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

Youthecat It's the trouble with Mumsnet. So many posters have no experience of things that other people encounter by but still think they know all the answers.

Caravanoflove I would hope as a GP you would be less judgemental! You sound furious.

Shadows- new clothes, days out and presents ARE luxuries. No one has a god given right to them.

My mother grew up in a large family where there was little money and they only got an orange for Xmas, lunch was always bread and butter, clothes bought second hand and passed down 6 times.

It never did any of them any harm!

Your children would only be upset by no presents if you've raised them as spoilt self entitled brats!

Oh well called gordy

Fuck off Sugar, there's a dear.

Out of interest, do you know how much you would have to earn a month in order to do better than you do now?

Must be quite complicated to work out (factoring in child tax etc.)

I really think that state pensions should be means tested. There are some really wealthy pensioners out there (including my parents) who do not need it.

This really irritates me.....incense's me actually.....anyone with a private pension had paid twice throughout their working life so why on earth should they be penalised for their hard work and financial control....especially when one can chose not to work or contribute throughout their life and then reap the benefit of their profligacy.....it would surely encourage people not to have a private pension....and I say this as someone who does work, will get a state pension but cannot afford a private one

Yes, because we are obviously going to take lessons in ethics from someone who thinks sex chatlines are a legitimate form of work.

You do know that it is not illegal to be a prostitute either?

OhGood / OP / Anyone interested

There is a very good calculator here for working such things out

FFS, SugarMouse.
I don't know where to start with you. I want people in the OP's position to able to afford basic presents for their DC at Christmas, especially in a country as wealthy as this one.

Besides, have you ever seen a) the condition and b) the availability of (for example) secondhand boys' school trousers? New in that instance is not a luxury.

In a culture where almost no one gets presents of any note for birthdays and Christmas, then missing out on those things is not a very big deal. We don't live in that kind of culture. Yes, we are probably way too materialistic for our own good, but no matter how skint I was, I would move heaven and earth to have a few things for my DC at Christmas.

As you can see from my earlier post, I'm not 'soft' on benefits. I hope, though, that I am also not 'soft' on callousness.

rainbow the NI system should be a contributory system for everyone. Dismantling that is where we are going wrong. It would be a mistake to further weaken that by means-testing the OAP as that would further undermine support for the (very necessary) welfare state.

I'd rather go the other way and make unemployment and sickness benefits much more useful amounts initially, boosted by individual contributions records (as in Europe).

Universal Child Benefit was also something that kept support for the welfare state high. Sadly now gone.

No sugar they wouldn't be upset by no presents. They are happy well adjusted children. However someone other than you makes the rules, and someone other than you has decided that the welfare state should give me enough that I CAN afford to buy them some presents. As gordy says, there is a welfare state and ATM it doesn't see fit to leave me and my family in such dire straits that we have to busk in our spare time.

. I have plenty of self respect however much sugar would like me to be humble and ashamed. Thankfully I haven't encountered anyone with her degree of vile judgmental "opinion" in RL.

Arsenic, I'm with you about universal benefits: if everyone benefits, everyone can see the point. People should be able to see the point without directly benefitting, but unfortunately human nature doesn't always quite work that way.

It does my aunt's nut that she and her husband lived very frugally and she gets very little help from the state now because she has savings and investments (not lots, but some), whereas her neighbours who burned all their readies off on holidays and new cars in their working days now get various top-ups. If anyone had told her she wouldn't get her state pension because she'd saved too much, she'd have had their hand off.

To clarify, they wouldn't be upset by no presents at their age. As they got older and saw that everyone else got something at Xmas and they didn't they would be upset - because that's a normal human emotive reaction ... Something which sugar seems lacking in.

In order

I didn't mean the children should busk instead of school, I meant after school and on weekends

Read that link. Child performance licences still required, even if it's after school.

"Children do not require a licence if each of the following applies:

the performance is unpaid;
the performance does not require the child to be absent from school; and
the number of performances is less than five and no other performances have been undertaken in the previous six months."

In school hours, the OP can do a silly dance on her own. It will keep her fit, the public entertained and she can claw her self respect back.
Are you actually even a member of the public? As in, have you ever gone outside? The public are not entertained by silly dancing, and the public call 101 about unlicensed busking. Note that under-fourteens can't get busking licenses. This is because child performers are regulated as I already have tried to explain to you.
www.gov.uk/busking-licence

Right now, she is lower than a big issue seller! At least they do something for their money!

What an interesting thing to say. I never regarded Big Issue sellers as particularly low. Right now, what she is doing for her money, is being an unlicensed public nuisance in the shopping centre, and I find that quite sufficient.

*is not being an unlicensed public nuisance.

Arsenic, I'm with you about universal benefits: if everyone benefits, everyone can see the point. People should be able to see the point without directly benefitting, but unfortunately human nature doesn't always quite work that way

So very true.

