To think people on middle incomes are forgotten about?

[Squeezedout]

I am so upset tonight and just need to vent. I have always worked, as has my partner. We have 2 children who we could provide for until my industry pretty much collapsed and I had to find a less well paid job.

The cost of childcare and rent (south east) is absolutely crazy and I can’t keep up. I put in an application for universal credit that said we’d be entitled to a few hundred a month so have jumped through every single hoop, taken unpaid days off work to attend a job centre (the irony!)

Only to find out now (6 weeks after the initial claim) that we are entitled to roughly £4.50 a month.

On paper maybe we have decent salaries, combined with the rent and childcare we can’t even break even each month. I know we are not alone.

It seems in this country that if you are the poorest of society, you are helped (in terms of council properties with decent rent, council tax help, 2 year funding and everyday benefits as well as lots of media attention to the problem) to ensure you have enough to live on. If you’re the richest in society, you obviously don’t need help but the squeezed middle are just completely forgotten about.

I am NOT benefit bashing at all but It really doesn’t pay to work sometimes. I’ve calculated how much better off I’d be as a single mum not working in a council house and tbh I cannot keep taking out loans and am starting to think this is the only option to keep my kids fed.

AIBU to think the ‘squeezed middle’ are completely forgotten about in this country? And that it is fucked up that I can’t feed my kids on an average wage?

@Squeezedout
Childcare costs are the killer and if its any comfort once the kids are at school, things do get a bit easier financially. I know you may not feel like it but honestly you don't want to go on benefits or envy those on them.

I help out at a charity and from what I can see, the poorest are treated dreadfully, the arbitrary use of benefit sanctions is cruel leaving people with no option but to visit a food bank. Free food you think but the stuff they get is is not appetising nor particularly nutritious, and anyone with the means would not choose to live like this.

The incredibly well off are able to look after themselves.

I'm not sure I get it - I'm a lone parent on circa 30k a year, I get no benefits apart from CB (£80ish is it a month) and I think I'm doing pretty well. I'm lucky that I was able to buy a property. Once in London and then because London was too expensive to bring up a child I moved out and was able to buy in a cheaper area. I think moving is a perfectly valid idea, friends can be visited, family can be visited and jobs can be found. I took a massive 20k pay cut when I moved here to work part-time. Now my child is older I've gone back to full time and am moving up the ladder again. Benefits helped me massively when I was part-time so the system did it's job perfectly.

It is possible to live well on a not very high income but London and the South East is not necessarily the place to do it. However, unless your job is absolutely tied to the area I would always move.

I sometimes wish I could go back 30 years to being 18 and decide not to go for an industry that ties me to a very expensive city. Neither DH (same industry) nor I earn loads but we are stuck in London for work.

Going for a job you love isn't always a great idea, long term.

Yes. We both work full time as teachers and are just about surviving. We don't go on holiday. We don't go out. We have worked abroad as the money was far better. We have a child just about to go to uni for 6 years. I know now that her loan will not even cover her bills and accommodation. We will get minimum help, unless we divorce and I give up work. Then we'll get the highest level of help. It's shit.

If you can't change your situation (incomings / outgoings) and improve your lot within your existing environment, then you either have to lump it or change your environment. The Irish, Polish and Italian communities do this all the time. I get cross at the term 'economic migrant' because actually humankind have always tried to improve their lot globally for centuries....what's so bad? Within the U.K.....london to Chester is a 2 hr train dash....the train is packed every week with people doing just that, revisiting family. It's not ideal, but it could be a whole lot worse.

I cannot afford to retire in London. We will have to move.

I don't see any problem with interest rates being low.

Well, it's a gift to the super-rich because they lever up their investments and make a killing.

It also heats the housing market and penalises savers.

Other than that, it's great!

The problem is it's not just childcare costs Until school begins. A lot of people have to pay for the kids to be dropped off and collected, potentially til they're able to walk to school by themselves.

Yes, but the costs are a lot lower once they are at school. The really expensive time is preschool particularly before the free 20 hours (or whatever it is).

Yes. We both work full time as teachers and are just about surviving. We don't go on holiday. We don't go out. We have worked abroad as the money was far better. We have a child just about to go to uni for 6 years. I know now that her loan will not even cover her bills and accommodation. We will get minimum help, unless we divorce and I give up work. Then we'll get the highest level of help. It's shit.

I don't know where you live but if you are both teachers you should have more than required just to survive. You may be living somewhere very expensive but surely you could easily have moved elsewhere?

It's definitely all about where you live, I get shocked at some of the wages/house prices on here. DH and I earn approx £25k each, both work full time, we have a mortgage on a 3 bed house, holiday twice a year. have 20 min commutes and a DS in nursery 4 days a week. We are in the North East, yes wages are less but the house prices and cost of living is also considerably reduced to allow us to live comfortably on our joint £50k wage with no assistance (as it should be) bar the tax free childcare.

Mmm I must say if me and my partner were both teachers, and were struggling on that income in the south east, it would take one helluva support network or culture vulture habit to keep us there. It really is a nice lifestyle you can have in so much of the country on teacher type wages.

Yes. We both work full time as teachers and are just about surviving. We don't go on holiday. We don't go out.

