To think most of MN don’t know what having no money means

[icecolddrinks]

And that admitting to having none is humiliating.

I see it here all the time. Someone has no money. Someone suggests something to make life easier. The person says again they have no money. MN suggest a cheaper version.

On the thread about dress up so many people were saying to tell the school.

I know debt and low incomes aren’t ideal but they aren’t uncommon either so why is it so hard to acknowledge that someone might have 3p in their bank account and no money?

Sorry, OP, I incorrectly attributed @TwinsandTrifle's comments to you in my previous post. (slaps self on wrist)

Rightmove currently has one 3-bed property that's not above the LHA for the Brighton Broad Rental Market Area, which extends from Shoreham to Newhaven and a good 10 miles or so inland from the coast.

And I'd bet good money it's not even available to people on benefits. Trying to find a landlord who'll accept benefits is tough.

And I don't blame the landlords. When I was looking for someone to rent my flat for a year or so (while we rented in our new town and house hunted) I didn't want to rent to anyone on benefits - despite knowing what it's like from the other side - because of most council's policy of not rehousing anyone unless they've been evicted. This means that if you give your tennant notice and they can't find another place in time, if they go to the council for help, the council will actually advise them to ignore the notice, stay on and wait until eviction papers have been served and only leave when actually evicted. This costs the owner significant time and money.

In the end, I was talked into renting my flat to a friend on benefits and when we needed the flat back to sell, so we could buy stop renting and buy a family house for ourselves, we ended up in exactly the situation I feared. My friend couldn't find a place and the council wouldn't help.

Instead of evicting my friend (which we would have to do if it came to it) I offered to help with the flat hunt. I looked every day for 4 months, alongside my friend, for a place that would accept benefits. They were like hen's teeth. We eventially found one, my friend moved in for a day, on the first night the ceiling caved in due to damp and the landlord didn't come to fix it! So he was back at mine before he'd even handed the keys over.

In the end, he moved in with another friend when a room became available, so it was luck and not the suppsed safety net that got him a new place. Meanwhile I was looking at not having a house in the town we wanted to live in, in time for school admissions. It was a nightmare.

People who don't have to go through this system have no idea how tough it is and how the cards are stacked against people and the poor are punished for being poor.

[quote FreshFancyFrogglette]@Bunnyfuller save the electric from devices oh yeah that 30p a week is guna make all the difference!!
i regularly pawn my hp laptop, and i get £30 . we are not poor because we use devices !! we are poor because of greedy landlords taking over half our wages before we even start thinking about living... if i was paying a mortage rate, rather than rent, i wouldnt be considered poor. i actually earn a really decent wage, but most if it is being rinsed to someone who gets paid to sit on the arse, and not maintain the building properly,,,[/quote]
Quite! And that greedy landlord may well be having their buy-to-let mortgage paid by UC or housing benefit, and will end up owning a valuable asset that the taxpayer has bought for them.

How can someone realistically spend 35 hours a week job searching if they live in an area with no jobs

I once supported a family whose 19 year old was on JSA (this was pre-UC). His job seeking commitment required him to call at 2 prospective employers every week day to see if they had any vacancies. He lived in a village that only had a shop and a pub, and the bus fare to the nearest town was £6.50 return.

He used to stick his head round the door of the shop and the pub every day, and call out "Got any jobs going?"

He did look online as well, but because of poor public transport he was really restricted as to the hours/days he could work. Even in the nearest town, he couldn't get to work before 8.30 or finish any later than 6 (5 on Saturdays), and Sunday working was completely impossible.

Your inability to understand that someone who knows the system incredibly well through both personal experience, and advising others is honestly, embarassing. All because the actual experience doesn't suit your theoretical narrative. A little education on the subject would help you here, but you don't want to listen to that.

Incredibly well, @TwinsandTrifle? Given your confusion about what the LHA is and how the benefit cap works, you wouldn't pass the test to get a job on my team of welfare rights staff. And it's not that tough - two recent hires were a solicitor looking for a career change and a housing officer, neither of whom had a background in welfare rights.

@NoIDontWatchLoveIsland

Twins point has been somewhat lost in the to & fro.

