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?

Maybe it's because I was well off in years gone by but £500 a month after bills and food when you have 3 children isn't "loads".

I'm grateful for my benefits, they put food on the table and I can cover our essentials plus maybe the odd take away or some new undies for myself but it's not loads, it's just not. Enough yes, but it's no way to live long term whether in benefits or in work

IMO plenty of older MNers will understand it, since we remember an era with no cash machines or ccs - you had to go to your own bank and v likely have a stern interview with the manager if you needed an overdraft, or wanted a loan. I had to see the manager before getting a loan for my first car - £150 for an old Mini - and satisfy him that I was responsible enough to pay it back at £10 a month, IIRC.

So if you had one and four pence halfpenny in old money (about 13p) to last to the end of the month, as a housemate of mine once did, that was it - unless you could sponge off well-off parents, as she so often did.

But many others didn’t and couldn’t. During our seriously skint era dh and I wouldn’t have dreamt of asking our not-well-off parents - it was a case of living extremely frugally - for quite a while we practically lived on homemade veg soups, bread, and the cheapest possible cheese.

PP money shouldn’t be used generally. It should be used specifically to raise outcomes for those children.

That’s only applicable to the extra pupil premium for LAC. FSM pupil premium can be spent more generally. Our school don’t provide free trips, music lessons etc. I know because I have asked for help with a residential trip and been told no.

I once when I was very skint had to take my jewellery to a pawn shop so my dd could go on a preschool trip that was £15. She was the only one without a parent going with her because I couldn’t find another £15. Thankfully we are not in that position any more. We didn’t get free school meals then either but do now.

@icecolddrinks

I teach secondary. I know who the pp children are who I teach and so should everyone.

Why? Why does the maths teacher need to know that PP paid for the revision book not me personally? Why does the English teacher need to know that PP paid for the Macbeth study guide? DS is in school, clean, in correct uniform, homework done etc etc. Nothing else is relevant to the teacher. He doesn't need extra classes on account of being PP. He doesn't need to sit at the front of the class. He doesn't need any extra input at all. We just get help paying for all the things he needs. (Which schools provided to everyone in my day)

I’ve never been skint, I’m very lucky to have had support from my parents and always been able to work.

I have worked with people who have struggled financially and I can totally see how it happens.

Benefit errors are frequent and leave people getting into debt with horrific payday loans to sort it out.

Zero hours contracts make top up benefits even harder to claim when needed because income is changing all of the time.

Landlords often fail to resolve issues like broken washing machines, damp etc so people had to spend money on it themselves because they couldn’t wait, and had to get into debt to do so.

The wait to receive universal credit often leads to getting into debt.

Personal independence payment and child DLA get wrongly refused all of the time (I used to help appeal these and had 100% appeal success rate) many can’t cope with the process and quit and don’t get what they’re entitled to, having to scrape by for things they need like taxis to hospital, convenience foods when they can’t cook a meal etc. Mental health issues were the hardest to get benefits for, the assessment process often made no sense for mental health issues.

Most fathers didn’t seem to pay maintenance to single mothers, either the father didn’t work or was self employed and hid earnings, leaving her struggling to raise kids alone (there were also very good fathers and single fathers but I saw struggling single mothers the most). I did see fathers who refused to reduce their voluntary maintenance payments even when their hours were dropped at work and they couldn’t afford rent, because they were scared of not getting to see their child.

Obviously there can be alcohol, gambling or drug addictions which have no easy fix.

Asylum seeking families get an absolute pittance which is impossible to live on.

Immigration issues could also lead to a lack of entitlement. There were European single mothers who had lost their job and whilst we tried to argue they should get benefits their only income was £30 a week from social work who were often good but also often grudging to give them that so their children could eat.

Domestic violence where the abused partner fled often meant the need to use up any money they had on a deposit and buying belongings left behind, it’s easy to end up relying on payday loans whilst dealing with that. Spaces in women’s refuges were often few and far between. Whilst in the relationship there could often be financial abuse.

If you are a single healthy jobseeker UC is very low and buying things like interview clothes, haircuts, transport to interviews, paying for decent internet to apply for jobs etc could be very difficult.

Young people get less benefits even when they have the same expenses, it’s often expected that parents will help but many have no parental support.

