Minimum £44 per week on clothes and £106pw on social/cultural activities???

[Snowflake65]

For one adult and two children - does that seem excessive?

Just completed the calculator on the Joseph Rowntree Foundation website and this is what it says is minimum income standard

Funnily enough it is telling me my salary is not enough - I should be earning £35,000 a year to have a minimum standard of living or when I put in my actual mortgage and utility figures it told me I need to earn £40k+

Surely they cannot be right? If they are campaigning against poverty I would have thought they would use more credible figures, or maybe IABU.

www.minimumincome.org.uk

Ok, I know I must be doing something wrong because it says the actual amount we need to be earning is double what we do earn. But I know so many people that are in very similar boats and people on benefits that are worse off. You just cut your cloth according to your..... what's that saying, you make the best of it really.
I try not to think of us as poor, my oldest child has gone from asking if we are to stating it as a fact and I find it heart breaking. Compared to most of the world we are absolutely loaded just by virtue of having running water and sanitation.
I don't know what my point is, just rambling but it's all very well to be saying that in order to have a decent standard of living we need a household income of £40 grand plus but it's just not how things are - at the moment, so I just find it a bit depressing.

You can go in and adjust for mortgage, rent or other costs.

Its not very helpful because I have an adult disabled son living with me but it won't include him

Gas and electricity is underestimated, surely? Or is that just me?

As far as I understand it, the figures are based on their surveys of what people think a minimum standard of living should be - so yes, it's what most people think.

Having spent a considerable part of my adult life living in poverty (not any more, luckily), the figures seem high to me. I wonder whether they're distorted because those on higher incomes can have an unrealistic idea of what really is essential. But on the other hand, I don't think anyone should live a miserable, joyless existence where every expenditure is a cause for worry. So I don't mind them setting the bar high.

Deblet I would factor your son in as a child as you will be financially supporting him.

it seems to think I should have £50 a week for social / cultural activities, except that's about as much as I have to l live on! And would love for my utilities to be as low as they say!

Yes I suspect it is based more on what well off people see as essential.If you spread this throughout the year, so include holidays and xmas, this is about what we spend. But we are nowhere near poor.

It says that we need just under 50k and we are well short of that. It doesn't take account of disabilities and there is one in the household and that adds a lot of extra expense. We probably do get through quite a lot of money on clothing but I'm not sure how much. We don't buy expensive clothing but the toddler is growing fast and the disabled teen goes through a lot more clothes than your average teen due to the nature of his disability. We also have to spend a horrendous amount on food due to special dietary requirements (teenager and toddler would be very very poorly if we didn't stick rigidly to the diets).

You would have to factor in DLA and any other benefits that the son is in receipt of snowflake, as income. Too simplistic to assume absolute financial draw. Certainly the DLA payments bumped our family income up considerably.

Poverty is about so much more than lack of money. It's about lack of aspiration and lack of opportunity as well. Children whose parents spend next to nothing on extra-curricular activities or family social/cultural activities will be children who are doomed to never break out of that social mobility trap.
But you can use public libraries for free, listen to the radio for free, visit free museums, have days out at local attractions or interesting towns for just the price of getting there, have conversations about current affairs, books, music, art .... It's possible to give children social and cultural experiences without spending large amounts of money on extra curricular activities. OTOH, some parents might have no shortage of money, but not think of doing any of those things.

£44k per year , 2 adults , 3 kids .

That's near enough what we earn between us ,give or take ...we do certainly not live on the poverty line , no where near .

Its made me feel like I don't spend enough on the kids I thought they were spoilt little buggers

Agree the clothes figure sounds high. I doubt we'll spend that much this year despite having kitted out a 14 year old for boarding school and her brother starting an early growth spurt.

Strike through fail !

Many towns and suburbs no longer have public libraries or free amenities any more as that funding was cut under the first wave of austerity Dorothea. Furthermore, getting to the free activities/locations you mention isn't free. It can easily cost more than £20 for a family to get somewhere on public transport. That may be a huge chunk of your food budget.

And if free museums offered the same opportunities as some of the paid-for clubs, don't you think we'd see more social mobility and fewer parents of private school children paying for certain opportunities?

The trouble with long-term poverty is the absence of hope and the way it robs people of motivation to change. Day-to-day existence becomes exhausting doing just the necessary. Sometimes finding that necessary oomph to get the family out for a free picnic (even supposing you can afford the transport to get there, the utensils to pack it up and carry it there, and have the sort of food that can be utilised in such a way - not easy if you're meal planning), is just too much.

What it says on the website is: 'The Minimum Income Standard for the UK shows how much money people need, so that they can buy things that members of the public think that everyone in the UK should be able to afford.'

Some of those members of the public will be millionaires, others will be very poor. I presume it's an average of what they come up with. Basically it's pretty meaningless.

Good post, Pounding.

hmmm we have a family income of less than what it says you need for a basic standard of living but i think we have a decent life. We go places and eat out and arent in masses of debt.
We are 3 grand under the amount we are supposed to have apparently!

however we dont spend any money a week on clothing or childcare. But we spend far more than they allow for rent almost double!!

so that they can buy things that members of the public think that everyone in the UK should be able to afford

So not "the minimum to survive" but "what people think is OK".

You may be happy doing only free activities, but I think it's a good thing that the average person thinks that children SHOULD be able to afford one or two paid activities.

Well said btw Pounding. People who have never been poor have no how much energy, time and effort it takes to manage life on a low budget. It is so stressful knowing that if food gets burnt/goes off/drops on the floor then that's it, you're going hungry, or if a jumper gets torn then that's one less thing to wear because there's no money to buy a new one.

It's not so simple going on a lovely day out if your eldest child has a hole in his trainers and you can't afford to buy him new ones until pay day. And as for 'just the cost of getting there' - for some families the price it costs to take a family on a bus is enough to mean that there's one less dinner for mum next week.

Doesn't seem to be anywhere you can factor in a dc living away at uni in London whose student loan etc doesn't cover all their costs.

Another well said Pounding. I remember the moment I know we we were poor when I was growing up. My mum accidently dropped a box of eggs on the floor and I walked in on her crying over it. They were to be our tea for the next few days and there wasnt a penny left to buy anything else. It's hard to understand if you've ever been through it.

I posted on another thread about saving money, we pay out for extra curricular things but seldom go out.

I think people get a sort of blindness when it comes to money. My very lovely, intelligent, well educated friend used to fret endlessly about how little money she had. I was confused because her husband had a much better paid job than mine and I was doing fine but I assumed she had big outgoings for some reason. Then we went out and she spent £90 on curtains in John Lewis. I was agog. There was no way I could ever have spent £90 on anything, at the time. I stopped listening to her pleas of poverty after that.