I know this will be contentious - cost of living rise

[qualitychat]

My mum is a pensioner and gets Disability Benefit and Mobility Benefit and Pension Credit. She receives almost what I get in a month. She is moaning about the Government not doing enough about the cost of gas and electricity, which I agree with. The thing is they have said that people on benefits and pension credit will be given lump sums towards their bills. I am a middle earner and so is my husband. We will likely get nothing. Do you not think it will be the ordinary working families who will be squeezed the most if something is not done?

@Discovereads she didn’t say 1994. She said the 1970s.

@Discovereads Yeah, that is complete bollocks.

The link that you have provided is explaining why a married person couldn’t get a mortgage in their soul name due to the fact that they are indeed married and therefore the other person they are married to would be entitled to a percentage of the property that they are about to purchase and therefore the banks protection would be reduced because they could actually only secure the asset against 50% of the married couple whilst the other 50% wouldn’t have their name on the mortgage and therefore wouldn’t be held accountable for any losses but would be entitled to any gains.

That is an entirely different scenario, couldn’t be any further apart.

@Wouldloveanother No. she stated that her friend couldn’t get a loan without her husband acting as a guarantor in the 90s. The conversations moved on.

Quite a few "workers" are on benefits as wage rises have been so pitiful for the last 15 years, the government has subsidised what employers should have been paying in the first place.

Most pensioners are on a fixed income. Those just receiving the state pension will be on 10k a year. Even in a one bed flat their energy costs will be 20% of their income come next month.

I know. I grew up in a deprived part of Swindon and know exactly the kind of poverty class you experienced. We were taught that landing a job at the Co-op was a dream job, the pinnacle of success for girls like us along with marriage and motherhood. The boys were taught to aspire to a factory or rail job, and marriage and fatherhood. Most of my female class mates left school early due to pregnancy and ended up working in pubs. Many of my male classmates fell into lives of crime- dying young or in and out of prison. Some of them escaped by joining up for the Falklands War, and then went on to die or be disabled in Bosnia or Iraq/Afghanistan. We were not even considered good enough by the teachers/head master for the usual respected working class trades.

Divide and conquer.

@Wouldloveanother Because she was planning to buy a very cheap house anyway.
And interest rates were very high in the 1980s so mortgage costs had already increased. Lots of people got their houses repossessed in the eighties as a result. The extra five years and high-interest rates made it unfeasible for her.

So in essence a mortgage wasn’t going to happen for her, male or female?

Thank you!
Yes the boys with ambition joined the forces to "learn a trade". My first boyfriend did this as he wanted a better life. Lots of boys I went to school with ended up in jail or with criminal records. My best friend had a child by 16 years old with her boyfriend long disappeared. I remember a boy coming into class all excited because he had landed a factory job.
When people talk about people my age being privileged because we could go to university for free I have to stifle a hollow laugh. The big government campaign at the time for kids like me was to get us to stay on at school after 16 years old, as most left then.
Friends left school at 16 and worked in the local chip shop, jewellery shop, factory, as a bus driver or were unemployed. Two boys from my class at school have already died, I am only in my fifties.
We were all totally written off by teachers. They wanted us to be able to read and write and behave ourselves, that was it really.
As a kid on free school meals at the time I would now have so many more opportunities if I was at school now.

We are talking about way before 1994. My MIL first tried to get a mortgage in the early 50s. Everything approved, she had the deposit, the income, her brother refused to sign as a guarantor and she had no one else. Same happened in the 60s. By the 70s I'm not sure if it was lack of guarantor or age as she was in her 50s by then and they didn't tend to lend to older people.

My MIL would have been in her 70s when you got your mortgage, you probably don't realise what it was like for the women who came before you.

Not by the eighties. It was possible financially in the seventies, and houses were cheaper. But she could not get a mortgage without a male guarantor, which she did not have.

Salaries outstripped house price index in the 80s actually if she was working she would’ve been in a better position I think you really have got this muddled up in the nicest possible way.

@RunningSME You are saying I am a liar based on you googling and looking at trends. I am talking about a real person's life.
Wages rose because so many staff in decent jobs went on strike. The railway workers, bin men, etc. They all got large wage increases. Not everyone did.

