to be fed up of always feeling poor even though my husband earns above the national average?

[alwayspoor]

I am a SAHM, live in east anglia. HOuse prices are massive, we have a house up north that we can't sell (need to be near London for DHs job) and a mortgage. We've got 3 dc's. Struggling to by decent food on top of all the bills.

No, we don't have our possessions insured - it's never occured to me to do that :)

Don't have many valuable possessions anyway: no car, no TV, no ipods or anything like that, old furniture, an old stereo, basic phones.

We were burgled years ago but they didn't take anything, probably felt sorry for us . They went to our neighbours instead.

Marianne, when you rent a house, you are cushioned in some ways that house owners are not (I do appreciate that rents can be just as expensive as a mortgage). If you have a mortgage then you have to have buildings insurance, which can be very expensive. Often, you will have an additional insurance to pay the mortgage if you become unemployed or sick or die. Mine costs £131 per month, but having had a situation where dh's employer went into administration, I feel I need this for the long term security of my children.

Often, you will be shelling out for insurance to cover repairs to central heating or boilers or drains, because there is no landlord to come around and pay the costs for you.

Renting gives you no long term security (unless you rent from the council or HA), but neither does owning a house - it's just a money pit that you have to buy if you don't qualify for council housing or there are few private rents available where you live. Add in negative equity etc and home owning costs people a lot of money and they have no control over it. It's not like deciding not to have Sky tv.

Buildings and contents insurance is very often part of the terms and conditions of a mortgage, equally other types of payment protection, such as a LIFE policy, that will pay your mortgage upon your death, etc. If your drains are old, some pay the water company Drains cover, usually a tenner per month.
All these insurances are very costly, several hundred per month in total. For the house we are renting, I haven't bothered with insurance either....

If anything happens, or anything needs repairing, I call the landlord, and he sends the handyman around. I know the cost of this, because any time our own tenants need a handyman, which is a few times per month , the cost is £45 per hour.....

I definitely think grocery prices vary; I live in a medium sized town, and we only have "small" versions of all the supermarkets. Therefore there is a real lack of choice and they are all filled with the more expensive items, rather than value items. For more choice, and to spend less overall, it's a 20 minute drive to the next town where there is a superstore version of one of the supermarkets. So I feel that in a city it's probably easier to do shopping on a budget as inevitably there is more competition for the shops and also more choice of cheaper items as the shops are bigger and have more stock! Luckily we have Aldi and Lidl so I stick to these, but I'd always heard that Asda were cheap, but our Asda is tiny and stocks very very little smartprice stuff, so it's actually more expensive than other stores.

I understand karma, and I knew you have to have insurance if you own property. I just don't think we need one in our current circumstances.

I think if your flat burned down Marianne it would cost you a lot to replace your pocessions - however it shouldn't be at all expensive

Marianne - A colleague of mine had a flat in the block above the carpet shop that burned down on the first night of the recent riots in London. She got out with the clothes on her back and the contents of her handbag. Thankfully she did have insurance, but it's been tough.

Please get insurance, you might not think you have anything valuable, but how about you look at the total, what would it cost if you had to replace all of your clothes to just the bare minimum so you had enough to work/casual? Then same again for your DP and your DCs. Every pot, pan, fork, plate, mug etc in your kitchen (assuming it's not all the landlords). Every CD, every book. Every sheet, towel, tablecloth. Every toy your DCs have. As flippant as it sounds, when we were discussing it, I realised I own over £200 worth of makeup.

Marianne it would cost you a lot to replace your clothes, furniture, basics for DCs etc if there was a fire. Your landlord will not have insurance that covers your things.
It would only be a few pounds a month, I am really shocked you don't have it actually, it seems a strange attitude to me, quite immature.

Marianne i think you are managing well on your current income but if you are not paying to insure your possessions, your situation is not as resilient as you think it is.

you have sat down, planned your money (which is more than most people do) but you haven?t factored in 'shit happens'. you might know that family will help out but many people don?t have that luxury & shit does happen.... maybe your finances just havent been tested yet.

Also running a car might not be necessary in London but out in the sticks it's essential.

err choc working from home is out of dh's hands - hes not allowed.

We probably could do without a car but 20 mintues walk to school in winter We are rural.

yy re contents insurance, people always think about being burgled but forget all about fire and flood which could potentially wipe out absolutely everything you own. I started making a list in my kitchen and I gave up half way through as there was just so much I lost the will to live!

Definitely the replacement value which is the issue.

Been thinking about Marianne. I actually find your attutuide quite worrying, you haven't really thought it through have you? No insurance, using savings to live on, assuming your DH will fall into a job. No wonder you don't feel poor, you are not living in the real world.

I do agree that some people think they need new things when they just want them. Someone I knew moved into a house which can't have been more than a few years old and replaced everything including the kitchen and bathroom. However lots of people are struggling and this isn't an option for most (I would think).

Me and DH have been together 12 years and in that time have owned 2 homes, we did nothing more than paint in both houses as a) we couldn't afford to do anything else and b) we couldn't justify it when the kitchen, bathroom etc were fine.

