... to think that most MNers live in a bubble?

[frgr]

Seriously, the amount of times I read on here about "oh we earn 70k a year but we're really struggle to provide for little Jacob's polo lessons this year" (or some other such shite).

In real life, the average income of my family and friends is probably circa the national average. I know for a fact that my BIL is on around £6/hr and works 42 hours a week, I know that my best friend's total family income is about 22k because she was talking about mortgages a month ago... I'm talking about hard working people who go out come rain or shine and do their day's work, to provide for their families.... and then I log on here and find out MNers are posting trivial shit about being unable to afford XYZ and feeling hard done by on their incomes of "only" 3x the national average.

I don't know if I've become more sensitive to this crap since starting re-posting on here last year (after a break of about 3 years), but it seems to me that certain members of MN are totally and utterly oblivious as to what the average family is having to endure during this recession.

It's fucking unbelievable, it really is.

In your opinion, why are so many MNers out of touch with reality? Does this site cater to a different class than me? Are avg MNers just generally deluded - do I even belong here any more, with our 21k combined income, worrying about where the next school trip fee is coming from despite the fact that both of us work?

Christ.

UQD - what do you mean by a guaranteed standard of living? It is perfectly possible to start a business without another source of income. DH did it - we took a mortgage holiday for 9 months and lived off a Business loan for food etc. Because of the nature of his business he doesn't have to wait ages to be paid - he isn't a builder who has to wait until the end of a very long building job before he gets anything which helped as we had money coming in,quite quickly although not enough to live on - it eked out the loan.

It comes back to what we were talking about risk. If I don't work we don't eat (except I suppose for state benefits). No maternity rights. No sickness benefits. Mo pension. No paid holiday.

actually Xenia studies of risk have shown it tends to borne most b people at lower earning levels - company directors go bust - then a few years later you find them again with a new company...

low-skiled people get kicked from their niche jobs - they are more likely not to work agian.

Just reading the Sunday Times magazine article about the squeezed middle.

only 190k tax payers earn over £200,000 but if they increase tax by £1k for those in £20k to £50k band which has so very many people in it they raise £5bn. So the middle will be squeezed.

Am so very tired of all this that I am now slithering into comfy middle class bubble with cool glass of chablis before I write something I shall regret.

I don't care how much anybody else earns and I don't care how they spend it. I live in a happy bubble.

You need to have a certain amount of confidence that this is going to work out, though... and really it needs to work very quickly. Not many people can afford to miss more than about 3 rent or mortgage payments in a row.

Well yes you do need confidence but you need a good dose of that to get any job at the moment too, survival of the fittest as ever.

I am fortunate that DH and I have combined earnings in excess of the 70k discussed here. We are able to take nice holidays and send DCs to private schools (although would not have done so if there were excellent state schools in our area - preferred the private school option to uprooting and moving house).
I don't think we live in a bubble - my parents were/are not well off and my siblings live a similar lifestyle to my parents. One has just been made redundant (with small baby) and the other is at risk of redundancy this year. Where they live new jobs will be hard to come by in the short term in the current climate. I do though appreciate that 3 things have come together for me in a way that has enabled me to earn a good salary: (1) parents who cared about a good education; (2) raw academic ability; and (3) a driven personality. My siblings both have the first of these, and one of them also has the second, but neither has the third.

Although I dont think I live in a bubble, I do see the risk in relation to my DCs. For those who have read the dragon mother articles, I think my kids fall into her third generation category - they were born into a middle clss lifestyle and take nice holidays etc for granted. I am very conscious of this and do make them aware of how privileged they are, but on the other hand there is little point in earning well if we don't use it to improve the DCs' lifestyle.

What I wonder about sometimes is whether our financial comfort wll actually increase or decrease their career options. On the one hand, we should be able to give them finanical support to help them through the early hand to mouth days if they choose something like a creative career. This would not have been an option for me (even if I had had talent) since my parents would not have been able to give any financial support and my upbringing made me crave financial security. On the other hand, they will have become used to a certain standard of living which they may well expect to relicate, limiting their career choices (we would intend to help them out finacially at the start of their career but not to bank-roll them indefinitely - even if we could). Also, their comfortable lifestyle may mean that they do not develop the type of "hunger" that I had.

I do know this is not a bad problem to have!!

The confidence issue depends on your starting point. My sector requires nothing in outlay beyind photopied leaflets and a website; face to face stuff. So I ahve overnight decided to give it a shot and if it pays nothing, well I have lost nothing as well!. I can keep looking for work whilst I give it a shot.

I have posted a Q in the money section about not for profits if anyone knows anything.

