Life is too expensive and not enjoyable.

[buildingourdreams]

I am only 26 years old and I am tired

H and I both earn okay money both work ft and I sometimes do part time work too

We've 2 boys under 7 and After rent bills and food and petrol we have not a penny .
This is with our parents helping with childcare we don't even have to pay childcare for the boys thankfully 🙏

We Can't go on holiday. Can't even have a takeaway or my nails done

We rent and Can't save for a house to buy don't get any benefits other than the basic Cb about £200 month. (And I don't expect or want handouts anyway)

Is this our life now ? Don't tell me to get a better job as I might do as I get older but this is not the point I'm making . If someone works full time they should be able to afford a few treats in life and specially with 2 incomes!

I worry constantly that we are failing our kids and should I even have had them? And also Like, what will even become of people like us when we're old ?

Part of the problem with housing is that we (the British people) have this allergic reaction to living together in high rise buildings. Almost every country I have been to builds blocks of flats (cheap housing) for people, and people live in them amiably and get on with one another. In this country if you build social housing and they are not houses, they become ghettos very quickly. When you give someone something for free, something they haven’t had to work for, they tend not to care about it or look after it.

Lol.
Name any labour government that hasn’t left office having bankrupted the country.

Those who run the country depend on your belief that voting changes things.

Hi OP, sorry your thread has been derailed. I think sometimes, some people can't help the chance to rant at the government and those who voted for them, which is obviously a big part of the problem, but not helpful to you.

I think something that makes the current cost of living crisis worse for people your age is that it's the first time you've experienced significant inflation and the last recession was 15 years ago so you were very young so unless one of your parents lost their job and there was significant fall out from this, you probably can't remember times like this before.

If you actually do want budgeting advice, you probably want to repost in Money Matters or have a look at Moneysaving Expert which is a great resource to help to work out where your money is going and see if you can cut any costs. If you can do this, you can sometimes free up a bit of money to make things more comfortable.

Definitely also do a benefit check because, even if you're only entitled to a small amount of universal credit, and every little helps, you'll also get extra help with energy costs, be entitled to a social broadband tariff and also the Help to Save account, if you can manage to put a little money by for Christmas, car MOT and repairs etc, you get a bonus equal to half the maximum balance after 2 years, so free money from the government and a big incentive to try and save a bit if you can.

From the post I'm replying to, what stands out to me is that you're spending a lot of money on petrol, and also you appear to be paying for your energy by a method other than equal monthly direct debit.

On petrol, do you live a long way from work and can you find a job closer to home? Where does your DH work compared to where you live? Could you move? I know moving costs money, but if you could manage it, it might be worth the investment and upheaval if you found somewhere where petrol costs would be lower and is cheaper to heat even if it means borrowing the deposit from a parent or looking for help with a deposit scheme.

Can you pay your utilities by standard direct debit so you can spread the cost all year?

On a slightly brighter note, if you pay your council tax over 10 months, you don't pay in February and March (this sometimes applies to water too) so that's a bit of money spare that you could save, or use some of to treat yourselves.

On treats, with DC your age, a family National Trust membership could be a good investment if you have suitable properties nearby as it allows you free days out for about £10 a month (take a picnic because cafes are £££s and really busy at weekends).

Takeaway pizza isn't really a treat to me because it's usually very expensive for something that isn't significantly better than a nice one from a supermarket, but you could have a look at the Too Good to Go app to see if there's anything on there that you can get cheaply for a treat.

Good luck

@ElliF well I left him in 2014 so any savings I had are long gone. We haven't seen him since. No chance of maintenance.

Council tenants pay rent. The problem with council estates is that they need to be mixed - some homeowners and also renters. The caveat should be that the homeowners cannot just sell to anyone (so that the housing stock is kept for those on the median income for the area and below). A lot of ex council flats in London are now owned by landlords. I was looking at an ex council flat and it was actually the FTB flat of a lawyer who worked for a law firm that paid an average of £250k per annum. I actually know someone who lives in an ex council flat in central london and she owns a second home in Scotland.

In my home country, even the president lived in government housing (two big apartments that were knocked together for her, her 5 kids, mum and DH). She wanted to continue living in it even when she became president but it was too hard for her personal security forces to keep track of everyone.

I empathise with how you are feeling however agree with others who have pointed out you are only 26.

I would have loved to have children when younger but for the life we wanted to live it wasn’t financially feasible. I spent my 20’s working towards some level of financial stability. We bought a house before considering having children. I had my first child aged 32 and am now due my second age 34. I’m not saying this is the right way to do things, it’s a choice. I had 2 miscarriages then pre eclampsia with my first which may have been related in part to age but you just don’t know. There’s no perfect solution.

