my dcs

the lawyers I know who are OK are a family lawyer and a barrister I have a friend who is in house for a bank and I think she has not found it so comfortable recently

My sample size is small and prob not representative the small firm accountant and architect lost their jobs the large firm ones are OK I don't know enough to know if it is always like that

stleger sorry to hear about your probs

OP posts:
Funnys5FootUnderThePatioGarden · 16/10/2010 23:49

ah well ST if you are going to attribute all this to the previous government, then you may as well be talking to the wall as to me.

It is pointless, and actually unfair, to blame this on any government. It was a GLOBAL financial crisis that got us into this mess.

To me these issues are personal ones and it makes no sense to try to blame a higher authority

Original poster
safetalk · 16/10/2010 23:52

saliz my dcs don't go to private school from that list only 1 person has dcs in private school I was using it as an example of a middle wage type aspiration/expectation.

(FWIW it's the teachers I know who are partic desperate to send thier dcs privately)

Owning your own home is not a necessity in the UK yet many people aspire to do so

OP posts:
Original poster
safetalk · 16/10/2010 23:56

I don't attribute it all to the gov but I do think they have to accept responsibility for the result of some of their actions (whether it was the lax regulation, the encouragement of building up personal debt, ramping house prices or the cash giveaways eg health in preg grant)

do you feel that they are completely blameless then?
don't you feel that they should have been more prudent? Grin

OP posts:
stleger · 17/10/2010 00:00

My kids didn't go/don't go to private schools - which enabled us to have some savings for 3rd level - which due to fees and lack of part time work for students is a blessing. In Ireland we can blame government, councils, builders, developers and financial institutions as well as the global downturn. Watching the miners in Chile instead of constant economists was a welcome break. It seems every small positive money statistic is followed within hours by a negative.

Funnys5FootUnderThePatioGarden · 17/10/2010 00:05

we all benefitted from the low house prices, the lax regulation and the availability of personal debt. It was what caused the bubble and something which most of us benefitted from.

I think that like the rest of us, the government thought the bubble would never burst. And who could say hand on heart that they knew it was coming?

With the benefit of hindsight, I'm sure we all wished we had been more prudent.

Funnys5FootUnderThePatioGarden · 17/10/2010 00:06

sorry correction, I meant to say we all benefitted from rising house prices!

stleger · 17/10/2010 00:08

Yes, observing the UK budgets, they did seem very generous in the face of global financial 'restructuring'. It seemed that as our taxes were rising and salaries were falling, UK budgets seemed extraordinary. We were in Belfast just after Christmas for a funeral, and had to go into Marks and Spencers (on the way) on what turned out to be the first day of the sales. Having experienced Christmas in the Republic (lower key than previously, in many ways thankfully), people in NI were loading trolleys with clothes. I fear there will be cuts soon Sad. I was stunned at the decision to do away with prescription charges in Northern Ireland - I have relations there who have never paid due to ill health etc., but equally we know plenty of high earners. That, for example, seems to be costing more than was envisaged. (I know a lot of NI budget is separate to UK).

Original poster
safetalk · 17/10/2010 00:24

Funny I disagree (sorry I'm not beng cranky with you) only 2 people in that list own a property

I have a young child and a kind of new generation group of friends and house owners are def in a very small minority and those that do have a 1 bed flat

must be a London thing

I wonder what prop of households did the house as cashpoint, lots of credit thing?
also I feel strongly that the only people who benefit from rising house prices are those who downsize (a tiny number surely the rest of us are being shafted we jus don't look at it that way) and rising house prices in a low inflation environment is a partic nasty combination for young families

OP posts:
Original poster
safetalk · 17/10/2010 00:25

yes I'm always a bit Hmm when I see people intending to spend so much in Oxford street they need a wheely suitcase just to drag it around all day

OP posts:
stleger · 17/10/2010 00:35

That is my dd1's dream Smile. Mine too, as shopping with dd1 means I hold things and admire her, then she puts them back. She has just got a babysitting booking, first in over a year, and is hoping this signals economic recovery. So do I. It is crap for everyone 'ordinary', whether low paid, on benefits or in the squeezed middle trying hard. (We are in a house we started buying 14 years ago, it was 'worth' more a few years ago, but stamp duty to trade up meant we couldn't afford to. Now prices are down, and we are still living here with the original mortgage, we haven't 'made money' on our house. (Spent a fortune though, it is a 1970s building disaster!)

Original poster
safetalk · 17/10/2010 00:41

I was Shock when I saw, on here I suppose that house prices were 70% down in some parts of Dublin I think

OP posts:
Chil1234 · 17/10/2010 08:48

"we are supposed to be in our prime earning years and I feel that we will never catch up."

I think that's your mistake. We're not simply machines with earning potential... we're people. You probably won't appreciate it at the moment but sometimes it takes a few set-backs to make the point that there is more to life than being a high-flyer. Take the time to reassess what you really want out of life & what you want to do with it. Is it the high-risk, high-reward rat-race or is it something a little less ambitious that allows you to balance your life better and have peace of mind?

"Every cloud has a silver lining" etc.

Mishy1234 · 17/10/2010 08:55

No, YANBU.

It seems that everything is falling apart around us and it's going to take a LONG time for things to recover.

The positives though (if you can call them that) are that people are starting to take pleasure in the little (and free!) things in life. Maybe our children will carry that on into their adult lives and hopefully they will have a better outlook than us.

Rollmops- your comment shows a lot more about YOU than it does about OP.

brassband · 17/10/2010 09:25

'I think that like the rest of us, the government thought the bubble would never burst. And who could say hand on heart that they knew it was coming'

I disagree.the crisis was caused primarily by American banks lending mortgages to people on benefits.Any man in the street could see that the wheels would soon fall off, you don't need a masters in economics to see that.

brassband · 17/10/2010 09:26

My best hope now is for hyperinflation which would make our mortgage and borrowings shrinki real terms.

kerstina · 17/10/2010 09:46

I think you are being unreasonable about sending dcs to ptivate school.
What went wrong is people were greedy. Unbridled Capitalism does not work. People were moaning about how much house prices were but wanted highest possible price when selling. At least if house prices go down some people might be able to get their foot on the housing ladder.
I am still annoyed about Cadburys being taken over by Kraft an American company using borrowed money from a BRITISH bank.