There are SOME people in the uk, a tiny minority, who are living in real, hand to mouth abject poverty. Often where its genuinely no fault of their own & typically for a relatively temporary period eg on redundancy or illness or a sanction to benefits.

but there are also some people in the uk, another tiny minority (!) who are poor at budgeting/cutting cloth, and don't always avail themselves of the help available. Pretending this category doesn't exist does the first bunch no favours.

and the reality is the vast majority of the UK either earn enough or obtain enough from benefits to manage, eg affording food/housing/utilities for their families and a few treats. Many of these people are relatively poor, in that the UK has some very wealthy people and lots of people will feel hard done by that they cannot afford the holidays, cars, treats, clothes etc afforded by the better off. But fundamentally real dire absolute poverty is statistically rare in the UK, and even more rare to be stuck in it very long term.

I can only think of a very few households who were unable to learn how to manage money when given support and coaching to do so. Two of them were couples with mild LDs, two were single people with MH issues, a couple had brain injuries and one was where one partner was an alcoholic.

Most people can learn to manage their money with a bit of help. Sadly, funding for that sort of work is rarely available.

I have money now but I have experienced have none for quite a few years in the past so I do!

DS school had a lot of dc living in poverty, so had high rates of pupil premium. The town I live in has huge pockets of deprivation. Really poor, I was involved with a study of this area about a decade ago regarding grant funding, it’s not just a guess.

I don’t remember the exact scenarios but the school used this money for free trips and activities to all children so there was absolutely no difference between anyone. It meant the dc like mine who didn’t need it free got it free but it stopped any kind of singling out. I think that head teacher did a really good job of inclusivity.

I haven’t read every comment so sorry if someone has already said this but it’s always more expensive to be ‘poor’. If you have some spare money you can stock up on buy one get one free offers, you don’t have pay on credit cards or take out loans to pay for necessary things.

Debt is expensive. Not being able to plan for the future because you can’t afford today is expensive.

@Maggiesfarm

PrettyLittleFlies: Have you read the full thread? Plenty of posts berating women for frivolities. .......... I've dipped in and out since the thread started.

Nobody should berate someone else for being poor and everyone deserves the occasional treat.

However being resentful of those who are well off is hardly helpful.

Let me translate that last. “Aiming and redirecting criticism away from the internecine war of division, of those who have to fight over the tiny bit of wealth that’s left, set up by our lords and masters who are raking more of it in every day and laughing at everyone who is fool enough to work for their money on ridiculously inadequate wages, is not what I want to see. How dare you see through the imperialism and new slavery that’s being re-established.’

For your petty minimising ‘resentment’ and ‘chips on your shoulder’ I give you fully legitimate anger at the way we are all being duped and taken for fools. At the degeneration into crime and turbulence on our streets, legitimised by those at the top, who bear no consequence for it. There’s only so much wealth to go round, why do you feel the need to defend 1% of the population taking so much directly away from the poorest?

@melj1213, I'm sorry you've had such a tough time.

Your experience is a good example of how decisions that were the best at the time can end up like a millstone round your neck by just one change of circumstances.

I hope that things soon improve for you.

@NoIDontWatchLoveIsland, approx 20% of people in the UK are in poverty.

commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/sn07096/

I think that's a significant proportion, personally.

I've been in an actually broke situation.. I've been a young mother with a baby and a toddler, a partner desperately looking for work and £20 a week to do everything. Rent was covered back then by housing benefit, as was council tax, but £20 a week didn't cover food, nappies and gas and electric on token meter, let alone actually needed extras like travel to job interviews or babygrows. All because my partner lost his job for taking a week off when i almost died during pregnancy, tax credits couldn't seem to work out what our entitlement was and it took 8 weeks to sort out child benefit for the baby. Our only option to eat was to go to my parents house and when the fridge broke it was hell. In the end I resorted to using the self service checkouts that had just been introduced to do my shopping as healthy start vouchers don't just deduct the cost of fruit, veg and milk on those, but take it off the total. The guilt genuinely kept me up at night.
Benefits were sorted out, but the depression of still living week to week, using our last bit of money to top up the 3g dongle for job hunting and trying to provide for our boys was soul destroying. We didn't have a food bank within walking distance then either.