Things are tight with cost living crisis but that’s affecting most people currently.

So £45K is very doable outside of London. That’s one salary for most working professionals. One train driver salary. Yes, maybe it would be a pinch at 28K, but then we’d qualify for social housing and UC too.

Where do you live that 28k would qualify you for social housing? In most places it's not about income anyway, and in the areas where demand outstrips supply (most of the UK) being on a low income doesn't in itself qualify you to be socially housed.

Wow super interesting thread.

Tory bashing might feel good but it's not exactly helpful when the only alternative at the minute (starmer labour) would only seek to maintain the corrupt systems of power. Labour under Corbyn might have been different but we seen how the media dealt with that threat to their worldview. We get a choice between two sets of globalist, neoliberal social-democrats, one just happens to be more "woke" and spendthrift than the other. And ultimately will turn out the same in most other EU countries despite what propaganda will say.

Declining living standards are always going to feel sh!t. We really had things looking good for a little while! And whilst your feeling are valid, leaning too much into them won't help.

My best advice- in the short term, let go of expectations and come off social media!! You'll feel more content of what riches you do have (a roof over your head, food on the table, a country at peace, a moderate climate, healthy kids).

In the long term- get educated, read beyond propaganda and meet others to fight for real change. I personally favour a model of decentralisation but that (like any change) wouldn't be painless either, and the fight from the big players who want the status quo to continue could get pretty nasty.

I was utterly skint in my 20’s, the cat ate better than we did. I was building my career and holidays etc were a rarity. We ran a small, old car gifted to us and lived in a very cheap one bedroomed flat in a dodgy area. Kids weren’t remotely on the horizon.

It takes time to build a life, and yes things are different now in terms of much higher house prices and the job market but even when things were easier many 20 somethings were pretty poorly off. I agree two people earning a full time wage should be able to afford the basics but early in your career it’s going to be hard going. Throw kids into the mix and it becomes a huge juggling act.

So, where does the money come from to increase salaries across the board?

I had literally just explained that in the post you replied to: productivity growth. The UK has had zero productivity growth for 15 years. The only way to sustainably raise everyone's salaries and standard of living is from productivity growth. This is why people in the UK have got slowly poorer compared to our international counterparts.

The two main reasons for the lack of productivity growth as I said are:

1. A huge lack of business investment. This was poor anyway due to bad economic management, for example there being no long-term industrial strategy, no energy security strategy, poor national investment in skills and infrastructure, etc. Then, it absolutely fell off a cliff after 2016, unsurprisingly. If you cut yourself off from your main trading market and erect expensive and completely unnecessary barriers to trade, of course business investment will vanish. Entirely predictable and indeed was predicted. Why would a company invest in the UK with access to only 60 million consumers when it can set up in France or Germany and have access to 300 million? On top of this the US and EU - recognising the need to compete with China et al, are currently implementing huge state funded investment plans to support businesses with grants etc to aid growth and drive productivity, making them even more attractive than us because unsurprisingly our Government is not doing anything like this, as usual.
2. The tax system is an absolute mess per my previous posts creating huge disincentives at an individual level for productivity to be increased. Remove the rudiculous bottlenecks at various thesholds if earnings and you would very quickly see productivity rise.

Until both of these things happen very little will change. In fact given fiscal drag's impact on point 2, and the sensible actions of other countries to boost investment set out in point 1, things in the UK will not only not improve, but get substantially worse if no action is take .

Two full time wages should cover all of those things with spare tbh.
Is it worth looking at moving somewhere more expensive and saving on energy bills? Or do you have the heating on a lot and unlikely to save any? I know that isn’t always straightforward.
If property is damp then reporting and getting that sorted could help.
Are there any savings you can make in your expenditure? Can you renegotiate anything? Internet etc?
Are you reducing your food shopping as much as you can?
Without exact figures it is hard to see but allowing £1000 (which seems plenty) for the extras you mentioned, you are spending £2600 a month and your income must be considerably more than that.

Thanks for expanding on that.

But as I see it the money still has to be put in place first.
Productivity is a result of investment, and that investment can only come from three sources - The people in the country. Outside Investors. Or printing Government Bonds and selling into the market.

In a collapsing world economy, with all major corporations culling their overheads, I don’t see outside investors stepping in regardless of any tax breaks the country is willing to offer.

So you're left with taxing the people and the employers that are already in the UK, or money printings, and I can’t see how either of those two can work given the debasement of the currency we have seen over the past 15 years.

