To think wages should cover the cost of living?

[KeepYourCup]

I'm a single parent, I work full time and pay for childcare for my primary school ages child. I physically can't work any more hours and my salary is just above the NMW.

I rely on top-up benefits from Universal Credit to get by. We have a nice life - nothing fancy but there is food on the table, a comfortable home, car etc. I realise I am in a better position than many people who claim UC but it pisses me off that I am left relying on it each month.

Last month they wiped out my entire payment with only a couple of days warning. I am appealing that decision but in the meantime I ended up having to borrow money to cover a couple of bills and a repair on my car.

Single parent families are normal, and households should be able to get by on one wage. My rent alone eats up almost half of my take-home pay, and I only live in a two-bed flat so not a huge house with a garden or anything.

I realise its all relative and that everyone's circumstances are different, but there is something very wrong when an adult working full time doesn't earn enough to cover the costs of simple living when there is only one adult and one small person living at home.

AIBU?

This isn't aimed at you OP I'm just making a point.

When people trot out the 'get a better paid job' or 'look at promotion' or 'can you not retrain' on MN do you not realise that some people may only ever be able to work in the sorts of jobs that pay minimum wage (and we need them to). I work with lots of lovely people every day and in reality this is where their capacity lies. Absolutely no problem with that - they still get up and do a honest days work and they should absolutely be able to afford a decent standard of living and a few 'treats' for going out to work full time each day.

I think we are stuck with this for as long as wealthy older home owners are more likely to vote - and vote Conservative.

Things got worse with the voter suppression that resulted from the introduction of individual voter registration, which statistically has penalised students and private renters and favoured home owners.

www.google.co.uk/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/feb/21/individual-voter-registration-conservative-party

Planned boundary changes post-Brexit are also expected to favour the conservatives by as much as an extra 40 seats:

www.google.co.uk/amp/s/www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/tories-rig-next-election-planned-boundary-changes-benefit-a8471811.html%3famp

And if we lose Scotland, the conservatives confidently expect to be in power forever.....

It’s also Labour’s fault. Why is it that when for the first time in 40 years, Labour has policies targeted specifically at addressing the issues of inequality in this thread, nobody seems to be aware of them - or if they are, they start worrying about ‘Corbyn’, ‘back to the 70s’, ‘marxism’ etc etc

It’s almost as if lots of voters want to defer to their ‘betters’ - and maybe many still prefer to see themselves, despite all the economic evidence to the contrary, as members of the ‘aspiring classes’...

And some even still seem to associate the Conservative party with sound economic management - even as we watch them drive through a change that everyone accepts will be economically harmful - especially to people like the OP.

In the end, we get what we vote for.

Has anyone mentioned the knock on effect on MH that the residual low-level anxiety has, of never quite knowing how secure your housing is, if you rent and have a low income?

Any day you can come home to a letter telling you that the landlord wants the property back for X (spurious reason). You need to move out, without savings, (you can't afford to save because you are paying so much in rent, and therefore have no deposit for a new place), knowing you need to stay near your job and your children's schools, and that your chances of getting a reasonably priced property that you can afford and is suitable are nearly nil.

Is it any wonder that MH issues are increasingly common?

The taxpayer is effectively subsidising companies and corporations by topping up low wages.

I pay taxes.

No doubt someone will be along to say unless you earn X amount and pay X amount you're taking out more than you put in. But most weeks my ni and tax contribution, equal or almost equal (depending on exact hours) what I get back in child benefit and tax credits. Probably costs more than that though to do all the paper shuffling involved. I do get free prescriptions, however don't get free school meals or housing benefit or anything, so I'm probably 'taking' less than most people would assume I am for being on an in work benefit.

I don't know what the answer is, but I get really frustrated to read British Gas made £466 million in profit last year, and that was 19% lower than the year before. Yet still put prices up and would imagine they've got min wage employees on the payroll too. That's just one example, sometimes feel when I go home after a 12 hour shift and I can't really afford the heating on for as long as I want, that my main function in life is making others rich like I can never imagine! I'm on more than NMW, not much more, but I worked hard to get to a position that's deemed worth a few pennies more. And I'm still entitled to help because it's still not enough to live on, and actually as my wages increased and TC dropped (as it should) I'm financially better off, my employer is just paying a larger amount of my income, I'm left wondering if it was and is worth the extra work and responsibilities some days. It will be eventually I guess if I get another promotion and 'even out' and maybe another after that will see me earning above the threshold. Sometimes it's hard to keep a positive frame of mind about it though.

*should say NOT financially better off

I also think we need to look at taxing wealth & not just income as there is too much disparity between older generations who tend to own & younger ones who don't

But we did have this and it was an unmitigated disaster.

The “wealthy” left taking any tax they would have paid with them and left the “bill” for running the country to the middle and lower paid.

I can only go on from my own experience.
Starting out I was paying 75% of my income in rent. (At this point I didn’t even live in London). I had a job in a bank.
(Monthly income £80, Rent £15 per week)
To get by I had to take Saturday jobs and when I turned 18 I worked in pubs.