There are definitely options for making things better, but when you're struggling like that all your energy goes on just surviving. There's nothing left. You cant see the forest for the trees, and outgoings get higher every time you need something. Sure, you could get that bed for your kid from Facebook, assuming it's still there in a couple of months when you've saved up enough money, but what do you do in the meantime when their cot broke and they have nothing but a basic cot mattress to sleep on? You go to somewhere like brighthouse. Where you not only pay higher than the cost on ebay, you also pay a tonne in interest. We live in a world where only the rich can afford to be poor.

It took 5 years to drag ourselves out of that situation. And the main reason we were able to is someone gave me a chance and saw that I was hardworking, ambitious and determined. I'm incredibly lucky and so many people don't have that someone.

Lakielady those statistics are relative poverty, which is really just measure of wealth disparity as it's based on the proportion of people who have incomes under 60% of the median income.

The reality is in the UK a low percentage of people live in truly abject poverty.

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_percentage_of_population_living_in_poverty

It does not mean that those people don't matter. There may be tens or even hundreds of thousands who are very poor. But there are tens of millions in the UK who are not, therefore, true absolute poverty in the UK is rare and where it does exist its often circumstantial and short term in nature.

My point being lakielady that I think trying to classify people who feel relatively poor, and are managing on a tight budget, struggling to afford treats, in the same bucket with people who are missing meals & malnourished due to poverty, does a disservice to that latter group.

@tomorrowalready any mention of the MP and the duck house really makes me laugh. Don't think he will ever live that one down.

@NoIDontWatchLoveIsland

My point being lakielady that I think trying to classify people who feel relatively poor, and are managing on a tight budget, struggling to afford treats, in the same bucket with people who are missing meals & malnourished due to poverty, does a disservice to that latter group.

Being unable to afford shoes for DC when they need them, for example, is poverty. You don't need to be malnourished to be in poverty.

I hate the idea of every pupil buying teachers thank you gifts anyway. Where we are, we do a gift from the class - maximum 5 euro donation, but you don't have to donate anything or you can put in a euro and it doesn't make any difference - the gift is from the class so nobody is left out. That means the teachers get a decent present instead of tat and everyone is happy.

33feethighandrising

I totally agree. But being able to afford a cinema ticket but not to be able to get popcorn as well, is not absolute poverty.

Also Lakielady the stats you link to include that 15% of people who own their own home outright are living in poverty. There's a big choice being made by those people not to liquidate a huge financial asset to meet your income needs. It's not absolute poverty if you own a house outright.

I read threads like this and I wish, wish, wish, there was a legitimate, ethical, dignified and legal way to partner up people who want to help with people who need a little bit of help.

I don't have much spare but I have enough that I could help out someone with a bus pass for the first month, or pay for a month's WiFi or buy a pair of shoes for school.

Those little things could help. It's a pipe dream isn't it?

I said personal gifts. Any gift given to a nurse personally eg box of quality street would be shared with the ward and put in this office (maybe 30 people!). It is in our code of conduct to not accept gifts. As for the consultants claret that was totally unnecessary and was most likely also shared with secretarial staff from my experience. A letter to the hospital would have been far more appreciated im sure.

Unless you have lived it I think most people dont get it. When I had very little one ex friend thought getting a credit card was a good idea! All she ever thought about what the here and now. She couldnt understand that I had to budget very finely. Then when she was in my position her answer was payday loans and eventually a man to keep her.

I get having no money at the end of the month and the stress of having an additional expense no matter how small.

There also isnt always the correct support to get people out of poverty. Sanctions dont work and there's not enough access to decent training. Qualification can be expensive to get and like mentioned earlier force employers to pay a decent wage, pay our carers, childcare staff etc a decent wage. Put decent limits on rental charges, provide grants etc so people can afford to move Areas.

I find a lot of people look at poverty from a place of already having a lot of stuff. Its hard to explain but my sister fled her abuser in the middle of the night and had nothing but the clothes she wore. She had to get everything and yes its really exprnsive to be poor as you have exprnsive electricity rates and can only get cheap things that need replacing a lot. I had a rough financial patch but already had a winter coat and a pot to cook in etc. It was only when things started to wear out/ need replacing that things started to feel tight. But i had an in built buffer of stuff and could carry on all my cheap deals. Luckily i found work again but the buffer collapsed..