The mistake was not letting the banks fail in 2008. We covered up the mess and swept it under the carpet, and proceeded to kicked the can down the road for 15 years. We broke the cardinal law that interest gets paid for money borrowed by setting interest rates to zero. At a governmental level we set the value of money at next to nothing and held it there for a decade. I don’t see how you can get out of that. That was the death of money right there.

Where do you see the money coming from for all the investment?

Until very recently there was a prolonged period where the Government could borrow at 0% or even negative interest rates. It is absolute economic insanity for them to have not done so and implemented an enormous investment program, in a country that had zero productivity growth, skills gaps and failing infrastructure. Instead, they implemented an austerity program which made these problems worse.

Investments have a return. So yes they involve outlay, but well-planned investment with a proper industrial strategy leads to higher returns: increased growth and productivity, and more tax for the treasury. A proper industrial strategy of this nature then encourages business investment. And yes, there is significant business capital around the world that can be obtained, if you create an investable environment in this way. If, on the other hand, you let your infrastructure fall apart, create huge skills gaps, have no industrial policy to grow key sectors, and then erect huge and expensive barriers to trade, clearly you are not creating an investable proposition. This is why an increasing proportion of the UK economy consists of low skilled, low paid, low margin work.

It isn't rocket science. And it is the reason that other countries even despite interest rates now being higher and Government debts already high due to Covid, are creating large scale investment funds anyway. It is a necessity to remain competitive. Provided you have competent people who understand business and economics in charge of the program (i.e. none of our current MPs) it is still possible to implement such a program successfully - you simply have to ensure that there is a proper cohesive and integrated strategy, not the piecemeal throwing around of funds at random projects like with the "levelling up funds", to ensure that the ROIs exceed the interest rates, in real terms. This requires competent people making the decisions with a long-term view. And to rejoin the single market and customs union, of course.

If we do not raise business investment and productivity then not only will productivity (and therefore salaries and living standards) continue to fall, the value of GBP will also fall further which is very bad news for anybody struggling with living costs because that also makes imports more expensive and we import large proportions of essentails such as energy and food.

This is all basic economics.

To make this work as I said you also need people to have an incentive to work, therefore the bottlenecks caused by universal credit thresholds, CB thresholds, tax free childcare threshold, higher rate tax threshold, and the threshold for removal of the personal allowance all need addressing also because currently these are hugely impeding productivity and growth.

For a Government who apparently believe in market forces they appear to have an astonishingly low level of comprehension of how markets function.

This is also why it's utterly laughable when these politicians stand up in Parliament droppjng words like "growth" into their speeches when they appear to have zero comprehension of where growth comes from, evidenced by the fact they are doing nothing to create an environment where it can happen. And all of them, on both sides of the house, are too gutless to mention the elephant that is now so huge that it's taking up half of the Chamber of Commons: that they must rejoin the single market and customs union immediately if they want any improvement in living standards for British people.

Instead, they bicker about how they can snip yet more off budgets for services, and whom they can not-so-stealthily pickpocket next to plug the gaps. Eventually the bucket has so many holes it cannot hold any water at all. No comprehension of the difference between costs for services and investing to actually increase tax revenue in the longer term. Because they do not care about the longer term, it's all about today's optics and the election in 2024. Absurd suggestions on convincing retirees that there they should return to work, rather than making it worthwhile for the working age population to work more. For examples of how this is impacting people at every level of earnings being less productive than they could, see this article:

www.theguardian.com/business/2023/feb/13/full-time-part-time-work-no-longer-pays-uk-economy

The fact that Hunt had to "launch an enquiry" to try to find out why people aren't working more, when he is the one in charge of the disfunctional tax system creating the problem, is absolutely mind boggling.

For a Government who apparently believe in market forces they appear to have an astonishingly low level of comprehension of how markets function.

They do, don't they? I'm no fan of the free market lunatic fringe, but you do at least know where you are with them.

And even for local produce, the prices are set by the international market so if the value of GBP falls, even the price of local British cheese and butter will go up. Other countries becoming richer and consuming more = more expensive for us.

London is actually a very affordable city compared to many other capital cities and it is because the UK is relatively less well off. I hate the term 'cost of living crisis ' because it is gaslighting in the truest sense of the word. If you cannot withstand an extra £100 in your energy bills or you have to immediately change your eating habits because groceries went up 20%, you never earned enough to begin with..it is a scandal that so many people who deem themselves average struggle with the cost of things like bread..

He could've saved himself some time and started a thread on here. That and meeting a group of reasonably affluent early retirees would've probably provided about 95% of the explanation needed.

