Here is my total income as a lone parent on benefits.

[HereBeHubbubs]

Inspired by a thread which is glorifying us lone parents as 'rolling in it', I'm prepared to declare my benefits income. It's not gauche to do so, because it's your money after all (looks at taxpayers), and you should probably know that I am also grateful for this support, prepad to pay back into the pool when working again, and am not extravagant nor consider this a 'lifestyle choice'.

I don't have Sky, a plasma tele, holidays, credit or catalogue accounts, smoke, drink and rarely socialise due to childcare issues. I buy all our clothes from charity shops. I do however have a concession rate council leisure centre swim membership of £18 a month and a £10 rolling contract mobile phone, with a phone somebody gave me.

I am terrible at budgeting and have been living on a £500 overdraft for at least the last couple of years - I never have enough income to return the account into the black, so I'm generally always at least £400 overdrawn.

My utilities are on prepayment meters currently eating up old debt weekly and a not competitive tariff.

I'm currently looking for work and can't understand how people sit at home without good reason, because since my youngest started school, I have been going stir crazy and begun to feel quite down and despondent about not working.

Fortunes will change in the near future as doubtless I will find work, but meanwhile, when you break down the cost of my outgoings, hopefully you can see that lone parents really are not 'rolling in it'.
Especially the ones who receive little or no maintencance from their absent children's father.
Unimagined outgoings include things like termly Brownies subs, school snacks at £8 a month, school shoes every new term, birthday and Christmas presents, rent shortfall £75 a month, winter utilities alone are £40 a week each gas and electric.

Lone parent age 45, two children 5 and 7, private rented three bed (officially two as one leads off the bathroom) terrace Anglia region.'Housing Benefit and Council Tax Benefit don't enter my bank account, they're paid direct to recipients.

Weekly Income
5.00 CSA
72.40 JobSeekers Allowance
34.05 Child Benefit
114.08 Child Tax Credit

£225.53 week
£902.12 every month

Why should people get paid for doing nothing?

Why should people get their bunions fixed for nothing?
Why should people have en education for nothing?

Is eating less important than these things?

We have less than that, DH works full time and I get carers allowance, we also get DLA but no tax credits, we have to pay for petrol to travel over 500 miles every 2 weeks to see a specialist for our son along side various other appointments. we also have a teenage DD, no FSM and no housing or council tax benefit.

On top of this DS has a very limited diet so we have to pay extra for 'free from' foods.

Also DH has to take a pay cut every time DS is in hospital because he has to go on to part time hours in order to be at home for DD (DS can be in hospital for 3-6 weeks at a time)

We would be a dam sight better off if neither of us worked or if I was a single parent but we are proud that we cope, proud that despite all the obstacles we face we get by. In face it has made DD more determined to work harder at school because she has 1st hand seen how difficult it can be when we've had a tough month if DS is in hospital.

I don't begrudge anyone benefits because no one should have to live on the poverty line especially not children.

We also have bloody oil central heating that costs a bomb if it's a cold winter, we don't have sky, DH got rid of his car and rides a moped and pays the little amount insurance is upfront yearly so petrol is minimal, we do have a family car because we have so many appointments to go to but I try to walk everywhere. Oh DD does get a free bus pass to school because we live so far away and that saves us £15 a week thankfully. All 3 of us have pay as you go phones that my dad tops up £10 on each every month.

£900 after rent, well done.

thats the reason I work for £6.31 an hour op, the frustration you feel being out of work and out of everyday social contact with other people working.

my job is shit, truly shit, and I'd get the same money less £10 a week from the tax credits if I gave up work, but mentally I know going to work is better for me than being at home all day.

good luck, I hope you find something soon.

The asterisk regarding sanctions was for this:

During the school summer holidays I was also looking after my sister's child the day I went into sign.
All three chikdren were fractious and itching to get into the park next door, so as I sat down at the signing desk I said to them, 'I won't be a minute' to which the lady gave me a big ,

then during the course of the 45 minute appointment (it's usually between 15-25 mins) asked me the standard, 'have you looked for work this week?' to which I stupidly replied, 'to be honest I haven't had a chance the last few days with looking after all the kids all day',

and because I also couldn't provide physical evidence of my job search (ie I didn't bring a device with my cached history), and didn't bring the local paper with me to prove nothing suitable therein, and she only had my word for the searching I had done, she suspended my benefits for a month.

My Jibseekers was stopped completely and wasn't backdated as I wasn't eligible because of what I had said, and my housing benefit and council tax benefit was also suspended for 4 weeks whilst the decision body investigated.

I also receivd a warning letter from my landlord agency, stating they've added £20 because my rent was late.

This is not preferable to being employed, no. This is what actually happens when you have to claim Job Seekers Allowance.

I now have to 'play the system' because if I tell that lady again I forgot to look for work today because my child was off school ill, I'll stand to lose another £72.40 a week when she sanctions me again.

I appreciate that it seems an easy life to 'sit around all day doing nothing' (does my life suddenly get less busy and stressful when unemployed then? I hadn't noticed!)

Going to work for 8 hours a day, 5 days a week would surely make you busier?!

DavidDann Can you expand on your comment '£900 after rent, well done* as it sounds like you might be exactly the opinion I was hoping to enlighten with this thread.

There is nothing well done about being unemployed. There is no sense of entitlement present here.

HereBeHubbubs
"I don't include Housing Benefit and Council Tax Benefit in my income statement here only as it doesn't go into my bank, it goes direct to the landlord and council."

