To detest the term 'squeezed middle'

[unicormb]

And how it's being used on here to forecast that the poor high earners will be worse off than anyone else over the next few years?

It's absolutely not true, for one. The worst off will be the worst off.

I grew up in poverty. My kids are middle class. I know the gulf that exists between the two, firsthand, and secondhand from working with kids in inner London for twelve years.

The squeezed middle will be ok. So can we stop pretending that people who earn over £50k a year are on the brink of destitution? It's really demeaning to those who survive on a lot less.

I think it can be useful to describe a certain group. I also agree with @crossstitchingnana and @Shinyandnew1 . We are in exactly this bracket. Earn too much to qualify for anything, don’t earn enough now to save for anything significant and we wouldn’t be able to top up for uni if we were asked to (a couple of years away yet). I posted on another thread the other day about the decent margin we used to have when we first bought our house. We were overpaying the mortgage by £500/month and could save £500/month. Now we don’t overpay the mortgage as the utilities bills are four times what they were and we use at least half of what we would have liked to save to subsidize everything else that has gone up. Clearly no one is starving BUT we don’t have the disposable income we used to have. We’re not even frivolous, we’ve stopped the kids’ swimming lessons as they were expensive, though carried on with Cubs as that’s quite cheap. I have bought some clothes for the Autumn/Winter in charity shops recently. We both have what should be decent, white collar jobs, middle management I suppose. We were absolutely fine even 18 months ago. Now it’s getting harder and there is zero help. Conversely, one parent I know at school boasted about how she spent her first government top up on a holiday! And got the school residential for free for two DC at £300 each! We’re paying for everything ourselves with what really amounts to a 10% pay cut - no pay rises here and inflation sky high. Rambling now but the knock on effect is the demise of restaurants, the high street and so on. Who do you think propped up all these businesses with their discretionary spending?! It won’t be us for a long while yet. That’s for sure!

Plantpotpetal

Couldn't have put it better myself. Yes, no-one is starving but our dd is off to uni next year and won't qualify for full loan. We have managed to save nothing.

I am single parent earning 46k. This time last year I wasn’t single and didn’t expect to be. I have a small house with a mortgage, I need to buy out my ex and I work full time with 2 children who share a small bedroom.

I don’t qualify for any help. I am far batter off than families who can’t afford their next meal, I don’t argue that.

But I work full time, I am the resident parent. I have no spare money, nothing. I. Worrie about the car breaking down, I have a leak in my front window when it rains, that I’m just having to ignore.

I might be able to eat and slightly heat my home this winter but to say I’v worked my arse off and have a relatively well paid job, that I can comfortably survive and nothing more is a poor state of affairs. I feel very squeezed and I feel vulnerable with no savings and a lot of responsibility.

I agree. I’m getting fed up with people deciding that if as a household you’re total income is 50k you should be flush with lots of savings and any financial difficulty is your own fault. Given the hideous cost of childcare, housing, general life it really doesn’t get you far these days. The squeezed middle is real and it’s shit.

A mum I’m friendly with has an interesting perspective on this. She got accidentally pregnant in her teens with twins by a bloke who promptly got himself sent to prison and has barely been seen since.

Before she got pregnant she “made a lot of mistakes” (her phrase) but the minute she knew about the girls she was determined to change things for them.

She “did everything right”. Re sat her GCSEs by studying at her kitchen table whilst breastfeeding babies. Took higher qualifications by working late at night despite having to be up a 5:30am with the toddlers. Got a decent job and worked her way up. Girls are now in early secondary and she is working close to full time.

And she reckons that she is no better of than when she was a single, teenage mum on benefits.

She doesn’t regret it as such as she hopes that her girls will use her example to stay in education but she reckons it was bloody hard for very little financial gain.

