AIBU to think MN is a different universe to the real world

[FourteenSixteenTwentyTwo]

Reading a post about someone who is worried about money. Answers:

Take in ironing - honestly, I know very, very few people who give a shit about ironed clothes let alone outsource it. Plus you’d need a half decent iron to do it efficiently which costs money. And it’s usually suggested to a single mother who’s already burning the candle at both ends to survive.

Rent out your mortgaged home and rent elsewhere - ignoring the legalities of renting out a home you live in, where are all these houses where rented is cheaper than mortgages? Certainly in my area the only thing I could afford for the SAME as my 3 bed detached mortgaged would be a 1 bed rented studio or otherwise moving 30 miles away and needing to commute back to school and work.

Take it a lodger - great idea in theory and especially if single/ child free couple - but are most of you really okay with that if you have small children? I wouldn’t be comfortable having a stranger living in my home and having potential access to them whilst I’m asleep/ distracted, whatever.

I appreciate people are trying to be helpful but it just sounds like mimicked sound bites without a lot of thought about practicality.

So AIBU to think MN trope responses are an entirely different universe or do I just happen to live in a vacuum where these things are really considerable?

I think you’re pretty unreasonable to think that your experience is the real world and someone else’s is therefore not the real world. We must all be on our uppers or else we’re just fantasists who enjoy inventing answers or worse a 65 plus year old lady who apparently can’t exist in the real world either. I have a 3 bedroom house but sadly / thankfully only have 3 toilets. I’ve sent my ironing out to be done but have never had a spa day. My advice would be filtered through my own life experience as is anyone else’s but I don’t claim to speak for anyone else which is a massive bugbear of mine. Sweeping generalisations being far more irritating to me than a piece of I’ll thought out advice.

I iron (well DH does the ironing) and most people I know iron their clothes. Who are all these people who don’t? But perhaps they wear clothes that don’t need ironing.
I know of a very very well to do woman who has a gardener, daily, chauffeur and sends out her ironing. (Who knows what she does all day)

I have friends who rented out their flat and moved to a rented house as he had a two year contract in a different area and didn’t want to spend all the money it would cost to buy a house.

I have lived as a lodger. The landlady was a newsreader for local TV. She lived in once city but worked in another. She had two female lodger so it allowed her to stay for a few days in the other city knowing that her 15 year old daughter wasn’t completely home alone.

Yes none of these situations will help someone struggling financially but they do exist.

Yes MN is a different world. Full of champagne socialists who've never actually lived in deprived areas they like to talk about.

I agree with @basicDad
I have learned a lot from reading these threads. Obviously not everything will be truthful, but everyone here has different life experience, values and goals.
Definitely broadened my mind about feminism, money, and problems people are experiencing.

Sometimes it’s unbelievable. There’s one right now where rhe op has basically said my husband has been fired for gross misconduct and is lying to me snd I’m heavily pregnant with a toddler

And some folks are posting that poor poor man, he must be so stressed, get a job you lazy woman.

It’s actually unbelievable

Nope yabu.

People are thick and blinkered and unaware of how others live in the real world too.

Only different here is you hear more of it, more frequently. Its just stuff people thick but don't say normally.

@Bluntness100 I’ve been following that one and agree with you. Especially the shitty comments about her losing out on getting her nails and hair done when no such thing has been said. It’s an awful situation and I think sometimes people just need a handhold and REAL practical advice like ‘contact your mortgage provider and see if they can give you a month or two payment holiday’ - not, oh your poor husband you are Satan for not understanding. Take some fucking ironing in!

And I agree there’s a lot to be learnt and it’s fabulous place for women on occasions - it was a lifesaver during pregnancy for me - but some posters can be so out of touch they cause more damage than good because their world is nothing like reality for most.

Some are, but I think there is also a very middle class outlook. Get a lodger, much easier if you have an annex for example. There is also an age thing, up until 5+ years ago people could male good money on the side with ironing, £2-3 was the rate to wash and iron a shirt and I live in a town where the trains used to be packed commuting into London, with half of the men in suits.

Also for many who went to uni, my husband and I both worked whilst at uni, I worked full time whilst doing my masters, my husband worked 50+ hours a week in his day job, plus evening bar work to get extra money, both my husband and brother did at times work 40+ hour day jobs and 30+ hours bar work to make ends meet when setting up their businesses. It is a very middle class outlook but 60-80 hour weeks have been the norm for many at some point, of course that is a lot easier of 40 of those hours involve being sat down.

I think that many also forget how much easier being in a couple is, especially having a decent partner. Bills get halved, tasks are easier you actually get a break sometimes. Very different if you are a single parent or have a partner so useless you might as well be.

It is also a lot easier to get a proper perspective when your life doesn't feel like it is shit or constantly on the verge of falling apart. Either I or my husband could quit out jobs and do bits on the side for spending money, but the mortgage and bills would still be paid, it seems much more of a mountain if both working still means struggling with money.

So not a different universe, just a middle class one.

You can’t just rent out your house if you have a mortgage.
You will need a buy to let mortgage which will have a higher interest rate than a homeowner mortgage.
Then you will need landlord insurance and then gas and electricity safety checks.
All these you need to pay before you even gets tenant.

A lot of advice given on here is pretty useless in the real world.

@kinzarose

I keep reading about how all of the MN council estates are full of doctors, judges, barristers etc and never, ever have any ASB. All of the problems are caused by the ruffians in the adjacent private housing.

Thanks be fair, mine does have plenty of middle-class professionals in the privately owned houses.