People just have no idea what it was like in the 50s 60s 70s for women. I started work in the 60s, worked in a team of 6 men and 6 women, the men got at least double what any of the women got, I got even less due to my age. It was just normal that women got paid less and it was also quite normal for women not to be allowed to join pension schemes and others were in pension schemes that paid the contributions back if a woman married, it was referred to as a dowry. Sometimes it wasn't that women were officially not allowed to join schemes but rules were put in place that made it less likely they could join e.g. part time workers not allowed to join when women were more likely to be part time than men.

Lots of reasons for some pensioners to be in poverty and more likely for women than men.

When I went to work in a factory at 16 a group of us all started from my school at the same time. All the girls were automatically allocated to the lowest paying jobs in the factory, while all the boys were allocated slightly higher paying jobs. We were all straight from school with no experience, it was done on the basis of sex. All the supervisors and managers were men. That was in the mid-eighties. I do not even know if there was a works pension scheme, but if there was I never heard about it. I would have paid into it, but there was not that option.

That was common in the 80's and 90's despite the fact that by then it was illegal.

The attitude was that men needed to earn a living to support a family, and women earned pin money.

Yes I remember men getting a pay rise because they were getting married or because they had become a father.

@Discovereads the only bit you missed out in your admirably detailed account of pensions history was Gordon Brown's raid on the pension dividend credit in the 1997 budget. The rate of return was slashed, silently, but the workplace pensions schemes that did exist (generally defined benefit pensions with progressive vesting rights according to length of service) became much more expensive to operate for employers so there was a huge shift to defined contribution plans which allocated the risk burden to the members. And the best-funded pension provision in Europe lurched into becoming one of the worst.

Part timers were only given the legal right to occupational pension scheme membership in 1995

My mother was in her late fifties by then

No I’m saying you’ve got your story wrong, people often do, they called it trauma recall, you think you know what version of a story that facts from the historical times suggest that your story is impossible i.e. in this case there is no possibility that a woman would’ve been turned down for a business loan in the 90s without other factors aside of her being an unmarried female. Your friend, who has the trauma recall, may have been up to her eyes in debt and have defaulted left right and centre she’s probably not going to mention that when she’s recalling the tale to you because it’s less embarrassing to just say I didn’t get it because I was an unmarried female. Its self protection it allows her to believe that that’s the reason when actually the facts suggest other wise.
Its the same scenario when people talk about how they cannot afford XYZ, they can’t do this they can’t do that when you actually sit down with them and break down the budget for them you can point out that actually it is perfectly possible for them to do what they need to do but the admission that they’re actually wasting money left right and centre is quite hard for them to swallow.

I know for a fact as a single parent with no other source of income other than my salary I could survive on minimum wage, it wouldn’t be pleasant at all but I certainly wouldn’t be starving to death, eating shit from the supermarket own brands or freezing to death.

My mum and step dad who gets various benefits and are also reasonably comfortably off, will get help due to their age. Me and dh who work full time, dh has in fact in real time had a massive pay cut because he can no longer work as a contractor will get no help. My mum and step dad do not need to cut back on things particular, just be a bit more careful. We are seriously having to cut back a lot, kids clubs are stopping, takeaways are stopping, I know in the real world this isn’t major, people are worse off then us, but help should be for everybody apart from perhaps the very rich, My mum has even asked me why we are cutting back on things, it’s because we can’t afford them…

The issue isn't people on disabilities and benefits, the issues are the rich and the way the tax system works and tax evasion.

@RunningSME you are not reading my posts properly. My married friend got her business loan, but her husband had to sign the application. It was her business, they would not approve a loan just in her name.
And she was not in debt. It is simply because she was married.

Well, that's just shifting goalposts since you originally had a blanket generalisation of the disabled as a monolithic group who will ALL require assistance.

You did specifically assert the disabled can't handle the cold as well as non-disabled ignoring the fact that a disability doesn't mean they can't handle the cold.

As a Working disabled person, I'm nowhere close to being in financial dire straits. I made sure I saved thousands during the pandemic too, so I'm confident I can ride this out on £20k a year income.

Maybe she got trauma recall? It could be caused by the actual facts not working e.g. your friend was married and did get the loan, so the facts get changed to she was single and you were wrong to say she didn't get the loan which of course you didn't say.