The definition of the squeezed middle is the socioeconomic group of people whose income is too low to maintain them comfortably but not low enough to qualify for state benefits. Whilst that may include some ‘high earners’ (whatever that may mean) in expensive cities, the vast majority of people who fall into this category are in lower or middle paid jobs or professions. A lot of them are young, with young families, nearer the beginning of their working lives then the end. For sure, most of them won’t be starving and their shoes won’t be falling apart…but colleagues of mine (healthcare) are already talking about working more shifts then is probably safe, or selling their possessions, to be able to make it through winter. Thinking it’s people swapping their Audis for Fords just highlights your own naivety, to be honest.

I am one parent household with 2 dc at home. Children in school but not old enough to be left home alone.
I have 2 degrees and use them in my job. I used to be on a reasonable take home that I could manage on well and save for holidays, but except for having cost of living pay rises, since having my children, my wages have not increased. I work full-time and my take home is
£2550. My mortgage is £1100, council tax £180, food £400, water/sewage/TV/insurances
£160, broadband (needed for job) £24, mobile £10, car repair/tax £40, petrol £80 so about £2k on pretty fixed costs. This leaves about £500 a month for gas/electric, clothes/shoes/uniforms, presents for birthdays/Xmas and any of the children's hobbies and holidays (as if). Given how much gas/electricity is going to rise, I would love to know what the definition of poverty is, coz at this rate I will be getting into debt for the basics and that to me is poverty.

You just sound quite ignorant OP. You want people like teachers, nurses, etc etc to do their jobs and pay their tax but seem to think you can slag them off because they have jobs and are on above minimum wage.

Also, a lot of people in this bracket are probably from working-class backgrounds and don’t have a lot to fall back on in terms of family support. Many teachers, nurses, police etc are people who might be the first generation to go to university or to have a professional type job. They don’t have inheritances coming to them or parents who can bail them out. When you’re in that position your standing is quite precarious.

We are the squeezed middle though and we are going to struggle if energy bills keep rising. We know we will get no help which makes it even more worrying. No Audis here I promise you, my car is a 10 year old Fiat with advisories! I feel bad for those worse off than us and hope they will get the support they need but that doesn't stop me worrying for us and our family.

OP, you seem to believe that no one who would identify themselves as the squeezed middle can have ever been truly poor. If they're at all bothered by things getting tighter and trickier, they can never have been wondering where their next meal will come from?

Ridiculous.

I'm not looking forward to having to keep the heating no higher than 16, or to not being able to afford any treats, or to going yet another year repairing the same clothes.

I'd never say that to the face of someone who was on the breadline - and yes, it's different when you've started a thread about it.

And I'm truly grateful to have a home and food on the table (with help from allotment and community fridge) and so on. I remember it was so much harder walking 5 miles to work because I couldn't afford the bus fare that week, or Skipping meals.

You're making very broad assumptions with no foundation.

Lol at the idea that an Audi is a luxury car. You can get a decent 5 year old Audi for about 12k.

I worry about these threads, as many have said already, it's putting two groups of people at odds with one another who are both struggling when we really ought to be asking why is the top 1% not being squeezed the same way? Surely that's the injustice in all of this.

The squeezed middle isn’t about the high earners. It’s about people on £25-40k a year who don’t meet the criteria for any government support and are trying to cope with huge rises in rent/mortgage, bills and food with no savings. Most families in the U.K have less than £2000 of saving with most of that number having none at all. They aren’t all grinding poor. They are people who make ends meet and have no spare to absorb price rises- just like anyone else.

For context- before the pandemic DH was on £35k a year and I was on £20k a year. Our take home at the end of the month was around £3,500. Which sounds like loads. It should be loads. But once you have taken off bills, petrol, food, mortgage and nursery fees (which we all
know are eye watering) for DC it came to a grand total of a few hundred quid to save/spend/sort out huge issues that arose. We couldn’t be lavish and had to budget. But we weren’t poor.

Families in the same position now are finding that the few hundred they had for savings/spending/ emergency has now been swallowed by price rises. It is all my friends talk about at the moment and the main worry is that they have used all their savings and are on the brink of not being about to pay their mortgage.

I see a lot of mortgage defaults in the future and people cutting everything they can from budgets to save the house.

