to be shocked that Jack Monroe

[samandi]

was on £27,000 a year just back in 2011?

This is a woman I associate with desperate poverty and yet in the space of one and a half years ? she managed to go from having a prosperous job at a pretty young age to struggling to feed her son?

At the age of 22 she had about a £20,000 net income, which is more than many people can dream about. £27,000 is way more than I've ever earned in my life and I'm over ten years older than her.

Am I being unreasonable to think this detracts a bit from her message? Or am I just living in a different world.

TeWiSavesThe Day

A 20k plus salary is only not an insulation to poverty if you cannot budget or you make the wrong choices.

House and rent levels in the South East are ridiculous, but someone who earns more than minimum wage can always save. It is about choosing whether to buy stuff or whether to save the money.

Millions of people get by on NMW, so by logic so can you, and save the rest of your salary. You may not like that option, but it is an option. Buying stuff is a choice not an obligation

Why did you 'assume she only knew poverty'?

She's very open about how she had a good job and then it all went tits up is a short space of time. The story is in practically every interview she does.

To many people it makes her a more powerful campaigner as she demonstrates how it could happen even to a well educated, resourceful, employable person.

Can we only be impressed by poverty campaigners who have never had more than 10p in their purses for the last 30 years? FFS.

I don't think the fact that she was only poor for a short time detracts from her message, but it does make her quite unrepresentative. I don't think her experience compares to living in long term poverty, with all the hopelessness that that must bring.

I am intrigued as to how she ended up as a single mother given that she's a lesbian. I doubt she'll ever go into that though.

Its very hard to save, when you pay for everything, when you haven't had a leg-up from family, when you didn't make money from the property boom, when you need to be in work every day. You need transport, you need appropriate clothes.

£27k is the uk average wage. It's hardly wealthy, especially if you live in a big city.

I was paying £700 to rent a room in a flat share without bills 10 years ago. I doubt if young renters are now paying less than I am.

Being at financial rock bottom and going from own home to rental to room in a shared house is so profoundly distressing that I am glad Jack Monroe only had to experience this for the length of time she did.

27K after tax and child care is not a lot of money and Jack had no second income to float her.

She may have found another job eventually but how wonderful and inspiring that what she does know shines a klieg light on poverty in the UK today. Her blog had an initial political agenda and the recipes grew from that.

How anybody can read her post about having to refuse her little son more food because the cupboards had none and remain stone faced and disapproving is beyond me- let alone find such tenuous reasons to criticise her.

Samandi You get my first ever after seven years of posting.

Who sets the time she should live in poverty before she can speak for the poor?

William Wilberforce was never a slave. Elizabeth Fry was never in prison. Both were powerful campaigners of their time.

Mijas, I've lived it. I AM good with money. Do you realise how utterly insulting you have just been? That what, we put buying tat over adequately feeding our family?!

I am fucking livid that you've just implied that.

but someone who earns more than minimum wage can always save

Always? That's a big statement.

Her poverty was mainly caused through delays in her housing benefit. She was having to meet the shortfall through her basic other benefits, in order to keep a roof over her and her son's heads.
This sort of situation is quite common. I don't see how it would make her experience less valid.

A 20k plus salary is only not an insulation to poverty if you cannot budget or you make the wrong choices.

That's a ridiculous statement. Of course you can have savings to begin with. Even when you weren't expecting to have no income.

But they don't last long.

And then you're poor.

Millions of people get by on NMW, so by logic so can you, and save the rest of your salary. You may not like that option, but it is an option. Buying stuff is a choice not an obligation

That is a stupid point. A single mum on NMW will get housing benefit and WTC and CTC as well. Which probably adds up to near enough to a gross and taxable salary of £27k.

Also the whole point of getting a better job is so you don't have to live like you're poor. If you are on a v low income and in the unfortunate position of having to chose heat or food or new school shoes for your child then it's awful. Why would you do that if you earnt more? You wouldn't. Fucking idiotic to suggest otherwise.

A 20k plus salary is only not an insulation to poverty if you cannot budget or you make the wrong choices.

Again. A stupid statement. I am very interested in your financial situation and how long you think you could manage with no family or state support!

My savings would cover 6 to 10 months of being unemployed and I've only been able to save so much as my parents helped me out with things like uni and a car. After that is be fucking poor. I'd have to move out of my one bed flat as HB wouldn't cover it, and into where? With a baby you can't move into a shared house very easily. So I earn well above what Jack earnt, I've had family help in the last and I'm still less than a year away from financial ruin should I loose my job or get seriously ill. Great.

Buying stuff like food and heat etc is not actually a choice. It's a matter of survival.

i thought the reason she was so skint was because she was made redundant,and then there were problems with getting benefits to her so she didnt have any money to live on and had t make what she did have last for ages,hence the 10 pound a week on food thing.

Oh i think at least 10 years on £10 a month before you are qualified to consider yourself poor

All those plasma screen TVs...

I mean if they just budgeted and grew veg and herbs in their back garden they wouldn't be in this mess.