Commercial gene, my arse, sorry Bonsoir, but you're really barking up the wrong tree here. Kids learn how to make money or hold down a job or whatever by watching their parents (or other close friends/relatives) actually do it, day in, day out. That's why it's such a problem if a household has no breadwinner, because the family potentially loses the knack of self-reliance pretty quickly. (And a lot of the time when that has happened in recent history it has had more to do with macroeconomics, and the decline of manufacturing industry and so on, rather than personal inclination). But if someone in the family is engaging in running their own business, getting a degree or whatever, then gradually a kind of shared intelligence develops about how best to approach these things. There's also something in the mix about feeling you have permission to do this sort of thing - the 'people like us are capable of getting qualifications/getting good jobs/making money' argument. This is what social mobility really means, extending the range and scope of life choices for all people rather than those whose ancestors happened to do OK.

What worries me is that Nick Clegg is currently peddling much of the same crap that Bonsoir was spouting, and I think some of the people in this social group really do believe that if people are poor, they are either genetically defective, or it's their own fault. What to do?

Boffinmum I see what you're saying and all the research certainly shows that children are as much a product of their environment as their nature.

However, some people do seem to have something innate in them from an early age.
My MIL tells me DH was different from the off.
He had a job before school each morning at 13.
He spent every weekend working a steel factory from 16.
He went off to uni and then on to work in the city.
No one in his family had ever done anything remotely like that.

Litchick, obviously some individuals vary in temperament and inclination within families and social groups, but I was talking about the population as a whole. If you want to engage people in economic activity, you have to help them learn or re-learn how to do it.

However it's hard. Currently the only contact long-term unemployed seem to have with the workplace is sitting through ineffectual 'courses' run by Job Centre employees and the like (i.e. lower ranking civil servants) and odd placements in random businesses for a day or two at a time.

In contrast, those more successful in the workplace rub shoulders with well-paid professionals in their peer groups on a daily basis, and have more ongoing investment in their training. This grows the ability of particular social groups to be productive and effective employees.

If we really cared about sorting this disparity out, we'd see leaders from business and industry rolling up their sleeves a la Sir John Harvey Jones, going into the places where disaffection and alienation from the workplace occurs, over and over again, with great determination to improve matters and grow future employees. We don't see that very often though. They either dabble at working with future employees when it suits them (a la Apprentice), or whinge about how bad the long term unemployed are at fitting in the workplace. Believe me, if these industry leaders applied a fraction of their intelligence and effort to this problem in a sustainable way, we could transform this country. But the last time this type of productive flowering of social consciousness happened was at the end of the Second World War, and memories are short.

LeQueen, tbh I did all those things, also having a ZX80, ZX81 and Spectrum, and got nowhere in commercial terms, because of considerable male prejudice IME. The environment can have a massive impact on our life chances.

I hear you.

DH's family were horrified when he told em he was moving to London.
And when he upped sticks again and went to New York, they nearly expired.
They live next door to the house where MIL was born. BIL lives four minutes away.

And the reaction I got when I told my family I was giving up my job as a lwayer to write

Boffinmum I don't disagree at all.

But you had called Bonsoir's assertion that some people are born with a innate commercial gene a load of crap. And I just think there are some people who are hardwired differntly to the rest of their families.

Litchick, a belief in the inheritability of entrepreneurship may be comforting to hang onto in an uncertain world, but there's actually no evidence. It's the same as assuming a relationship between IQ and race, gender or social class, whereas in actual fact the bigger picture is a lot more complex.

So how do you account for children who seem to have talents and skills that no one else has?

Everyone lives in a bubble.

Litchick, the same way I am aware that just because there is one criminal or debtor in a family, it does not mean the rest of the family is necessarily going to share such traits. We have to get beyond individual circumstances and look at population averages, trends and so on to have information of any use.

The women on here with household salaries in the £40-£100k bracket are actually suffering from a long hours working culture compounded with expensive housing, long and expensive commutes in a lot of cases, expensive and unreliable childcare, and lack of extended family around them in a lot of cases. It's a shared problem, and holding up individuals as inheriting the ability to side step these problems without any reference to the external circumstances allowing them to do so is less than helpful at best.

I mean, my grandmother actually invented the button on the modern washing machine that means you can open it without your nails being wrecked. Could she take out a patent? Nope. Did she profit from this? Nope. Women didn't do that sort of thing. Was she entrepreneurial? Well, probably quite practically minded, but then a lot of people are. One individual means little in the bigger scheme of things, but people like to hang onto the idea that their tribe is just that little bit better than other people's.

Of course environment nurtures skills and talents. But people also inherit the aptitude for all sorts of personal qualities (or otherwise...).

I was talking to a mother at a party on Saturday who is very worried about her DS aged 6 (in DD's class at school). His father is a hard-wired womaniser and her DS is already showing signs of the same. And there is another little boy in the same year whose father has two families - this little boy is the only one who positively enjoys having a little group of girls running after him trying to catch him.