There’s obviously more restrictions on benefits than ever, such as 2 child cap, benefit cap, bedroom tax. Bedroom tax makes no sense as it often wasn’t possible to find a suitable smaller property for example when an older child moved out. Sometimes for example an autistic child needed their own room but the cap was still applied.

These are just some of the issues. Many of those struggling in poverty were in work. Although budgeting and life skills are not taught enough and are important, they won’t solve all of the systemic issues caused by austerity, zero hour contracts, payday loans with ridiculous interest, high unauthorised overdraft charges, lack of mental health services and support etc.

For more info from a recent objective UN report: www.ohchr.org/documents/issues/poverty/eom_gb_16nov2018.pdf

We've been absolutely stony broke. More than once. Certainly couldn't have afforded botox. Can't afford a car, despite living in a town where there is a fairly basic bus service & we're 2 miles from the train station. And I'm disabled. And DH uses a stick to walk.

When I was on maternity leave our joint income was my maternity pay plus child benefit. We were approximately £150 a month short of being able to pay our rent & bills. Without even considering the question of food. DH had lost his job & because I was employed & technically on full time hours, he wasn't entitled to any jobseekers benefit. We weren't entitled to anything else for the same reason. I got to the limit of my overdraft before my maternity leave ended, the rent bounced & I had to borrow the money. Lied to the bank about my return to work date so I could get a loan in order to pay the rent. Took a year to pay it back. 4 years to pay off the credit card we'd been using to pay for food, I did manage to switch it to 0% after I returned to work so it wasn't accruing further interest. DH lost weight as he didn't eat properly most days, we often went to the supermarket just before closing & if there was stuff knocked down to 10p, we got that - bread, vegetables etc, occasionally meat or tins. Sometimes there wasn't anything. He made me eat more as I was BFing DD. But we couldn't really afford food & had to go to the food bank which is run by the CAB here. They usually give 3 days of food but it was Christmas & they sent us home with a massive bag & another enormous box of food, enough for absolutely weeks because they couldn't believe how completely screwed we were financially. We just weren't entitled to any help at all.

We were homeless last year. Our LL sold our house. No-one would touch us, due to not having 2 incomes. DH was working FT at the time.

DH hasn't had new clothes in years, except for shoes. Occasionally his parents turn up with something they've found at a car boot sale. Sometimes it fits. His 1 jacket he wears for work & job interviews came from a charity shop for about £5 & I repaired the ripped lining.

I think many people think there are cutbacks to be made. If you've already cut everything back to the bone, there's nothing left.

I remember being on a, thread about people buying goods at places like bright house, some posters just didn't understand how some people don't have savings as surely everybody can afford to put a few pounds away a week, I tried explaining that yes on payday I could put a few pounds away, but come the end of the month, when I have no money in the bank and it's a couple of days before payday, my kids still need feeding, so I'm going to use the few pounds to buy food.

@Soberanne

Sorry but for most benefits is not enough to live on. Like i previously stated, i work full time and get tax credits. I have one child. My rent is not covered and i get minimum tax credits. I get no CT rebate nor do i get free school Meals. I dont have any debt, but by week 3 of the month i have nothing left. Please dont tell me to find another job as i am the person looking after everyone elses kids so they can get to work. If i was paid a decent wage like so many others including carers i wouldnt need to live in poverty nor rely on benifits.

👏🏼

@icecolddrinks

No of course not.

But someone has said children on FSM aren’t singled out. They are.

Positive singling out is still being singled out. That’s really humiliating for some people. And even just being known as someone claiming FSM is for some people.

It's only the school and parent that knows. If you think that it's humiliating that the school knows then there's no solution for that really- they have to know. Most schools work hard to make sure there is no noticeable difference in how the children are treated regardless of circumstance (PP LAC etc). If it is just down to personal pride I guess there's no solution for that either 🤷

In a good school these things would be done in a way that is not obvious. Who knows whether you paid for the hoodie, school trip etc other than the school and parent

The office staff. And if you think they don’t treat you differently, just look at some of the comments on here. People from all walks of life think ‘that parent is just making the wrong choices’ ‘that parent if just a benefit scrounger. That parent should get a better paid job’ etc etc.

