To be gobsmacked about my salary increase

[Clementinemist]

I started a new job a month ago, which came with a £15k payrise. 'Lucky me!' I thought when I was offered the role. It should have meant a bit more more disposable income. But in reality my disposable income has now actually decreased by £150 a month, mostly due to recent rent and bill increases.

Just wow.

I'm well qualified and experienced in my profession, and worked really hard for this role. It's quite senior too with more responsibility than my last job. Yes, I'd have been even worse off financially if I was still in my old job, but still a kick in the teeth. The concept of career and life progression now seems to be dead?

Gobsmacked

Ha! I haven’t heard that word in years!

May have missed it on the thread but you will also be paying more into your pension.

Not much of a sweetener I know …

Some actual numbers would give this thread some context OP. Where are the actual increases that have caused you to be worse off?

As someone on a fixed income which will not change I think you are being unreasonable. Everything is going up and you'd be worse off with it your pay rise.

You are so lucky. Some of us work in the Care industry where increases are not measured in 1000s, more like pence. About 3 years ago, my increase was 10p per hour. You can work that out on a monthly basis. The next increase was a bit better - 50p per hour.

Some of us are (through no fault of our own) on benefits which only just scrape an existence and the 3.1%increase we've just had equated to about £4/week for me.
My utilities have gone up by £40/month, my basic groceries are up by £12/week, where am I expected to find this extra £72/month from? That's just 2 lots of price hikes and doesn't take account of anything else at all like running the car (disabled and can't do public transport), I used to fill the car once every 6 or 7 weeks for about £50, I filled it last week and it cost £65.
I know everyone is feeling the price hikes but when you have to live on less than £800/month with £500 mortgage payment, it's impossible to cut back any further, so soon I'll be facing starvation or repossession, I can't afford to eat AND pay the mortgage.

Is that a typo? Should it be £52? I deffo recommend the £10 a day thread on here, can easily make £100 a month on survey sites alone. You’d have to submit a tax return over £1k so not sure if that would effect your benefits

@StanleyR38 was your comment for me?

£40/month (utilities) + £12/week (groceries) = £88/month (based on 4wk month)
£4/wk (benefit increase) = £16/month

£88 - £16 = £72 shortfall

I do as many surveys and competitions etc as I can get my hands on (never won anything yet) but it's amazing how many surveys actually throw you out when you get to 90+% completion because they say you "don't fit the target demographic", so you don't get the 20p that survey says they'll pay and you've wasted well over 20mins on it.
Since the beginning of the year, I've "earned" a grand total of £6.57 doing surveys for over 6hrs a day 5 days a week (approx 80 days or 480hrs) which equates to approx 8p per day or just over a penny for each hour I've spent doing them.
Then you can't withdraw your cash until you've earned £20, so if I keep up this level of activity, I might just have earned my £20 by xmas!

If I was fortunate enough to be able to earn £20/wk (approx £1k/yr) it would most definitely affect my benefits, they'd take approx 50% of the earnings off the benefits.

You are prob looking at the wrong survey sites - those ones defo aren’t worth your time. The £10 a day thread on here lists the sites that are worth doing - Prolific is a really good one.

Could you link please

Your take home pay cannot have decreased because of rent and bills; that is your disposable income.

Unless you can give us a rough idea of figures (shouldn't be outing!) - original gross/net pay vs new gross/net pay, I don't think we can possibly have any idea what you're upset about - even with pension/student loan payments, your take home pay must have increased, even if you've moved up a tax bracket!

£15k is a really good payrise, you've likely worked hard to get it and it's obviously going to be disappointing if you're no better off for it.

Are things really that bad in the UK?