Would love to have £900 a month left after mortgage and council tax!

Don't really understand why you say you're scrimping things (cheap clothes etc)

I would feel rich on £900 a month, and that would be for me, husband and two kids.

Arsenic, I'm with you about universal benefits: if everyone benefits, everyone can see the point. People should be able to see the point without directly benefitting, but unfortunately human nature doesn't always quite work that way

Sort of. I had CB taken off me for earning too much and I was actually in favour of that, as long as they put it back into the pot to increase benefits to families that actually need it and not people doing what renard says she does I am not wild about universal benefits.

But I do want my state pension because I am going to need that.

No, I'm not necessarily advocating my list. Indeed I would favour what the green party propose - a universal payment of the same amount to all adults whether you work or not and you pay your rent, your mortgage, your food or whatever out of that. No means testing. If you choose to live with another adult whether you are married to them or not whether they are a sister, or friend then you both get that weekly payment. If you live with 3 adults as we do in our house then that's 3 payments etc. It would have to be fairly low to retain an incentive for people to take work though.

I think though it's a shame if children and women on benefits are not grateful. Surely we all feel really grateful every day for all kinds of provision other hard working tax payers enable us to have like the NHS and the like. I don't think it is wrong to expect those on benefits to feel grateful. It's part of the positive mind set which will help them into back into full time work.

I don't think we can easily solve the conundrum of how to make work pay. We could stop child benefit, tax credits and housing benefit entirely and wages would rise to a fair free market level rather than low wages being propped up by the state. That might work.

I don't agree that single mothers have to have no money. I am a single mother of 5 and have always worked full time. The fact I never took maternity leaves nor went part time nor flexi time is one reason I am not on benefits now. We tend to reap what we sow in life.

Beast, your human nature clearly works very well: you can see that other people need the ££ of 'your' CB more than you do. Not everyone can manage that, and this means that universal benefits are a handy little bribe to focus the mind.

I can see that renard has made a lot of friends on this thread.

The cost of means testing a benefit, as opposed to it being a universal entitlement is absolutely eye-watering Beast, in percentage terms of cash paid out (I wonder if I can find a link). It makes me highly suspicious that the Child Benefit change is just a first step, because the saving cannot be as impressive as billed.

ArsenicFaceCream, if losing 80 a month is enough to stop someone on a high income supporting the welfare state then they probably wouldn't have supported it anyway. I completely understand why that money has been diverted elsewhere.

The fact is that Oxfam says that the children most likely to live in poverty these days are the children of working parents: not the children of people on benefits.

Children are far more likely to have cardboard in the soles of their shoes or miss out on out of school activities if their parents work. It's an absolutely horrendous state of affairs and something needs to be done about the welfare of the working poor.

I have very little patience for people like the OP. 900+ a month in disposable income is a very healthy income indeed. Given no rent or council tax, prescriptions, dental treatment, work travel or expenses will come out of that she is an awful lot better off than a great deal of people who work. If she is finding things tight she might have to make a few hard choices about where her money goes. Brownies is nice but it is not an essential and many working families could not spare the cash for activities like that. I'm sorry I have no patience for somebody who has that amount of disposable cash and thinks they are hard done by. She should be bloody grateful. I have nothing like that amount of cash to spend each week after rent, council tax and work related costs are taken out of the equation I have nothing even close to that amount of money. The only time I have visited a dentist in the last 15 years was when I was pregnant and had free treatment.

I have friends who live in the south east who watch people who've never bothered working but have gone into the benefits and council housing system living in relative comfort whilst they live in a studio with two children and can't get into the council housing system because they're not prepared to put their children through the trauma of the homeless system. I've had the experience of living in one of the hostels you have to go into to get a council house and no decent person would keep a child there any longer than possible. You have to listen to women being beaten in front of their children every night, it's full of drunks and drug addicts, you're robbed blind, it would be almost impossible to hold down a job in one of those places.

I don't begrudge people receiving help when they're in need but when they receive generous help like the OP and moan about it quite frankly they can stick it up their arse. Not interested in their whinging. There are an awful lot of people who work in much more pressing circumstances, they should be bloody grateful.

aer, the OP does say she's grateful: she uses the actual word.

ArsenicFaceCream, if losing 80 a month is enough to stop someone on a high income supporting the welfare state then they probably wouldn't have supported it anyway. I completely understand why that money has been diverted elsewhere.

You might think so, but decades of academic research have consistently said otherwise. It's an 'all in this together' psychological effect, I suppose.

and can't get into the council housing system because they're not prepared to put their children through the trauma of the homeless system

What a strange thing to say. The homelessness route to social housing is for people who have no choice isn't it? I.e. who are homeless. Not for feckless people who choose to traumatise their children for personal gain?!