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

That's correct grocklebox I am not working fulltime running a home. I get back home at 9.30 after the achool run and am out again on the school run at 3, so I have five and a half hours 'free' time. During school holidays of course, there's no 'free time' during the day.

I also spend hours each day jobhunting online or outside of the home, as housework only takes an hour or so tops each day including cleaning and laundry, plus I'm using the time to sort out life's junk accumulated in the cupboards, clearing out to sell online, and some volunteering in school. I'm online a lot, so always keep a Mumsnet page open, that's my skiving .

So what do your hb and council tax add up to? Just for fullness of the picture.

Cant see why they tax the lowest earners especially if they just give it back by credits.
Agree how many people does it take to fund 1 LP 2 kids £26k.

Resident men are effectively paying for absent fathers kids. So say we have 2 kids but cant afford more as we're paying for an extra 1.

DN had 'absent' dad who now has 5/6 kids altogether. Easier when you arent paying for 2 of them, with different women, creating 2 single mums.
Shoes every term? They must be very tall.
Admin wise seems silly bothering collecting so little CSA.

for fullness of the picture really though we need people saying i work and only come out with x after rent and council tax to reveal how much child and working tax credit and child benefit they get on top of that that they're not factoring in and the op is.

OP i think it's something crazy like 8hrs a day you have to be jobhunting and able to evidence you've done it now isn't it?

meh84 - That's a lot of disposable income OP! I think your thread of making others feel sorry for you has back fired somewhat.

Meh, it isn't a sympathy thread. It's an honest and straightforward divulge of the income of a lone parent on benefits, to encourage views and hopefully dispel some myths. It's a good debate, I don't think it has backfired at all, everyone has made some really knowledgeable and inspiring contributions.

Ooh, to respond to you meh84 I just said, 'Meh' that's never happened before I like it!

FWIW I think the OP has been very clever on here and hopefully will get a decent job that reflects her intelligence (not finance though eh!) as everyone is handwringing and jealously shocked at amounts, etc, etc they have overlooked that OP is a grown woman of 45 who didn't have dc until she was 38 and who is an LP through DV - she has kept quiet and let us all get on with it. Good luck OP.

maddening My rent is 525 and 450 uses paid direct to the landlord, it doesn't go in my bank.

I honestly don't know what the council tax benefit is because that goes direct to the council.

There is a shortfall of £75 rent which has to come out out my JobSeekers allowance every month.

X-post!

A lot of people are forgetting that not all of those are out of work benefits! It's perfectly possible to work AND get child tax credit and child benefit so take those away as then compare what she gets with an average wage. It's not that much!

Or compare it with an average wage and add on the tax credits etc. that they would also receive working.

My household has 2 people working, fairly average wages and we still get working tax credit, child tax credit, help towards childcare, child benefit and minimal help from housing benefit towards our rent which leaves us a lot better off than the OP but if you compare wages alone then ours looks a lot less.

to floatIsRechargedNow

So the OP is complaining at "only" having a lot more income than a tonne of people working full time, only having free time during school hours and the feckless father is paying a princely £5 towards his family.

Jeepers...

What about child benefit?

at HereBe - I'm gonna sit back with my popcorn and watch it roll on....

No, I'm not complaining about the income, Downtheroad

It's an honest divulge of LP benefit income to encourage discussion ... hang on, I've said that already loads of times ....

funnyface Child Benefit is included in the list. See opening post.

exactly lez.

the lady who claimed she only gets 1k a month from her job was not adding on her CB, CTC, WTC or any housing benefit she may be entitled to. even child and working tax credit for someone with one child on that rate of pay would be at least £800pm and £100 in CB on top of that. so that near doubles her wage.

people are comparing their salaries alone and not including their in work benefits and child benefit. that's not like for like.

the lady on 1k per month, if she is single and not partnered to a man earning twice that much, would be getting at least £900pm in in work benefits, possibly near double that if she has two children.

sovery you can find them here (as can everyone else):

www.gov.uk/government/collections/tax-credits-entitlement-tables

It depends on number of children soverulucky but I know you can earn 35k a year and still get both WTC and CTC. Plus they pay 70% of your childcare costs.