However.... other people who have those some living costs have to earn money and then pay tax on it. Their net pay goes on those costs. If you don't class those costs as income can workers stop paying them?

I don't doubt for even a moment that being in work, even crap work, is in a sense preferable to being out of work but to be honest it can be a very devil and deep blue sea situation.

When I was working as a home care assistant id regularly do 14 hour days and it was beyond exhausting so I find it quite hard to be sympathetic to people on JSA saying it's hard, I am sure it is but ... (Put it this way the company I worked for ALWAYS needed staff!)

But we have a doctor earning the same as someone on benefits. How can that be right? It's not between low paid and benefits but a highly respected career can 'pay' the same as benefits? How?

OrangeFluff I fit in the same things each day I used to do when employed. I don't have a work commute or a job, that's all. I'm still busy running a home with two children. The idea that lone parents are all watching Jeremy Kyle all day is exactly what I'd like to see vanish, because it simply isn't the case.

I'd just like to point out the OP's situation is not typical for all single parents. Unfortunately it does pay to have more than one child. CTC is approx £240 per child every 4 weeks. So a LP of one child gets significantly less and many have much higher rent top ups, debts etc.
I'm a working LP and 75% of my salary goes on rent. I have way less disposable income than OP but am still better of working.

Exactly that, inabramstonpickle, it's crazy, isn't it :/

Looking at OP. After rent and council tax I have £700. Then I have to pay electric, gas, tv licence, phone, house insurance, petrol, car tax, MOT, food, my fee to practice......for my daughter and I.
This obviously does not include clothes (every so often).
Things like weddings, birthdays and sometimes car maintainence have to take a back seat while we eat!
BUT we're happy

But childcare is never free unless a relative is doing it and doesn't charge. It all has to be paid for. I'm not against extra childcare for working parents but let's not kid ourselves that it's free. It will mean extra tax somewhere.

What happened before tax credits? Was there another benefit or was there just nothing before and no top ups at all?

There was something called Family Credit for a while (80s/90s) for working families. It wasn't particularly generous. Of course, the cost of living was much lower then.

tax credits = labour tried to find a way to meet the gap between shit wages and high living expenses to lift a ton of families out of poverty and to make it possible for people to get out of the benefits trap (re: a single mother couldn't get off of benefits because minimum wage around school hours would be so low as to starve them). tax credits, particularly working tax credits (which should possibly be the only tax credits tbh if i was really thinking we needed to trim things) made work pay and made it possible for many who were stuck.

where mistakes were made imo is where allowances doubled by having a second child, then another leap for the third etc so that you get crazily better off by having more children - not as in the cost of the extra child is taken into account but way in excess of the next child's costs is given. that would be where i'd make changes if i had to make changes.

re: a flat rate child benefit of £30pw whether you have one or ten kids and a flat rate child tax credit (where entitled, re: income tested as it is now) somewhere between what you get for one and what you get for two children now. however when it came to working tax credit i'd allow the childcare element per child for as many children needed it as childcare should be affordable to all to allow them to work.

that would save a fortune and have a long term effect of making people think more carefully about continuing to have more children that they can't afford. currently a single mother like myself could look at an online calculator and realise that by having another baby between ctc and cb i'd be entitled to another £75+ per week. if that mother is being warned constantly by the job centre that she's about to be sanctioned because her child is in school and could be sent on workfare having another baby might seem a very rational solution to save her families skin giving her more money and another 5years with the state off of her back. now you can slate her all you like but if we were talking about a rich person working out how best to maximise their income and minimise their contributions we'd call it accounting.

that's where i'd start with changes - not penalising all people but abandoning the price per child element of things.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Family_Credit

(bearing in mind of course that we're already ensuring that larger families are ok by paying out higher housing benefit allowances ((and the higher council tax benefit that comes with those larger properties)) so we're not talking about ignoring the fact people have large families, still addressing their housing needs but not making a woman with 5 kids have literally 5 times as much income as a woman with one even though her costs are not 5x as high)

I fit in the same things each day I used to do when employed. I don't have a work commute or a job, that's all. I'm still busy running a home with two children. The idea that lone parents are all watching Jeremy Kyle all day is exactly what I'd like to see vanish, because it simply isn't the case.

I'm not implying that anyone is sat watching daytime TV. But if you had to fit 8 hours of work, plus maybe an hour to commute, for 5 days out of 7, including everything else that you already do in your life, then you would be busier surely? Your post just confused me.

of course she would be busier - but as is a single mother is still a hell of a lot busier than a sahm with a working husband.

do you know to be honest i just don't think our economy works. we can all focus on benefits and x y and z scapegoats but it just isn't working and the costs of those scapegoats are peanuts compared to the massive gaping issues.

if you've got situations where 99% of the wealth is locked away in offshore accounts in the names of 10% of the population then of course the accounts are going to be bloody hard to balance.

I don't care what anyone does and have no desire for anyone to justify their time....but this:
I fit in the same things each day I used to do when employed. I don't have a work commute or a job, that's all. I'm still busy running a home with two children. The idea that lone parents are all watching Jeremy Kyle all day is exactly what I'd like to see vanish, because it simply isn't the case.

is simply nonsense. Your children are at school all day. Obviously you have many many more hours of free time than when you worked full time. You are not working full time "running your home". I don't care what you do, but there is no need for such nonsense.

According to that link there was also en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Family_Income_Supplement from 1970 onwards until it was replaced by Family Credit