AIBU to think one adult should be able to support a family with a full time job?

[Kendodd]

Talking about a normal size family, two/three children. Not talking about riches either, just an ordinary place to live and everyone well fed and clothed, all needs covered without state benefits. Any full time job as well, not just some fancy high paid thing.
I know for lots of people working really hard in full time jobs supporting their family just isn't possible on the money.

YANBU - they should be able to support a family.
YABU - they shouldn't be able to have a home and children on an unskilled job.

Yanbu. But with the proviso we overhaul taxation, not working through choice is perfectly valid, but you should still be obliged to contribute to the system.

Completely agree we need a massive increase in social housing. Not just enough to cover everyone that needs it to avoid homelessness or make ends meet, but enough for everyone within reason that might want it. So even if someone can afford private rent and still have disposable income, they can choose to have social housing and excess income to spend and save.

I don't see a problem with two parents having to work tbh, assuming that there are two parents and no disabilities involved.

I also think three children constitutes quite a big family.

At 26 I paid 12,500 for a flat, not in the SE, which was the smallest fattiest flat in the city on which it was possible to get a 90% mortgage. I had a normal if tightly budgeted social life, but no car, washing machine, telephone or TV. Flat last sold about 5 years ago for 80,000. Over those 30 years the salary for the role I did at the time quadrupled.

So things have got worse, but there was no way I could have supported a family back in the 80s either.

DH and me were talking about this yesterday. I wish people were paid a living wage so that they could have a better quality of life. We would be paying more tax that could go into public services and life would be better all around. The reality is we work and a few people at the top get stupidly rich.

YABU - they shouldn't be able to have a home and children on an unskilled job

I think YABU but that your caption is goady.

I don’t think that women should expect to opt out of income-generating work when they have children.

@Jellycatspyjamas
Are you smoking crack
Of course you “cut your cloth accordingly”
Do you realise how cheap things like “technology” are now compared to 30 years ago.
It’s like comparing buying bread in 1910 to buying bread in 1985
A phone is essential and can cost you as little as £5 p.m - of course you didn’t have a fucking mobile phone in 1980s! Because it would have cost you THOUSANDS AND THOUSANDS OF POUNDS.

You can’t buy an old car now, the huge associated costs/green taxes make it nigh on impossible, gone are the days when you could buy an old diesel for £2 and run it cheaply for years.

Buying a second hand car is expensive. Most people can’t afford it

Hundreds of thousands of children don’t have their own bedroom, what planet are you living on.

Going abroad on holiday !! Guess what CHEAPER than going on holiday in the U.K. now compared to the 70s/80s - still most poor people I know DONT GO ON HOLIDAY

and people like you wonder why the boomers are so hated

I would think it should be possible for a couple to save up pre kids & "manage" on a tight budget on one salary when children are under 3 or 4. But I dont think it should be an expectation that a family can be supported on a single wage in an unskilled job.

Productivity and modern household technology (eg good vacuum cleaners, efficient white goods) mean a housewife is no longer needed to simply "keep house", the work takes less time, so parents of school aged children can easily both work out of the home.

I don’t think it’s all lifestyle, but lifestyle definitely contributes. I was amazed how much money we saved in lockdown with minimal car costs, no extra curricular activities for the kids, no childcare costs, no holidays, days out, meals out, beauty treatments etc. These costs just slip up and up, and can make a huge dent in a weekly/monthly budget. I wouldn’t have said we lived remotely extravagantly but our post lockdown budget is much less than pre lockdown.

@Kendodd

I don't think it's possible anymore.

I know it's not possible.
The question is whether it should be possible or whether we are ok with it not being possible.

I agree with you OP - I am not sure about one unskilled FT job.

A pair of adults working full time at whatever the country calls minimum wage should be able to afford a modest house, food, clothes, transport - that should be the aspiration for the country IMO.

Where I live - this is not possible due to housing costs.

Dh is a tradesman, gave up self employment when our dts were born (8 weeks in nicu/scbu without a penny) joined a local hotel as a painter for a whole £9.63 an hour. Thankfully cvid cut everyone's hours so he's doing his own thing two days a week to earn more.

