But ghostship you live in a one bed flat, there are several steps between that and a hostel like a one bed flat in a crappier area, a house share, a bedsit/studio flat... It's not what I believe you should do anyway.
My whole point is not at all that I think this crap about choice is valid in any way but that by making the choice argument it is people on lower wages/benefits will be harmed. To be completely frank people on £60k are not receiving any significant state aid, they may be struggling they may not be poor like people of other wage levels but they have nothing to take off them and I havent seen any of them pleading poverty just objecting to being silenced about the difficulties they are facing and objections to being told they are rich when actually it is possible for some of them to have the same level of income as people claiming benefits/on low wages when you take everything into account (yes this is wrong but the answer isn't to take away top up benefits like this government want). You start feeding this argument about choices the lens will be turned onto the poorest the most harshly because that is what this government is about.
Let me tell you a little about why I think what I do: primarily because I have seen both ends of the spectrum. It's not something I haven't talked about before on here but you obviously haven't seen so.
I had a pretty crappy childhood; physical, financial and emotionally abusive and left to live with my boyfriend at 16. We lived at his parent's 3 bed house with his younger brother who he shared a room with, his sister and one of his older brothers whose gf also lived there and his two parents. We had no bed so we slept on a single mattress on the floor and I qualified for bridging allowance of £11 per week which I had to buy all my food etc out of and I had taken up smoking because I was depressed (bad choice) we used to pick cig stubs out of pub ashtrays/off the floor and re-roll them.
After a while things improved with my parents a bit and I went home, I got a job working at the funfair (was 17 but told them 18 for higher wage) on low pay, long hours, lots of dodgy people, I was drinking a lot to cope with living with my parents (bad choice), after a work night out my line manager raped me. Obviously I lost my job but only after being bullied by everyone at work about being a "prick tease". Losing my job made my parents really angry.
I got another job in a pub shortly after my 18th birthday and met xp. After a while he moved back down to his family on the otherside of the country and I went with him, he was abusive; sexually (in case you don't understand what that means it involved showing me horrible porn he expected me to act out if I loved him, taking condoms off until it was pointless asking him to wear one, sleeping around, filming me, groping constantly, having sex with me while I was asleep, constantly expecting sex, having sex with all my female friends) financially, emotionally, psychologically and also physically controlling (not letting me go places/speak to men) I attempted suicide, various things happened; him sleeping with a 14 year old girl he worked with, him disappearing off for days on end, him stealing the rent money and blaming it on me, our housemates stealing/damaging all my stuff, his mum threatening me and chucking a drink over me because he told her it was me who stole his money and his stuff that got stolen, eventually we had to come back up here (bad choice).
I went back to my parents but couldn't stand it and stayed out as often as I could, was working in pubs with xp, got pregnant and he forced me into an abortion (yes it does happen in this country), one time he took me to a house I didn't know with a load of people I didn't know off their faces on drugs and told me if I didn't take ecstasy he'd leave me there by myself. That was how I started taking drugs which was another way to block out (as well as alcohol) everything. Before long I was actually homeless and sleeping on random couches/staying with friends. Xp went away to work abroad and I stopped taking drugs but was still drinking a lot but working in bars so wasn't costing money an still homeless, I'd go home with blokes to have somewhere to sleep, obviously some of them thought I owed them.
I had a kind of boyfriend who I thought was pretty nice for a while and stayed with him, he was a pretty serious alcoholic and a lot older than me and he also raped me whilst really drunk, thought that was normal though and didn't leave until he threw me down two flights of stairs when in a drunken rage.
That night I had literally nowhere to go and the most amazing and kind man offered me his bed, this turned out to actually be his bed and he slept on the sofa for 3 whole months. I was earning £20 per week from one night's bar work. At this point xp had come back and I got pregnant again but this time I had been sorting myself out with a proper job and no alcohol so we got a flat. Xp was still abusive around Xmas time I had had enough of him disappearing off with other girls all the time and he had well and truly isolated and humiliated me and so I refused to allow him to have sex with me and he raped me. After that he went and stayed with his mum/other gf and when he came back he tried to make me pay out of the child benefit/tax credit for the bills he hadn't paid (I already had all food, clothes and shoes, my PAYG phone and the household Internet and gas); he got the joint benefits claim since he had left his job and my SMP had finished and he was getting the HB too. It turned out he had not paid anything and had instead just put all the money into drinking, smoking, drugs, fruit machines and drinks for girls.
We had a huge argument and he pushed me down and grabbed my son out of my arms and I called the police who made him leave for 24 hours and he never came back.
After he left i found the debts, i also did a pg test and when he overtly raped me i'd got pg. Whatever debts he'd got against the flat (rent and some historical council tax) I got debt to pay off and I started my own benefit claim which was like freedom after being completely financially oppressed before. Fortunately my landlord was great and on my side saying he was glad xp had gone and telling me a load of stuff he'd been saying to him about me (which he hasn't believed).
Lots of things came out of the woodwork about how he had isolated me from everyone by telling them lies about me and how he had stolen stuff from people and blamed it on me. He brought what was deemed in court to be a vexatious proceeding against me in family court, he used the police to bully me, lots of horrible stuff for about 3 years after he left.
I've now been married for almost four years and yes my DH has a high income, if he gets a good bonus it can be £60k, we decided to try for a baby and got twins and we have, because of our age been in need of housing at an unavoidably expensive time. We live hundreds of miles from dh's contracted place of employment because we couldn't afford to live near his work. We live in an ordinary end of terrace house in the crappiest area of town with the highest levels of crime and horrible neighbours who deal drugs and smoke weed around our children when they are in the garden and who have massive dv rows at 4am and are constantly swearing and shouting, we can afford one crappy old car and we can't afford a paid for family holiday although we can use my parents' holiday home and we do have a weekend away for our anniversary without the children. Fortunately we can afford to pay for me to go to uni to study law because on my current level of education as the wife of a high earner childcare currently prices me out of the job market. None of this makes us poor but it sure as hell does not make us rich, which is all I think anyone has ever said.