At least you have the choice to relocate to virtually anywhere else in the country as teacher wages are pretty much the same wherever you are. Two teacher wages in cheaper areas will get you a really good standard of living.

There are plenty of people who don't have that choice and have to stay where the work is, or risk huge pay decreases to move elsewhere (or career changes).

I cannot afford to retire in London. We will have to move.

Which is the norm. It seems most people just move to London for the jobs and then move away again later in life.

Yes. We both work full time as teachers and are just about surviving. We don't go on holiday. We don't go out

@Incacat2 surely you must have a joint income of circa 80k+ if you are both teachers and have university aged dc! Depending on when qualified of course!!

I sometimes wish I could go back 30 years to being 18 and decide not to go for an industry that ties me to a very expensive city. Neither DH (same industry) nor I earn loads but we are stuck in London for work.

Yes, us too! I really wish I’d understood this when I was in my early 20s and choosing careers, but it was just never something that came up. It would be one of my first pieces of advice to someone choosing a career now - try to choose an industry/role/qualification where your services will be in demand outside the expensive urban centres.

This might be a case of the grass being greener (as these aren’t areas I know much about) but it seems to me that friends who work in healthcare, dentistry and education have far more mobility than my DH and I do because their services are needed everywhere. Whereas ours are only really in demand in London.

The "tapering away" of child benefit and of the personal allowance at £50k and £100k should also be much wider - it's an insane system where you can have "marginal" tax rates/benefit loss rates of 60/70/80% (and there's a case where it's over 100%!). Sheer lunacy.

Taper rates generally are too high. Someone on £20k, getting some help towards rent, will lose 32% of every extra £ in tax and NI. Out of the 68p that's left, they'll lose 63% (around 44p, can't be arsed to go and get a calculator) in universal credit. So out of that extra £1, the worker on a low income will get to keep around 24p of that extra £, equivalent to a marginal rate of deduction of 76%.

There's no incentive to increase earnings when your income is low, unless the increase is huge.

I don't mean to be obtuse - but what jobs are there which can only be done in London? I quite literally have no idea.

I'm in a creative industry that is almost solely based in London - there are odd small pockets elsewhere but if you left London for that job, do that job for 5 years or so and realise the job has no promotional opportunity, there will be no other options in that area, and so you're back to London which you've now been priced out of.

@Squeezedout I'm surprised that the online calculator estimate of your entitlement was so far out.

It may be that during the initial assessment period your earned income was higher than normal, because it covers more than one calendar month. One of you might have had more than one pay day in that first period, which would reduce your entitlement.

The client group I work with doesn't include people in work, so my experience is limited when it comes to this kind of scenario (and we were one of the last areas to get UC), but I know that when you get 2 pay days in one period it can take people out of UC entirely. I wouldn't be surprised if this was the case for a lot of people in their first "UC month".

You may well find that you get more in subsequent months. Perhaps if there are other benefit advisers on here, they'll have a better idea!

It’s a tiny bit more nuanced than ‘jobs that can only be done in London’ - like I say in my post, it’s about demand for services. Demand determines pay, job security and prospects.

I practise a fairly niche area of law. The demand for my specialism is largely based in London. Like @CassianAndor I could possibly find a job (at considerably lower pay) in Bristol or Manchester but I would be very lucky - and if I were made redundant or found that job had poor prospects, I’d struggle to find another one and would have to return to London.

Basically it’s doing a job where London is a seller’s (employee’s) market, but anywhere else is very much a buyer’s market (if a market exists).

I have a friend who's DH does something very very specific in banking and he would only be able to do that job in major financial centres which in the UK means London.

It would probably be easier for me (and him, probably) to find a job in New York or Sydney than it would in other parts of the UK!

(Obviously he earns a decent whack but with 3 DC they're not carefree with money.)

What is the highest combined earnings where UC or tax credits stop?

but what jobs are there which can only be done in London

It's not the job, but where the biggest/best employers are.

Over the decades, big firms have closed down their local/regional offices and relocated their head offices to London. So if you want a good/top job in a national firm, you'll usually have to go to London.

Yes, there are obviously jobs elsewhere, but usually lower paid, lower standard, etc which greatly reduced scope for advancement.

Take, say, chartered accountancy. In London, experienced CAs can command £100k+ in the big firms, plus the option of relocating to overseas branches, specialisms, etc, and several hundred K per year if you make partnership level. A couple of weeks ago, I saw an advert for an experienced chartered accountant manager in Preston on a salary of £40k in one of the town's largest accountancy practices.

In my home town, we used to have "big" employers in the city, i.e. BT, various banks, a couple of national insurance firms (one a head office), branches of national firms of accountants and solicitors. All that's gone. All we have now are local/private professional offices, a few bank branches with a handful of counter staff, etc. The "top" jobs have all moved to London, Manchester, etc.

I'm not at all surprised that the online calculator was so far out, because when we did it, it told us we were entitled to nothing at all. We went ahead and applied anyway and found we were entitled to just under 450 a month.

After decades of working & paying into the system. I was made redundant. I was entitled to £73 a week UC
Some people possibly don't realize the reality
When my redundancy was paid, I relocated to another region for a new job

There is a choice
Some people seem scared about change