Is £1k a month enough to live on?

[EL8888]

I was debating with my mother whether it was possible for a person to live on £1,000 per month. Bearing in mind there is no rent / mortgage to pay (house is paid for), no debts and they own a newish car plus they have a Freedom card to use. They live alone with no dependents or pets. I said it was enough and she said it really wasn’t

I live in a 2 bed house in London

Your costs aren’t comparable as you don’t live alone.

And £250 a month for gas and electric is incredibly expensive and not at all usual for a 2 bed house.

My figures are average so some might be higher, some cheaper. If a single person chooses to spend £250 on gas and electric then that’s their choice to do that instead of have holidays/hobbies.

Of course can’t have everything on £1000pcm after rent/mortgage as a single personbut you certainly could have some luxuries in life. Pleading poverty would be disingenuous when people are living on much less.

Errr.. I pay my mortgage, utilities, food, car finance and have fun money. I was doing this for years on £1200, could do it on £1k but wouldn’t have as much disposable income.

Had a substantial pay rise recently though so now I have more to play with and save.

My mortgage is £350 a month. 2bed semi detached, driveway big enough for 4 cars, separate garage and large garden. I live in the sticks so I don’t pay city prices I suppose.

@UndertheCedartree oh the stories I could tell you. To put it short the initial training was terrible. We were trained by people who were lovely, but they'd literally just gone on a week or two course about UC themselves and had never done the job. And the course they'd been on seemed to be all about theory and not about application.

Then we had maybe two weeks of consolidation. This is where we have a small number of actual cases and someone who's done the job wandering around among us. Unfortunately they brought too little of them. I'm a fast learner, but often had to twiddle my thumbs for an hour or more waiting for guidance whenever I came across something new.

Then they shove you in the deep end. We were told we'd never get more than 350 cases, but before I recently moved to a different area of UC I had over 800 and had around that number for a while.

I've coped better than most as I scour the guidance (which in some places is very vague, and in others for inispicible reasons someone higher up has decided everyone needs to go against bits of it (this might've been born out of the effort of saving time, but all these big ideas do is remove checking we had in place for fraud. Unfortunately the instance I'm thinking of when we did do out checks in those suspicious circumstances we discovered around 98 percent was in fact fraud and the claimants quickly removed the children who were in fact not in their household as soon as they were asked for evidence those children were living with them. But now the oficial line is just verify the child and don't ask for any evidence they have the child. But that's a different rant.)

I also ask questions, questions, and more questions until I'm sure I'm doing the right thing. But of course many of my colleagues are just too overwhelmed by their caseloads. We also have a lot of people going off on stress, and some who do seem to be too fed up with everything to put as much effort into the job as they might otherwise.

Way more than I have left after rent

@20formerbabe that's a good post.
There's living to be had after bills isn't there. (Rhetoric).
I'm living that life. I might need to give up my car soon (15 yo Corsa)

Yes, I have £1900 and my mortgage is £1000 of it.

Living on the breadline. And that's working people!