When you have so much shit to deal with you just don’t need anyone else’s judgment or pity. Some people don’t care. For others it’s just too much to deal with.

@LegoCaltrops

We've been absolutely stony broke. More than once. Certainly couldn't have afforded botox. Can't afford a car, despite living in a town where there is a fairly basic bus service & we're 2 miles from the train station. And I'm disabled. And DH uses a stick to walk.

When I was on maternity leave our joint income was my maternity pay plus child benefit. We were approximately £150 a month short of being able to pay our rent & bills. Without even considering the question of food. DH had lost his job & because I was employed & technically on full time hours, he wasn't entitled to any jobseekers benefit. We weren't entitled to anything else for the same reason. I got to the limit of my overdraft before my maternity leave ended, the rent bounced & I had to borrow the money. Lied to the bank about my return to work date so I could get a loan in order to pay the rent. Took a year to pay it back. 4 years to pay off the credit card we'd been using to pay for food, I did manage to switch it to 0% after I returned to work so it wasn't accruing further interest. DH lost weight as he didn't eat properly most days, we often went to the supermarket just before closing & if there was stuff knocked down to 10p, we got that - bread, vegetables etc, occasionally meat or tins. Sometimes there wasn't anything. He made me eat more as I was BFing DD. But we couldn't really afford food & had to go to the food bank which is run by the CAB here. They usually give 3 days of food but it was Christmas & they sent us home with a massive bag & another enormous box of food, enough for absolutely weeks because they couldn't believe how completely screwed we were financially. We just weren't entitled to any help at all.

We were homeless last year. Our LL sold our house. No-one would touch us, due to not having 2 incomes. DH was working FT at the time.

DH hasn't had new clothes in years, except for shoes. Occasionally his parents turn up with something they've found at a car boot sale. Sometimes it fits. His 1 jacket he wears for work & job interviews came from a charity shop for about £5 & I repaired the ripped lining.

I think many people think there are cutbacks to be made. If you've already cut everything back to the bone, there's nothing left.

Thank you for sharing

Just wanted to say that your child would NOT be treated differently at all.
A teacher would only be aware if they looked it up for data reasons. Please, please, anyone reading this who might be in a similar situation, apply!

Absolutely! One school I worked at, in one of the most deprived areas of UK, had a real problem with parents who were eligible for FSM not applying for it. We were desperate to encourage them to apply for a number of reasons, one of them being that we could attract more funding the more FSM we had.

It’s not just in a b&b as @LemonRoses inferred.

She didn't infer all people in poverty live in B&Bs. She clearly gave a situational example.

@icecolddrinks

But they are singled out.

They are identified as pupil premium students and different schools spend this money differently but it always involves singling out.

They are not singled out in a way that is noticed by anyone who doesn’t need to know for the child’s own benefit. The school staff working directly with a child will know if they are pupil premium, but that doesn’t tell us whether the parents are on benefits now or not, seeing as children who have been on FSMs are considered to be pupil premium for six years after their parents stop being eligible. Other children that are considered PP are adopted, or looked after, or from service families. There’s isn’t a separate list of children whose parents are struggling in benefits, and the only reason teaching staff would know that a child is PP is because they are held accountable for their education, so need to know of the potential barriers to learning.

The is no need for anyone to be put off claiming help they are entitled to though schools. The end goal of both the school and the parent is to do the best they can for the child.

I agree. I also think it's silly when people comment to say that their income is similar to the OP's and they're fine so the OP must be doing something wrong. It's not just about income, it's about expenditure too! Rents vary massively for a start, along with council tax and water rates. There's very little you can do about that without moving to a cheaper area- which I know is often suggested, but really isn't that straightforward.

Then there's those that think people just need to work harder if they want to earn more money. It's like they're suggesting that those on minimum wage don't work hard, and those earning millions do. We all know that's absolutely not the case!

Being 'skint' has different meanings to people. To me (i've been there) that's having not a penny, no savings, no overdraft or credit card.....absolutely no access to money.
To a friend it's having a few hundred left after buying £150 jeans, £80 tshirt and £500 to menage that month. No i'm sorry but that's an insult to those who really are skint.

