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

Mine said we need to earn £22,624 for a family of 5. We earn 27000 between us but once i adjusted the rent and council tax it said we where £90 a week short

£4831.82 per year social and cultural

Now while I know people who will spend that on just christmas, I don't come close, but it takes a large chunk.

4 x mothers day (me and IL and DM and Step Mum)
3 x fathers day (DH, DF, FIL)
2 x kids parties/birthday activities & gifts
average about 6-10 friend parties each a year, gifts for those
MIL birthday, SM's birthday, DMs birthday, my birthday, DHs birthday, SILs x 2 birthdays, DB birthday, DF birthday, FIL birthday, kids godparent's birthdays ( x4)
Close friend's children's birthdays
Niece and nephew birthdays
Easter eggs
a few fireworks for a cheapo NYE
a few quid plus candyfloss & funfair ride money at guy fawkes
trick or treat tat….

… I don't think they mean that people spend £4k a year going to the opera! I think its modest. As I said before I know people who would spend that just on their kids birthday plus christmas presents before they even think about ordering a turkey!

Pahahaha
It says that we should earn £21k EACH.....I don't work and hubby earns a tiny bit more than that, it told me that we need £110 more each week to have a standard of living!

Ps, I doubt that I spend £44 a MONTH on clothes for me, hub and the two girls (4&3) and we don't look like tramps, I shop at car boot sales and charity shops rather than next and debenhams is all (that's not to say we don't wear next and designers at debenhams lol)

Omg just realised i read That wrong it says we need to earn 45,247 a year between us!!! We get just over half that. I dont feel like we live in poverty the bills are paid and we have a bit of spending money then again we dont drink or play the lottery! Plus go to lots of free things!

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

So they aren't suggesting that anyone under this amount is living in poverty? Why then are people suggesting they are?

NarkyMcDinkyChops They're talking about relative poverty. Relative poverty is when you can't afford the things that people generally expect you to be able to. Thats what it means.

Absolute poverty is when you can't feed, clothe yourself or keep yourself warm.

I think its interesting that so many people think the amounts are too high. Because they are set by members of the public giving their opinion on what people "should have".
I think what might be going on is that general living standards are falling so a lot of people are living on less.
But cultural values haven't caught up with the fall in living standards so those same people will still sit in a focus group and say that people generally ought to have a holiday and be able to buy christmas presents and pay subs for their kids to do an activity or whatever it is.
The other thing is that society is becoming less and less equal so its more difficult to construct a picture of what a "normal" lifestyle consists of. The sense of shared expectations and shared living standards becomes more of a political ideal than an actual reality.
Someone up thread said that rich people must be squewing the focus groups with their unreasonable expectations of what a normal life consists of. I think there might be something in that. You must have the rich and the poor describing very different versions of normality.

I know the terminology, thank you, I'm querying if the report is talking about any kind of poverty at all. And btw, thats not exactly what relative poverty means.

I dunno- I think its a worthwhile project to try and quantify what a socially acceptable lifestyle is.
If you genuinely can't pull off such a lifestyle I think that would be poverty.

Obviously loads of people here are living on less than what Jospeh Rowntree would say you need for that. Which makes sense because Joseph Rowntree put the amount below their standard at 28% I believe.

How would you account for the fact that, when asked, members of the public will describe a lifestyle costing X amount as normal; but when given the figure X, will react by saying it seems too high?

Just read the current thread about pensions and think about how much money we're supposed to be putting into a pension every month.