(I'm joking BTW, op you are spouting sanctimonious shite and so are many others on this thread)

OP, lots of people give up well paid jobs and successful careers and businesses when they have dc. I did myself, because both dh and I worked in related fields with lots of travel and unsociable hours.
My business paid me 42k net in 1980's and we ended up on tcs
I really don't understand what you are saying.

ringaringarosy great succinct explanation of her history. I have heard of her but had no idea of her background, but thought as in the op that she had always experienced poverty, and was politically commenting about her situation as well as passing on her frugal tips in her blogging.

Personally I think that her story illustrates perfectly that it can happen to anyone, and that therefore we should

1. stop blaming people for being poor,
2. stop swallowing the government and right wing press bullshit about 'poor choices'
3. stop getting into 'competitive poverty' along the lines of 'well, I've been poor for 10 years so I'm proper poor, me.' Because that kind of divisiveness is what this government wants.

for those on this thread who have swallowed the propaganda. FFS.

Read her blog.

Jack Monroe writes of selling everything deemed not absolutely essential when her benefits were delayed and she had run out of saved capital. She did this and used the money she generated to go shopping to buy the cheapest Supermarket own brands she could find. This in turn inspired her recipes as a way of feeding her little son in as healthy and filling manner as she could. She set it up to help others and to campaign politically both locally and then nationally.

Some twunt left a blog comment asking her how she could afford 'sparkly glitter' tiles in her kitchen if she was so poor. A person so stupid, so absolutely thick they couldn't work out that Jack Monroe has absolutely no influence over her landlords choice of decor.

Maybe you would have her eat them Migas?

You can save if you are lucky when you are 'just above' the minimum wage but an unexpected bill or expense will wipe you out- the washing machine or fridge breaking, new shoes and coat for the child etc. You are always fearful, always adding and subtracting in your brain and never ever frivolously buying loads of stuff. Jack Monroe did not waste money on buying stuff; she had to sell it all instead. Jack Monroe was unable to continue in her job because of the unsociable hours, shift changes, cost of child care and lack of other child care alternatives. Not everybody has Mummy and Daddy down the road helping to look after the children.

Also Any earnings over the late teens removes housing benefit entitlement. This in turn affects council tax benefit which in turn affects other benefits such as free eye tests, prescriptions and dental care. Do you know how much the fear of losing a crown and needing it replaced or requiring root canal or a new pair of glasses would affect somebody on the minimum wage?

At 22, she won't have been earning £27,000 for that long. Sure, she may have had the oppourtunity to build up some savings, but she may have also had to spend some of these when her son was born. When you are renting, your savings can also be pretty quickly wiped out by having to move on a regular basis and having to pay out towards deposits and admin fees. It can also only take one big emergancy to wipe out your savings.

I am in my early twenties and do have savings. However, I could not live on them for a sustained period of time. I made a claim for JSA about 3.5 years ago, due to being between employment. It only took me four weeks to find another job, but it took 11 weeks for me to see any money . At the time, I still lived at home, so would have coped, but not everyone is in that situation.

Most of my friends do try and save, but it only takes one big expense like a car breaking down and having to get it repaired to get to work to wipe out a huge chunk of your savings. Also it would be a bit joyless to never have any treats like holidays, just in case at some unspecified time in the future you were unemployed. I think that would be a really stressful, horrible way to live your life- to never have any treats, just in case.

And eventually, no matter how much you have in savings, they will run out. :(

I think it's a mistake to assume that salary is an indication of how much you can afford to save. Obviously the lower you go the less likely you are to be able to save, but it's not as simple as therefore thinking that the higher you go the more you can save. The trouble with earning more is that everyone wants a larger piece of it, and it comes with greater costs. And income is never a reflection of disposable cash. Debts accrued on a lower salary can severely impact people on sizeable salaries, leaving them less well off than someone who earns half.

I had savings in the many thousands when life threw me a curveball. What was carefully planned to cover five years of my life was got through in the space of 12 months. I did everything right and responsibly and still ended up living below the poverty line because of circumstances beyond my control.

I don't think Jack Monroe's message is undermined by her previous job. I think one ofg the most important messages from it for me is that having children can severely hurt a woman financially. If you don't have the support network in place and rely totally on professional childcare, you can end up unemployed and poor in no short space of time unless you earn enough to cover the unexpected.

I think it's fair to say that experiencing poverty for a short while is not the same as living it year in and year out. It is that relentlessness of it that eventually wears people down and contributes to one of the reasons depression is such a big problem for the long-term poor. However, anyone living below the breadline for longer than a 6-month period will certainly have a pretty good window into it. Combine that with empathy and knowledge of others who have been in the same situation for longer and you can certainly talk about the subject with knowledgeability even if you don't have the long term experience to know the crushing despondency of it.

LEMisafucker - well, that's not a particularly useful comment. At least I'm trying to articulate my thoughts, just saying "you are unreasonable" without giving a reason why/even trying to discuss the point is fairly, well, pointless.

Dahlen - yes, I can see how introducing childcare into the equation sets things up a bit differently.

I maintain that £27,000 is a huge salary though. The net salary is almost twice the average net salary for a 21 year old.