@OlympicProcrastinator

In a good school these things would be done in a way that is not obvious. Who knows whether you paid for the hoodie, school trip etc other than the school and parent

The office staff. And if you think they don’t treat you differently, just look at some of the comments on here. People from all walks of life think ‘that parent is just making the wrong choices’ ‘that parent if just a benefit scrounger. That parent should get a better paid job’ etc etc.

When you have so much shit to deal with you just don’t need anyone else’s judgment or pity. Some people don’t care. For others it’s just too much to deal with.

I did say 'in a good school'. Sadly not the case in all schools but the same could be said about how many other places don't treat people with respect, eg, drs receptionists (not all - I have experienced fantastic ones and the not so good!)

I was talking to somebody the other day who said they were struggling to pay their bills. They are single with no children and earn $110k/year

Right so, your situation is not reflective at all of the norm. I'm an accountant. I know the "system" so to speak, and your tax credits should have taken no more than a month to instate.

You had no money because you had an almost unheard of administrative wait of 8 months. You weren't receiving anything. This is not what we're talking about.

I worked in Tax Credits back when it first began right up until around five or six years ago.

The eight month wait? Not at all uncommon especially in the first five years of the scheme, in fact it was so common that we had a team dedicated to dealing with those claims who would try to get them processed. It still took ages though because their worklist was so long (which tells you in itself how many claims they were dealing with). There were also claims that went into what was called 'Out Of Payment' (or OOP because HMRC loves an acronym). OOP meant that the system was recording payments as due but not actually issuing them to BACS so people were getting no money at all. The solution was to make an M1 referral to my team who would attempt to force the claim to update and issue payment (alongside the backpayments), if that didn't work then it had to be escalated to TCO who would put the claim into manual payments (a giro through the post every week) but that wouldn't include the backpay and there was always a chance the giro would go missing in the post too. We dealt with a lot of those. A claim could sit in the unprocessed stage for months due to VF failures (basically information the system didn't recognise or couldn't verify) and the call centres lacked the functionality to clear these so they would have to be referred to back office staff, again this had a massive worklist so would take ages to be cleared. Initially Working Tax Credit was paid via employers, we told them how much to pay and they added it to the employees wages then claimed it back. A lot of employers didn't properly understand this so paid the wrong amount or didn't pay it at all, some didn't want the hassle so would tell the employee to request manual payments from us, others would do things like dock the Working Tax Credits for all sorts of (not allowed) reasons.

We used to get accountants calling in who thought they knew the system better than us. We had a name for them. It wasn't complimentary.

I think a few people are missing the point with ‘your child won’t be treated negatively’

I’d bloody hope not.

But that’s not really the point here. I’ve worked in a few schools and they all do it differently, sure, but if the money is being spent properly it should be about targeting those pupils and making the gap smaller. It’s hard to do that without some singling out, even in a positive sense.

If you use SIMS which I think about 98% of schools do, a quick look at a class register will tel you who is PP, who is EAL and the ethnic background of a child. It’s nonsense to say schools don’t know. Yes the kids don’t walk round with a tattoo but it’s still fairly public knowledge and not everyone is OK with that, especially if they have strong links to the local area.

One of our performance management indicators is the performance of the PP children in our class. So we are absolutely expected to know who they are and in the data analysis, the progress of the PP students is a key performance indicator.

Someone poster might post about literally not being able to make ends meet ie no money, and people will always suggest "moving to a cheaper area" as if moving is a) instant and b) without initial cost.

This is also suggested to people who were high earners but lose that income. Any suggestion that this isn't an easy move is treated with derision.

Completely agree op, and it's not just MN. Britain contains many worlds, and they don't meet. No one with money has ever understood what it is to have none - not 'but it's only a tenner' or 'but it's only for a short time', but but but it's only or just this that or the other, but NONE. No one who has been sheltered and had a nice upbringing ever understands that Britain isn't a nice place for everyone, and not everyone has choices. It's pathetic, but that's the way it is.

@TheQueef DH is 67 and in a manual job, he can't physically work more hours, if I worked more than 10 hours a week, they'd just take the difference off our WTC, what do these people expect us to do?

@Hamnetssister

One of our performance management indicators is the performance of the PP children in our class. So we are absolutely expected to know who they are and in the data analysis, the progress of the PP students is a key performance indicator.

Same.