What really gets me is the idea that people in minimum-wage "low-skilled" jobs should all leave and retrain and get better paid jobs. I don't want to live in a world where nobody does minimum wage jobs. When we went into lockdown and praised the essential workers who kept society functioning, and we longed to go to pubs and restaurants and shops etc, that was the work of those "low-skill" workers that we were valuing. But as soon as people complain that those jobs don't pay enough to live on, the people here suddenly stop valuing and respecting that work.

I totally agree. I was reading a thread about things you buy the best of - ignoring the fact that most posters would not be able to identify their precious brands in a blind taste test, I was surprised to see Cadburys and Twinings mentioned by posters as being cheaper versions of their respective products. MN has its value but for anything related to money or housekeeping I definitely prefer the MSE forum!
However, re lodgers - there was someone on MSE who did a mortgage diary and she did have a lodger and children and it seemed to work really well for them. Hers were teens though and there were enough bedrooms for everybody.

The thread about the boost to UC ending reminded me how painfully out of touch a lot of MN users are. I hope a lot of them aren’t actually that devoid of empathy in real life, but you never know.

I did wonder how long it’s been since some of those people had an actual conversation with someone actually on benefits (and not “someone’s cousin’s friend who is totally gaming the system -and rich on benefits no REALLY”).

Around my area In London there are people on FB pages offering home cooked food and delivering to people's homes (relatively wealthy/time poor). They are mostly people offering an interesting cuisine from their country of origin e.g. fresh bangladeshi dishes, they offer a limited range each week ans batch cook which I think is good as some english people would find a really authentic curry tricky, a really good idea imo.

Also 're the ironing, our cleaner used to stay an extra hour to do ours as DH needs shirts for work and the kids are never not at my side long enough to get the iron out, also she was much better at getting the folds right.

So it can work, there s actually a major shortage of reliable cleaners in my area and the FB page have had to delete some of the recommendations for cleaners as they were getting inundated with requests.

So if you are wealthy you might see these as obvious opportunities but if you don't live near a wealthy area then that obvs won't work

@Draggondragon

I am probably rich in the scheme of things as I earn a tax free salary and have corporate free housing. Not so much on MN but I sponsor people and don't mind being asked. I have just lent a friend £3000 so she can pay her bills and buy petrol for work. I pay school fees for my Nepali cleaners children and I give an allowance to neices and nephews who are at university. Having bathrooms and a big house isn't all that, it's what you do with the money you can spare. I am no Saint and spend far too much on holidays and treats but I also think we have a responsibility to the people in our lives if we are lucky enough to have fallen into a situation which makes us able to help

@SmileyClare

When my dc were younger I approached an ironing shop who were advertising.

They gave me a large canvas bag of ironing to do as a trial. It took me the best part of a day to finish, I folded it carefully, hung the shirts on hangers in cellophane as I was instructed, hauled it into my car, and drove it to the shop.

The manager called later to explain I'd failed the test and my ironing wasn't up to standard. I wasn't going to be paid for the trial.

That was my experience of taking in ironing.

Sorry, but you made me LOL. It's the way you told the story

@AnneElliott

Yes MN is a different world. Full of champagne socialists who've never actually lived in deprived areas they like to talk about.

Aint that the truth!

I look and think 'of course you would' at the LTB responses on threads. Posters claim they'd leave their partners for the most trivial of things, but in RL people try and work on their relationships/marriages and it really isn't easy to just LTB.

@Proudboomer

You can’t just rent out your house if you have a mortgage. You will need a buy to let mortgage which will have a higher interest rate than a homeowner mortgage. Then you will need landlord insurance and then gas and electricity safety checks. All these you need to pay before you even gets tenant.

A lot of advice given on here is pretty useless in the real world.

You don't need a BTL mortgage, you just ask your mortgage company for consent to let. Gas and electrical safety checks aren't expensive.

I'll never forget the times I've been told I should move up north for cheaper housing.
I mean there is care work available there too. Never mind that my dcs dad is here. As is my free as its family childcare. So even if i could afford the costs involved in moving I wouldn't be any better off as what i saved in rent I'd spend on childcare (if that's even available for the hours I would need.)

I don't work at all atm following a MH crisis. Moving up north for cheap housing still isn't a solution.

My flabber has been well and truly gasted by the "lone parenthood through being widowed is a lifestyle choice" comment this week. Also the person who once suggested I overcome my dislike of being stuck in on winter evenings by buying head to toe waterproofs and a torch for trips to the park with the kids. Never mind that the car park is locked at dusk, the splash pad is off and the cafe is shuttered up for the winter. They insisted it was no different to going in the summer holidays if you just adopt a positive mindset or something like that.
I live in a 3 bed terrace, have only one toilet, kids at an ordinary school and I cut coupons out of the local paper for caravan holidays. I couldn't consider spending £100's on a single item of clothing or outsourcing all the domestic stuff. I sometimes feel like an oddity here among all the six figure salaries, au pairs and exotic holidays.

@nyktipolos

A few days ago I was told the the vast majority of houses where 2 parents work outsource most of the housework. Cleaning, cooking, gardening etc.

I know no one who does that.

This. ^ I know no-one who does that either.

I have only known a couple of people who have had cleaners. One full time office worker and one part time one. Both didn't need one, they were just lazy. Not saying ALL people who have cleaners are lazy, but those 2 were.

I outsource my ironing £20 per basket
I rent out my home and make a profit and rent in a better area abd I have a lodger it’s all relevant

Oh also I outsource my gardening cleaning and decorating 😳

it just sounds like mimicked sound bites without a lot of thought about practicality

If course it is. Usually by those secure enough financially to know they would never have to do the same. It's easy to suggest difficult solutions to problems you know you'll never face.