Sorry here, after reading the whole thread I totally missed that

it's interesting, both DH and I work, I am sure somewhere along the lines there are savings to be made BUT we don't have the time to be making them. I don't mean this as a bad thing BUT we live rurally, to find the best priced milk, general groceries etc would cause more travelling and so would probably even out any savings we made with travel costs.

after all bills etc we have £800, sounds a lot BUT actually it doesn't go far and we are always in debt, payday is a massive high until we realise that actually it's paying off the ever increasing debt we accrue each month. This is child are costs, paying off essential maintenance etc. the car is in desperate need of tlc but it will have to wait.

I admit we shop at ocado, but the nearest shop is a 30 min drive away, each way. I would shop in my lunch hour, except that it doesn't work that way (lunch hour-hmm) and after school there is too little time as doc are v young.

I'm not begrudging the benefits system, it would be a harsh country without this, it does grate that we both work hard, DH leaves at 6pm returns at 8pm at the earliest, yet we don't seem to benefit HUGELY from the hours we put in. The system is flawed as wages are so low, in real time, in the last four years my food bill has risen by 50% some due to having 1 more mouth to feed and the rest due to the rise of living costs. Our bills have sky rocketed, we had a gas leak that set us back £2k due to the way the gas company worked out our payments! we are lucky as we can pay bills by dd which makes it cheaper but sadly the cost of living is HIGH.

it is depressing to look at the figures and think "we have two incomes, and are getting less per month" BUT the potential we both have being in work is so much better than not.

I feel sad for the OP that her ex doesn't pay for the children, HE is the one with the benefits can do it attitude, not her. Realistically, the OP is in the worse situation as high paying jobs aren't probably going to be that available due to age, children, being out of work for sometime, being female.

The op doesn't strike me as this, but imagine that the pinnacle of your career is working the system, spending twenty years popping out children for cash and watching tv (again not the op :) ) imagine the potential some of these people might have and yet we see them as benefit scum. one of them could have the potential to cure cancer, aids, etc but they don't use it. That is what is sad about our benefits system. :( to have some sort of aim would be some much better for the majority.

problem is, how do you fix it? someone some where is going to get pissed off!

Maybe I'm thick but I dont see how putting wages up would help at all.
Surely if the minimum wage went up, wouldn't the cost of living?
I used to work in a day nursery anyone there who had their own dc were getting their wage topped up, without tax credits the only staff would have been young and inexperienced people who could still live in share houses or with their parents otherwise the price of the childcare would have had to go up to keep anyone with any life experience in the job of caring for our children.
Right now I work for an estate agency, they pay staff, they pay the local newspaper who employ staff and pay for paper and ink which presumably would cost more to produce and deliver to them, they purchase office supplies which again will cost more to produce and deliver, they have IT support people, pay zooplar, rightmove etc who presumably pay staff, purchase for sale boards and pay for the service of erecting and collecting them surely all of these rising costs would have to be passed down to the consumer every product and service would surely have to go up?
And for people who already quite rightly get more than the minimum wage, would they start to question why they got a degree and put themselves through teacher training/ law school/ medical school and have stressful jobs carrying tons of responsibility if people on minimum wage stacking shelves who get to leave work and forget about work are on nearly as much as them, would they think I wont bother or demand more too?
I may be missing something obvious I'm not the most educated person.

the op pays bills out of whatshe has left, you say pooh that you have left after all bills so you are better off than OP

Ocado? ffs - have little sympathy - is that really you nearest shop. I dont get this complaining about living rurally and commutes - you either chose to live there or the job.

I'd also say, if it hasnt already that not working for some people can have a negtive affect on mental and physical health.

I'm not getting any tax credits - I have no idea what they are? I

900 quid after rent and ct

that's more than us - family of four.

However I am not going to argue with you, as its not rolling in it or a life any of us would choose.