Currently living in a rented house which is in a time warp.

Marianne I don't mean to sound rude but from what you've described you've chosen a very simple life- no real valuables or assets. It's surely not too much of a mind streach to realise not everyone lives like that? People have cars, ora pricey engagement ring, or a expensive tv, or a bike. I find it quite astonishing you take your quite extreme way of life and expect that's how everyone lives, rather than you being the exception.

If you don't have anything to lose, don't bother with insurance-I never did as a student, if I was burgled I lost my second hand tv, clothes and toiletries- big deal. A fag and a expense to replace, but you take your chances and save your premium costs. But most people don't live like that.

Marianne - do you not need contents insurance??? I live in a rented property but still have contents insurance!

It would cost thousands to replace beds, white goods, electrical goods, clothes, books, carpets, curtains etc. It's just too enormous to contemplate, bit too laizzez faire and hippy if you ask me.

In it's simpliest situation- as I described above, room in a shared house and no valuables, I can see why you'd not bother. It's all about risk; nothing could happen and you'd have wasted/ saved the premium, or you could lose everything and have to shell out for more and take the hit accepting th risk didn't work. But like evrything in life you weigh up based on your own attitude to risk.

Sernity i agree about thinking through whether you need insurance or not but you should only not insure things you can afford to live without or replace.

for most people, having insurance will cost them more than the actual risk of the event occuring...but you need to be ok if you are unlucky & it does occur.

I completely agree; what I meant was there are plenty of people for whom the replacement value is little; a few sets of primark Clothes and cheap utensils. Furniture, building etc covered by landlord. As I say though those situations are few and far between; marianne may be one of them but it's niave to expect others are.

Obviously, there are many people/families who live on an amount below the national average. They need to pay for fuel, food, clothes just like anyone else, and have a variety of circumstances to cope with, including in some cases similar issues to what the OP is dealing with, or worse. Since this is an AIBU thread, I have to say my sympathies tend to lie more with people trying to live on a smaller amount than the OP.

Fixture - people who claim to be living on a much smaller amount tend to conveniently leave out the details, such as housing benefit, council tax benefit, free school meals, free prescriptions, etc. You hear it all the time - people complaining about getting only £90 a week or whatever, forgetting that they're getting maybe £200 worth of other benefits each week. Not everyone of course, but it does happen.

As for the OP, the mortgage and other costs on her existing house can be totally written off out of her DH's income just now as it is just a drain on their resources. Any true comparison should be based on their income once that is taken out.

It is also not as simple as just renting out their house. We considered that when we moved for my new job. There was no way that we could get enough rent to cover costs, nothing like it, and when you take into account the risk and the hassle with the mortgage company holding out for a sale was a much better option. I am very grateful that we sold our house before the proverbial hit the fan.

People on a smaller income would simply not have been able to take on the new job before selling their house in the first place. And it's certainly possible to be on a lower-than-average income without accepting any benefits or being entitled to them, e.g. if you're just above the threshold, or self-employed.

I know it's possible - I've been there actually, just above that threshold where everything stops - but I would like to bet that if we were to look at the incomes of the rudest people on this thread all would be not as it first appears.

But otherwise, what is your point exactly? They are where they are and they're struggling. What's the point of saying yah boo sucks, serves you right for being in a position to try and help yourselves? Except in so much as it proves that the all the Government's talk of people moving to where the jobs are, etc etc is total bolleaux.

We couldn't afford both mortgage and rent for more than a few months max. We covered it with the few savings we had and were lucky to sell the house before the savings ran out. We had no choice to move as I had been handed a massive public sector pay cut and we would eventually have been unable to maintain the mortgage if we'd stayed put. In hindsight it was a massive risk and we're very lucky it paid off.

Well obviously I'm a right weirdo, and some of the comments aimed at me here do have a point.

However, we may get a snapshot of someone else's life here, but that's of course not the whole story. I am not some freewheeling hippy with not a care in the world, I was trying to point out that some things that people consider essential ARE NOT and since the OP is struggling financially I was trying to say that it is possible to make different choices and be potentially better off as a result.

I just don't think that having all these valuables and assets is as important as people make it out to be. I don't live in any kind of student shithole, but I also see no reason to bankcrupt myself by getting a car or a big telly just so I can feel I belong - and I don't think it's an extreme view.

Insurance - maybe I'm missing something here, but I'm not really worried about losing our things - how often does something like that happen, and I am not sitting on some crown jewels! And we're unlikely to be flooded on the 2nd floor - top of the house

And yes of course I have thought it through, as I said we only get a partial idea of other people's lives from these posts. We're using some savings to get through this year because we thought it'd be better for DH to stay at home for a year than putting our 1yo DD in childcare (and paying a lot for it). It's all been carefully calculated. And we have a nest egg from my mother which is being saved for our daughters' future - but it's also something to fall back on if something went really wrong. And my DH's is entering into a career next year where employment is pretty much certain.

I obviously am quite blinkered when looking at other people's lives and choices from my own quite different perspective, but I think if you are unhappy with your life, and are capable of changing things, it is worth reconsidering your choices and priorities.