Even when I bought a flat with Dp the equivalent of my whole wage packet and a bit of his went on mortgage payments but it was still less than renting.

High housing costs are not unique to the younger generation. Housing has always been 50% of income untill you get to the point of paying off your mortgage.

I do think that sometimes you need to sit down and ask if you need to work smarter and not harder.

Recently watched the tail end of a programme about people who work 100 hours per week and still can’t make ends meet and are on benefits.

I did my watch the whole programme but the one person I did see was a guy who seemed to be spreading himself very thinly with the amount of businesses and jobs he had and from the little I saw I could see that a lot of what he did either went to pay off the running costs on other businesses he had or just wasn’t worth him turning up as the cost of getting to and from the work was costing too much.

He would be better off concentrating on one thing. (and it wouldn’t be the funeral parlour).

I do think though there always have been jobs that don’t require any particular qualifications but do pay sometimes better than the regular 9-5.

For me when I was younger it was weekend (Friday, Saturday and Sunday) night shifts in the local supermarket

It is just a matter of finding them in your area or looking further afield.

We moved 200 miles to an area where the opportunities were better.

I can’t think about if we had stayed where we would be now

I also think we need to look at taxing wealth & not just income....
But we did have this and it was an unmitigated disaster.

When did we ever tax land in a meaningful way? Much of the wealth in the UK is in land and as asset its not taxed in the way income is.

For me when I was younger it was weekend (Friday, Saturday and Sunday) night shifts in the local supermarket

What year was this would probably be useful to know tbh

How much and how able would you be to get childcare for said shifts?

Our tax system definitely favours the very wealthy. I know numerous very high income people who put everything through the business accounts and don’t pay any tax at all. The poorer PAYE people have effectively subsidised their barn conversions, children’s school fees, weddings, children’s houses, family cars, consumables etc thus having very limited outgoings and hiding income quite legally. There’s also an awful lot of super rich avoiders who earn large sums - think millions - and register as offshore business to avoid tax quote legally. Income tax hits low to middle earners disproportionately.

Far worse is our national failure to collect corporation tax from very large companies like Royal Mail, BP, Centrica, Cafe Nero, Vodafone, Waterstones, Gap, Boots, EE, Topshop and many others. Billions of unpaid tax.

The thing is @Oliversmumsarmy it's not as simple as moving to get a better paid job, or working smarter. Are you a landlord perhaps?

I have a home in SW London with lots of equity, this wasn't due to hard work (although I'm a hard worker). It was simply because I happened to buy fairly young due to help from my family. Someone working just as hard or harder than me & earning more but paying rent & without family support would not have had that opportunity.

I'm surrounded by older people who had modest jobs but have ended up with million pound homes, 2nd homes & good pensions. Now I'm sure they have worked hard but those opportunities are fewer today for younger people willing to work just as hard.

I have 2 young kids so I care about it & I had need teachers, police, nurses etc for myself & my children. I don't want them all to leave to move to a cheaper area, besides that just passes the issue on.

JustAnotherPoster00

At the time I was earning around £4000 per year doing a 9-5 job when I found our local supermarket was offering jobs on similar salary for doing 10pm-6am Friday, Saturday and Sunday nights.

It was 1985

Didn’t have children at the time but if we did I am sure Dp would have been more than capable of looking after children

How can we expect 25 yr olds to pay huge uni fees, pay rent & save for a deposit, pay NI for a pension they are unlikely to see, & a NHS that will likely not exist in its current form, save for a private pension, spend money on services to keep the economy going & potentially pay more tax. But have older wealthier people not carry any burden.

If I was young I would leave the country.

I agree I work full time in a school, have 3 children and after paying the rent, council tax and utilities I have £40 left of my wages. If it wasn't for tax credits we couldn't eat which just seems ridiculous. I started work so I didn't have to rely on benefits but here I am still relying on them.

surely a full time working adult should be able to live on their own without having to struggle?

A single adult is going to be to some extent in competition with working couples for the same properties. Where property prices are determined by competition among wage-earners (rather than say construction costs) it makes sense that you have to earn above average in order to afford to live on your own.

I just read today how the likes of Amazon paid a tiny amount of corporation tax relative to the billions they made in profits. All due to complex business location arrangements, is in a low tax regime country, and use of loans which reduce taxable profits but stay within the company and can be siphoned off by the directors and CEO as non taxable pay/benefits.

We need to seriously crack down on these global corporations via a tax system that is designed to tax the new type of businesses that have emerged due to the internet. The tax system is out of date and designed for the old style of business that usually had one base in the UK and was taxed on it's entire UK profits with much less scope for claiming it's registered office was in some low tax far off location.

I agree with pp that we have voted in the sort of governments that favour this type of set up. But it's not quite that simple. Big business, the Tories are in bed with the right wing media which has a massive influence on how we vote and ensures in an underhand way that we continually vote for a govt that only benefits the wealthy whilst pretending to help the majority of ordinary workers and families.