We are lucky that DC have finished nursery now so we have some wiggle room. But it’s not about deciding between keeping the pony or the yacht. It’s about people who don’t meet the benefit threshold finding their bills have gone so high that there is almost nothing left to give up without losing their house.

OP’s household income is £100k but is lecturing people on £50k. Stop sneering.

Well they are. If you’re talking about income tax the top 1% pay 25 of the whole tax burden for the country.

Just coming back to this again - a PP mentioned ‘doing everything right’. That’s the most galling thing. We worked hard, went to university, paid back our student loans, saved up before we had the DC so I could take some time off with them, are really quite boring and not very extravagant at all and it feels like we are back to square one, like 15-20 years ago when we bought our first place and sort of expected to be brassic! We didn’t expect to be our age (mid/late 40s), DC needing minimum childcare and STILL be counting the pennies with us both working full time. What do we cut out next? We can turn the heating down/off, we could cancel more of the kids’ activities, we can stop visiting family who live more than a short drive away, we have an old banger that’s on its last legs and a newer car on finance but a reliable car is needed for one of our jobs… We need two cars so we can both get to work. I go through our budget religiously and am down to one local aerobics class a week for me at £6/go, go to my hairdresser’s house so can pay cash in hand and half the price of the salon (less often than before too), buy what I can second hand, sell bits on, use up every bit of food (eg we have some just about passable potatoes and leeks in the fridge so I’ll make a batch of soup to freeze tomorrow). I try to meal plan, we’ve gone from Sainsbury’s and the occasional M&S shop via Tesco to Aldi.

Years of pay freezes as prices have risen have just done for us.

Haven't RTFT but the 'squeezed miidle' just makes me think of tight Victorian corsets, so is a bit irritating for that reason alone, but you've got to call the economically active, working people with a few quid to spare after all other costs something after all.

Not relevant to me as I'm located in the thighs of the squeezed middle diagram.

To use a favourite MN expression, "it's not a race to the bottom."

Hear hear

It's worth highlighting that QBee will be getting lots of extra allowances within their benefits (aside from the DLA) because she has 2 x disabled "premium " (horrible term) and 1/2 x carers "premium".

So QBee's income figs will be higher than for a non-disabled family.

The benefits system treats you v v differently depending on your reasons for applying. Families on UC who are looking for work but not carers will receive significantly less.

I'm not sure that people are saying that they be worse off (sensible people anyway), but it's more that it's a useful descriptor of a certain demographic? It's especially useful for Tories because they have identified them as potential swing voters who can be pitted again those worse off than them?

Helpful to not fall into this trap

Squeezed middle is real.
and it’s often people who have higher education or a good trade/worked their way up in jobs.
who earn on paper what should be a decent wage.
But they may have no help from family
money unlike the upper classes. Therefore paying out high mortgages. Servicing essential cars for their jobs. Paying out nursery/childcare fees.
So I appreciate perhaps not struggling as much as those in poverty.
But possibly people with high level responsibility/high stress jobs - teachers/health workers/social workers. Who have specific outgoings - childcare, the need to maintain a vehicle for their occupation, with very little pay to show at the end.
Not the worst position, but these are still real issues, when people who are highly educated and skilled are left with nothing to show at the end of the month. It makes me feel wonder what there is to aspire too. If you train, become a professional, but therefore need to put in longer hours, use a car and use more childcare. Consequently ending up worse off, or struggling just as much as someone working less hours in a less stressful role, because of the system.

I certainly wouldn’t view the ‘squeezed middle’ as a group whose problems will all be solved by swapping their Audi for a ford. Far too simplistic.
Squeezed middle are not the group I worry most for in this. But there are specific issues that they face and I don’t think it’s right to disregard these struggles.

And £15k is a lot better off than $2 per day, and yet here you are, upset despite being on multiples of those who are genuinely hard-up.

Doesn’t the hypocrisy ever give you pause for thought?

You have a cupboard? That implies a house, and a kitchen. An actual solid construction that protects you from the rain, and yet you want sympathy?