And, as the article also alludes to, the lack of productivity growth and therefore salary growth actually exacerbates the housing issue also, making it relatively more productive to invest in assets than the actually work, which in turn inflates asset prices relative to average incomes. The only solution to improve things is to create the conditions for a sustained period of productivity and salary growth and remove the tax and childcare funding bottlenecks.

Same. Markets need regulating for sure, but these people don't even seem to understand how market forces operate in the first place! An A-level economics student would do better.

He could've saved himself some time and started a thread on here. That and meeting a group of reasonably affluent early retirees would've probably provided about 95% of the explanation needed.

Ha! Well yes. One can only hope this thread makes its way across his desk. 🤣

While he's at it, as I've said on other threads, they need to prioritise removing the discrimination in the tax system against single people, who make up an ever increasing proportion of our population. They are taxed far more on the same household income than a couple. This is not the case in many of our competitor countries, for good reason, as it again creates a huge disincentive to work at full capacity, and means many taxpayers not reaching their full earning potential and therefore over a lifetime paying in far less and requiring far more state support.

This particularly impacts single parent households, so is also discriminatory given that over 90% of them are headed by women. The treasury is losing an enormous amount of revenue and skills from the workforce as a result. Not to mention its impact on child poverty levels, which is again storing up far more cost and less revenue for the future (aside from the moral issue). Again, a no brainer and very simple to implement. But will they do it? I highly doubt it.

Okay.
I see the mechanism of what should happen.
Who pays for it?

It can only come from three sources.

1. The people and companies already in the UK.
2. The Government selling bonds (gilts) to the BoE or foreign investment banks.
3. Foreign companies investing their own capital in the UK.

Lets say Toyota we’re going to build a car plant to make EVs in Huddersfield or wherever. Their motivation is profit and long term stability for their company. Why invest say £10B in a new plant in the UK to manufacture right hand drive cars here, when we have no competent staff or experienced EV automotive engineers, high corporation tax and VAT on the sale of cars, and at the moment they can manufacture them in the Pacific and their only offsetting cost is the difference in import duty between shipping us raw materials and shipping us assembled cars. Their labour costs are substantially cheaper in the East. We’re the only country that’s dumb enough economically speaking to continue driving on the left, so everyone pays more than everywhere else in the world.

Yes, we are completely deficient in skills and infrastructure to compete with the economic powerhouses of the world. But we are too far down the road to change that with money.

The change that is coming is unavoidable and it will be near biblical. They will hide it in global war, use the ‘because foreign aggressor’ excuse, take away everyone’s right to control their own money, and train us with carrots and sticks to own nothing and be happy. It’s been written about is professional journals and white papers for close on 30 years. Everything that has been predicted by the global ruling classes has come true.

Like I said before, we printer 3 out of every 4 pounds in the fast three years, but we haven’t yet suffered the consequential loss in value of that 75% reduction in the value of the pound. That inflation is only just beginning to show up in our economy. Things will get a lot lot worse.

And with all this going on, we’re trying our best to g et the party started in Ukraine? We’re absolutely mental.

I've already answered this question.

Government need to borrow to do this. It should have done it when it could borrow at a negative interest rate (i.e. a profit!!!) but even now, international markets have no problem lending money to Governments on favourable long-term rates if that money is for a proper industrial investment strategy that will generate revenue and growth long term. If you do this and create a decent environment for private investment then there is no issue in obtaining this. The reason this is not happening in the UK is because our Government is not creating that environment: it has let our infrastructure crumble, huge skills gaps emerge due to lack of investment in education, has no industrial strategy to invest in key strategic growth sectors, and has cut us off from our main trading markets. Therefore, private investors are not interested, due to said economic mismanagement and there being no coherent strategy to improve this.

If the Government do not borrow to do this - that will actually make a return on their investment and make both the treasury and the population better off - they will continually run up more debt to plug the eve more unaffordable gap between the cost of services the population require and the decreasing revenue it can raise from the ageing population with no productivity growth, and we will all get poorer and poorer. International markets are far less keen on continuing to fund that, and will not do so in perpetuity.

You need to do free fun things. I grew up in a very poor family, I think it was hard for my mum and she worked full time. But I remember fun times.

... or you spent too much on things you wanted and never considered saving.
How many people get a new phone every year or two?
How many people keep their car longer than 5 years?
How many people subscribe to more than one subscription TV service?

All very doable, and kudos for keeping consumerism alive, is you’re earning a decent wage, but if you’re not earning well, don’t have a financial safety net, and are living paycheck to paycheck, what the frack are you doing blowing your money on stuff you want.

Is a new phone or a nice car or a morning latte to be expected? are they entitlements?