What is it with being poor..

[scaryclown]

That makes everything more expensive??

I'm fuming/despairing at the moment. I've just managed to get control of my money after a period with no income and no soon as i get my first month finishing with £10 spare the fucking DVLA have written to me to trap me thus...

pay £300 or so quid NOW or we will take you to court where you will have to pay £1000. You cant pay in installments.

so because i'm poor, i'm forced to go to court to be charged £1000 because the court CAN enforce installmemts to pay...

fir a wealthier person, this is inconvenient and manageable, for the poorest its MORE EXPENSIVE ..

what the hell?

Also the reason is that i was clamped for pulling up on my 'to the MOT station' journey to collect the numberplate that i needed to pass the MOT and PAY THE DVLA ...they also charged me £260 to unclamp the vehicle.

UTTER BASTARDS...

my food bill is £120 a month

WIBU to put their windows in?

£120 for how many people?

Berny Sanders talked about how expensive it is to be poor.
It's very true.

I quote the Terry Pratchett Vimes Boots philosophy:

The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money.

Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles.

But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while the poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.

This was the Captain Samuel Vimes 'Boots' theory of socioeconomic unfairness.

Sounds fair to me. Keep your car right or don't have the cost of one

[Flowers] for you. Life sucks. I have been in your position many times. Is there no-one who you could borrow the £300 from and pay back in chunks?

That's bad luck OP
Why does the dvla want £300?

Because she got clamped for doing something that gets you clamped

Yep being poor is expensive. When you need credit the most, if you can get it at all, you will be charged extortionate rates for it, look at the rates for pay day loans. When you have plenty of disposable income,credit card companies will offer you interest free credit over 18 months or more. Mortgages, cars, loans all available for a pittance or even less, provided you don't actually need it. Companies like Bright House make my blood boil e.g. £400+ for a washing machine. If you aren't broke you can get one for £150 and pay it off on 0% interest. However, don't get clamped even if you have loads of dosh, just park where it's legal even if you have to walk with 6 kids, 3 dogs and a disabled gran.

OP it's awful

Whilst I kind of get your point - how come you got clamped in the first place. Avoiding that would have been easier.

Scary, is there a credit union near you? They will lend even to people with bad credit histories. And ignore the people wanting to know how you incurred a £300 penalty. Judgy buggers.

Are you sure you owe DVLA money for a parking offence? I thought DVLA could only clamp untaxed vehicles. If you parked on private property inappropriately, it would be a fine from a private company, surely?

And if your poor and need to pay for your utilities on a meter, that's more expensive too. I'm amazed it's even legal to charge more just because your on a meter.

Oops, posted too soon. If it is a fine for parking on private property, you can usually refuse to pay as it's a civil issue with all kinds of get out clauses.

I don't think it's fair that you get hammered for gas/electric bills if you can't pay by DD.

I think it sounds like the OP hadn't paid the tax disc because they didn't have a valid MOT - reads as though en route to get MOT done before taxing. In which case DVLA can clamp unfortunately.

Pawn shop.

Xbox/phone laptop/tablet /gold

Credit union is a good idea.

Because people with legal cars are always being picked on by DVLA

I wholeheartedly believe that fines should be government monitored and staggered by income - like taxes. If someone who earns £150K is fined on the train for not having a ticket, their fine of £50 is nothing to them. If someone earns £30K the cost is inconvenient. If someone earns £10K the fine is catastrophic. Yes, they all should have bought a ticket and all got the same fine but the cost to each individual was vastly different. This kind of thing fuels entitlement in the better off and is so damaging to those who are not.

The boots analogy that a pp posted is so accurate.

Everything in life is more expensive when you are poor. Literally everything. I'm not poor now but I have been and life is so much cheaper when you have money.

I know this feeling :(. I got into debt being in an abusive relationship, he controlled the money but the bills were in my name. I managed to leave but ended up owing a considerable amount. Debt recovery companies would offer me 25% off my debts if I could pay in the next fortnight. But it wasn't an option when I couldn't even afford to have the heating on. Both gas and electric were on prepayment by this point costing me more than most people pay. Took years to dig myself out.

Yes to Credit union.

Even our LA are trying to increase awareness of them, with Christmas looming, comparing the cost of taking a CU loan out with that of somewhere like Brighthouse. it's a very similar cost discrepancy to the one you're faced with.

Fifty, it is well known and documented that the stress of worrying about money reduces people's ability to make good choices. In this case, on the way to get the car mot'd OP stopped to pick up a Reg plate for the mot, and was unlucky enough to get caught. Perhaps if she hadn't been poor, she could have driven in her other car or got a lift in other half's car. Perhaps if she hadn't been stressed about money she would have planned better, or had more choices.

Being poor is expensive. You can't bulk buy, plan ahead, get better deals.

It's called the "poverty premium" - economists have run calculations on it and worked out it costs in the region of 10% notional extra "tax" to be poor!

The dvla say that you can have one journey to the MOT station, so i did that. They clamped me on that journey because i stopped to get the numberplate i needed and had organised to pass my MOT. I tried to tax prior but they wouldn't allow as no MOT. Of course if i had had loads of money I'd have got my FUCKING BUTLER to drive it there and get the number plate FLOWN IN ON A FUCKING GOLD CUSHION if i'd have known the DVLA were going to bemd their own fucking 'reasonableness' into 'not fucking reasonable at all'

and they bloody wrapped the clamping notices invisibly around the widscreen wipers so i nearly drove with a clamp on. They are total arseholes.