The internet is now another weapon in the right wing media, businesses and Tories arsenal. And I have this horrible feeling that this situation is only going to get even worse. Add to that brexit and the growth of AI which will wipe out millions of low paid and many higher paid jobs and the future looks very very bleak for a lot of people.

I know numerous very high income people who put everything through the business accounts and don’t pay any tax at all. The poorer PAYE people have effectively subsidised their barn conversions, children’s school fees, weddings, children’s houses, family cars, consumables etc thus having very limited outgoings and hiding income quite legally.

There is no way to legally avoid tax by putting the things you mention through business accounts. It either didn't happen, or you know a lot of criminals who are stupid enough to boast about breaking the law.

That is not lawful and most busines owners do not do it. I never have in 20 years of paying loads of tax as a self employed sole trader.

As for people wanting to tax ownership of assets it never tends to work very well and has even failed most recently in France. I tink it was cyprus which confiscated 10% of people's savings in banks and I know Corbyn wants to hit orindary people's pensions by doing something similar in terms of confiscation of abohut 10% of big companies.

As for land taxes the big estates from around the 1920s had to start giving them away to the National Trust etc as death duties (inheritance tax) became so high - they had all the fields but not much income so had to sell up. Obviously some did survive but most farmers for example are not very well off even if their land could be sold for £500k.

If we decided to tax the equity ordinary home owners have in their house (or even the value of their house even if they have a 100% mortgage on it or negative equity) it is hard to be fair. eg The equity in my house has been taxed at 40% plus whereas my elderly neighbour very little of her equity even allowing for inflation since the 1970s will have been taxed at 40%.

The thing is @Oliversmumsarmy it's not as simple as moving to get a better paid job, or working smarter. Are you a landlord perhaps

I have been a landlord. But I have gone to work longer than I ever was a landlord.

Dd is 19 and doesn’t work a 9-5 job.
She has set up her own business and does work over the course of the year 6 different jobs. Some she will only work 3-4 days per year some she works 3-4 days per week.

This week alone she has gone from one job to another to another to another to another all on pure zero hours contracts that allow her to work for other people and pick and choose which shifts she does.

She hasn’t had a day off for 12 days.

Even today she has been at work since 10am and is scheduled to not finish work till midnight.

A lot of her friends are at university and have not worked a day in their life.

In about 18 months time her friends will be coming out with a degree and a huge debt.

In 18 months time Dd is looking to buy a 2nd property. (Very cheap very grotty auction properties)

Dd has been offered a “promotion” and ft work in the offices of one of the companies that she works for.

Even without taking into account actually getting herself to and from the office she earns more doing 3 days per week for them in what is considered a lesser role than she would do working ft.

This is what I was trying to say about working smarter not harder.

If she had childcare to consider it would probably restrict her (it would be a nightmare if she had a ft office job) she would choose shifts where her Dp would look after dc rather than pay for childcare.

Her Dp also has his own business and wfh and doesn’t work a 9-5 job either.

I am sure they would figure it out if the hypothetical ever happened.

Atm though they both live at home and won’t move out till they can afford a place round here for cash.

I do think though some areas don’t have the opportunities and maybe moving is the way forward.
We did years ago and it was the best move we ever did.

Why on earth are your DD and her dp wanting to buy a house for cash? Far better to save enough for a deposit and max out their pensions, claim the tax relief and give them plenty of time to grow. Money tied up in property is not working for you. Barely any capital growth for the foreseeable future, no income and no tax advantages. Not financially savvy at all which is another huge problem in our society.

Why on earth are your DD and her dp wanting to buy a house for cash? Far better to save enough for a deposit and max out their pensions, claim the tax relief and give them plenty of time to grow. Money tied up in property is not working for you. Barely any capital growth for the foreseeable future, no income and no tax advantages. Not financially savvy at all which is another huge problem in our society

They want to buy for cash because

A. They wouldn’t get a mortgage. They are self employed

B. They don’t have pensions. They are teenagers.

and C. Money tied up in property is working if you choose the right property for the right price and know what to do with it.

I agree with pp that we have voted in the sort of governments that favour this type of set up. But it's not quite that simple. Big business, the Tories are in bed with the right wing media which has a massive influence on how we vote and ensures in an underhand way that we continually vote for a govt that only benefits the wealthy whilst pretending to help the majority of ordinary workers and families.

This is political and this poster touches on what seems to be going on. It is beyond me why anyone who cares about themselves, their family or the environment/society we all live in would vote Tory unless they were extremely wealthy, which lets face it, most will never be.

I had an email off someone the other day. Under their signature it said "we are a living wage employer". I'm not sure whether that is something to show off about!!

@SalemShadow one of our contracts states that all employees engaged on the contract must be paid at the London living wage and the company advertises this - I'm the account manager for this contract & I'm not even paid the regular living wage

www.bigissue.com/latest/ken-loach-this-is-capitalism-working/