13k we earned last year, family of 6.Thankfully cheap rent in a 3 bed semi, cannot afford to move though, my older girls need it.

Good luck on minimum wage. Even full time can get topped up with benefits because it is simply not enough to live on.

@Monkeybusinesss I’m not sure why you’re getting stroppy with me, I’m not the only person who cites lifestyle as being part of the issue. The point I was making is that lifestyle was much simpler, with way fewer expectations on what would be considered essential. So if you’re saying should one salary be enough to cover housing, food and essentials you really need to be able define what’s essential, and those goalposts have shifted immeasurably in the last 30 years (when it would be much more usual to have one salary cover a families living costs).

@Monkeybusinesss yep you got it in one. Sad isn't it. I do wonder sometimes how the (majority of) boomers will be repaid with their standard of care in very old age... Think they'll be willing to pay through the nose for it? Doubt so. It's a concept that would be a struggle.

@Jellycatspyjamas
You think a phone and a car isn’t essential for most people?

I like how many people are still saying its lifestyle when I literally post a chart showing housing is 2x compared to income what it was when your parents and grandparents bought their house.

It's not lifestyle!!! housing is twice as expensive compared to income now. That's why you need 2 incomes...

And I don’t fall in the “boomer” age group, don’t have a nice pension, didn’t get free uni education, bought my first flat with a 16% interest rate. I’m very aware that poverty is real, but this discussion is about whether it should be possible to live comfortably on one salary, which very much depends on your definition of “comfortable” or essential.

Anyway the point is people on this thread as per usual say things like
I didn’t have a washing machine in the 70s
Well guess what, very few people did because they were fucking expensive. Even in the 80s my well off parents rented one.

They are not expensive now, you can buy one for £100 and spread the cost. It’s hardly comparable to buying a washing machine in the 70s which was the equivalent cost now of around 4K

If washing machines cost 4K now I can guarantee very few people would have them. And if they did they would rent them.

@NailsNeedDoing

You think ANY full time job should be enough to fully support two adults and up to three children? No, that’s ridiculous.

A full time minimum wage job should be enough to support one adult.

So people on minimum wage shouldn’t be able to have children?

@Shelddd

I like how many people are still saying its lifestyle when I literally post a chart showing housing is 2x compared to income what it was when your parents and grandparents bought their house.

It's not lifestyle!!! housing is twice as expensive compared to income now. That's why you need 2 incomes...

Yep. It’s absolutely the house prices that skew the balance.

I think it should be possible to buy a house on one salary and that it should be possible to have a comfortable but simple standard of living on one non-professional / non-managerial salary.

I don't think NMW should be enough to support two adults and 3 children though.

I think we should start with an adult with a full time job being able to support themselves. Since that's not really happening at the moment.

Since when did taking your kid to Thorpe park and buying a mobile phone mean that you needed an entire other humans wage to make up for it,
All these people working a full time job 40 hours a week just to go on holiday and buy a washing machine and phone - weird of them.

Personally I think it does have to be "they shouldn't be able".

The only way to normalise financially comfortable households with only one adult working is to make two-worker households the exception. And almost certainly that means a return to the expectation that the woman's place is in the home. No thanks.

@Jellycatspyjamas

I think it depends on how you define needs too. When we got married (nearly 30 years ago) we were both on average salaries, we bought a one bedroom flat in an ok area, nearly all our furniture was second hand from family and friends, we didn’t run a car, didn’t go abroad on holiday and really cut our cloth to suit our purse. New clothes were bought as birthday and Christmas gifts, I wasn’t getting hair, nails, brows done etc and didn’t have expensive tech etc.

You just need to look at some of the threads here to see what people consider “needs” can stretch to include two cars, expensive tech, subscriptions to streaming services, foreign holidays, meals out, nails done, brows waxed, baby classes of all types, extra curricular stuff for kids etc etc. With the best will in the world one salary would need to be pretty good to cover all of that.

Housing is a huge issue but so is the standard of living people want for their money.

This definitely. There is much more unnecessary stuff to "need" than when I was young and dinosaurs roamed the earth. I am not saying that is the whole reason but its definitely a part of it.