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

I'm single and live alone and they were almost exactly right on rent - but my rent is below market rent for the (poor) area. My council tax is 30% more than they suggest.

Also food is £44.72! I don't spend that much! Good job there's some left over for my alcohol budget

Meant to add - when I actually had the suggested income, it felt like a fortune. I was putting lots into savings every week.

There are exactly 29 properties on Rightmove within 40 miles of where I work that would be within the 'default' rent amount (I looked for up to £400/month). All of which either appear to be really tiny rooms in house shares or somewhat dodgy studio flats.

I don't think that housing cost generalisation works particularly well.

We earn over £80k combined, admittedly with a stupidly big mortgage at the moment. Only adjusting the household income and the mortgage we are living in poverty

Joseph Rowntree figures are weird. Rent and council tax are absurdly low. I remember seeing some figures that were lower than our tiny mortgage that was £180 pm, but appararently if you don't have quite generous figures to spend on things like lottery tickets, 'social and cultural activities' and alcohol then you have a unacceptably low standard of living.

So no appreciation of the real world where rent/mortgage/council tax can be unaffordable but if you can't buy all the lottery tickets and alcohol you want and have to buy Yankee Candles because you can't afford Neom or some other such frippery, you are leading a deprived lifestyle.

Barbara - if they underestimate rent and council tax, but overestimate other things, don't they cancel each other out?

I entered the real outgoings like mortgage and water, and it turns out we have a mighty 45p per week left over if we're spending £40 a week on new trousers. I assume there was no allowance for pension contributions, so we can stash away a good £25 a year if we're super careful.

Personally I think that these figures are skewed to say more people are in poverty than actually are.

I wanna know where they get the projected figures of rent/council tax and house insurance from.... my figures are much higher and I don't live in a spectacular house.

I did realise our calculator allows for £9.21 for alcohol! Are you deprived if you don't buy wine?

It's ALL clothes though isn't it?
I spent about £20 on clothes for myself since Christmas.. HOWEVER, in the last month:
1 new school skirt
1 school shirt
1 brownies uniform
2 pairs of non school shoes as girls had outgrown everything but wells
2 tee-shirts
DH bought a pair of work trousers
I bought a raincoat that actually keeps rain out.

so, yeah! guess so! haven't been buying fashion outfits, but yeah!

"wellies"

It looks superficially a lot but Idk. I've just bought a gift for a child's party, my dcs ' pens for school and a replacement swimsuit for my growing dd - £35 not budgeted for in my monthly expenditure. It's really easy to rack up.

And for next payday so far:
DDs swim suit is a bit small
I've popped the wires in all my decent bras
Older DD needs new school socks..

Yeah I can definitely see us spending that much on clothes.
I never go "clothes shopping" as in recreational buying of fashion items

but if you include picking up a pack of school shirts cause they put permanant markers on theirs, some tights that won't ladder on 1 wear for work, a jumper for DH because his are looking scruffy….

And there's a f*cking ballet performance coming up so obvs we'll be expected to contribute to the tutus which will be a totally different colour to last years tutus because they couldn't possibly re-use…

Then there'll be a dress as a fricking victorian unicorn day at school.. so that'll be a last min dash to primark!

Interesting figures.

The website says I need to have an income which is about £6,400 more than my income is AND has set the rent at about half of what it really is.
No wonder I'm always skint

I'm off to adjust some of them and see what it comes out as

Just adjusted the figures to what they really are. I now have a shortfall of about 13k per year.

I am single, paid off mortgage a while ago and the annual amount that comes up for me is not much more than I earn per month. Think 17k annual on the calculator.

It looks like a lot. But that's only £14.60 per person for clothes. If you add up school uniform and shoes and every day wear and winter coats, dressing gowns and wellies and sports kit etc, I bet it does add up to something like that.

And the social/educational money averages out at £36 per person. Seems like a lot but if it includes holidays and presents for friends' birthdays, the chance to so a dance class or learn an instrument etc, then it's not so much.

And for an adult, if you take off a percentage to cover Christmas and holidays, £35 just about covers one night a week having dinner with a friend or going to the theatre or to a film or a gym membership and a quick drink. I think the point they're making is, it's not excessive to want these activities in your life. It's pretty ordinary to have that level of desire to mix with others and learn extra-curricular things. And that's what it costs. Being unable to afford these drags your spirits down after a while.

Haha to the rent at £90 a week and also the assumption that I spend around the same on food - if only!

I think these are just ball park figures. For 2 adults and one child I've been given figures of £33 for clothes and £77 for the social activities. I would have thought children would be cheaper than adults? Or does this reflect the fact that children keep growing out of their clothes?
But I don't think the numbers are that big if you break them down a bit. For example they suggest £90 a week for food, which I immediately thought was huge. It's much bigger than my supermarket bill, but if you add in the extra milk and bits from the corner shop and a few lunchtime sandwiches I'ld say we spend more than that. Likewise the clothes. We don't buy clothes every week, but if you add in school shoes, winter coats, school uniforms etc for DD who is growing really fast, I'ld say £1000 per year is not far off.

Ours comes out at almost £24k EACH! We don't earn anywhere near that. I wouldn't say we are poor though. We do ok. But I don't spend anything like that on clothes or social activities (what are they? 😜)

When I put our mortgage in, we need £70k between us. That makes sense, we spend peanuts on clothes, hols etc. I though we were fairly rich.

It's a very odd list snowflakes. You specifically mention clothes and 'cultural activities', but all the figures are so precise and odd that they must eb averages from a basket of places and people. For example, in London/South East where I live, £1,833.72 annually on mortgage/rent wouldn't pay for a garden shed. Obviously however some folk (like me) no longer have mortgages, which skews the figure.

So with clothes: 30 or 50 of me could probably fit comfortably into Cara Delivithingy's clothes budget, and 50 - 100 in Jeremy Clarkson's motoring budget (although TBH these two probably get a lot of that stuff free).

On the other hand, £4 a week for alcohol looks seriously and dangerously low ...

mumof3boys33
"But I don't spend anything like that on clothes or social activities"
really? not if you average it out over the year?
You have 3 boys, do they not have or go to birthday parties? don't you do Christmas or easter or halloween? Do you never travel to your mother or MIL with a bunch of flowers on mothers day? None of your kids have any extra curricular activities at all, even ad hoc?

as for clothes: no school uniforms? shoes? don't your kids always lose their winter hats like mine? Dito summer sun hats?