Am I stupidly poor? Or living in the real world?

[Chunkythighss]

Just off the back of another post…
people commenting that they will have to live off £1900 AFTER paying the mortgage and how this is going to be a struggle.

nearly £2000 a month extra.

This is more than I earn a month and pay rent, bills, etc… yet people are saying they’d struggle to live on this after bills?

Am I massively poor or is this normal? 🙈

This.

I mean my life is drastically impacted by not being able to afford my opera box any more but we get by.

My mortgage is one of our smallest outgoings though, at £300 a month. Between us we spend £600 on travel costs. £1700 on childcare. Then all the necessary bills. Leaving us with around £50-100. So an amount left over after paying the mortgage doesn't really mean anything.

The thread the OP referenced stated that out of the 1900 left after paying the mortgage, 1600 went on bills.

So the 1900 wasn't spare money. They had 300 a month left as spare money.

It is people being blissfully unaware of their own privilege, OP.

If people can't afford to live on £1900 after their mortgage has been paid, then they need to look at how they can change their lifestyle to reduce their outgoings.

I don’t see how that’s possible. You’d be entitled to in the ballpark of £300- 600 UC a month based on those figures (depending when your children were born) and then child benefit.

If they're financially irresponsible, yes. If you have a 10k income you need to put money aside to cover your costs. You can't claim you don't earn enough to do it.

Most people who rent will not have their whole rent covered by the government. Where I live the average rent for a 3 bedroom house is around £1700, the government will only pay £1250 so it would involve ending up homeless or moving to a cheaper area which means the child/ren DO have to change schools. Welcome to the real world.

In my personal opinion - it all depends on childcare and mortgage. I paid for son's nursery more than £600/month only for a part time (full time in London costs around £1200)- so in case of full time nursery - no bloody way I could survive on £1900.

Your right, better just withdraw my DC from childcare and then I can reduce my incomings to a big fat 0.

So if your rent is £1700 a month your not earning 1k a month

Can I ask what tax thread people are talking about? I've tried to look it up in the search box but older threads come up.

People on £1000 a month get Universal Credit top ups which include rent, but only up to a maximum of the Local Housing Allowance that I mentioned of £1500. There's next to no council housing left, where do you think those on a low wage live?

Me too, link to thread please.

£1250, not £1500. I wish!

Well we couldn’t afford our current life on your salary, so yes we would feel ‘poor’ but it’s all relative isn’t it? Other people might need to make cutbacks if they were on our salary! Not sure what is so hard for you to grasp - other people have different outgoings? Don’t forget that bigger houses = bigger bills, bigger cost of insurance. Other people might have a different view on what is ‘essential’. You mentioned SKY tv - we need decent broadband as we both work from home - the tv package costs an extra £15 a month on top, hardly decadent?

i have around 2k left after all bills - includes a food shop which i could cut down if needed. Also includes decent quality dog food, sky tv and netflix, swimming and dancing lessons, school dinners - things i could cut if needed

don't feel i can afford or justify gym or a cleaner - both things i'd love to have

this is doable and i don't have to think too much about budgeting for the necessity's but have definitely tightened things with cost of living going up etc.

I've also been at the skint end of the spectrum - particularly bad time when the banking crisis hit in 2007 so it does seem crazy i'm not living the life of excess i imagined i would if i earnt then what i do now! No luxury holidays - low key mainly uk and never more than one a year. It means i can put aside for a rainy day, have a pension and if the oven/ washing machine breaks it's not a disaster. We can have a takeaway or got out for a meal for someone's birthday. Can get occasional theatre tickets and buy my daughter driving lessons - yes i'm glad i can do that sort of thing - not a necessity but relatively normal things for a family to be doing.

I also don't have the luxury of working part time which many at the lower end of the spectrum manage but don't seem to consider this as a luxury! I really think women do their future earning potential a disservice and think me hanging onto my career through really horrible
times has meant i'm now where i am with earning what i do.

Interesting thread. It all depends where you live.

Here in Cornwall salaries are £19k - £21k for professional roles. Yet rent is £1000pcm and house prices are ridiculous.

Council tax here is ridiculous too. We pay £1800 a year for a 55SQM property 😂

So your income is low and your outgoings will be high (especially fuel as the public transport is shit)

It’s all relative, OP: you can’t rent a 1-bed flat around here for less than £1200 per month. Council tax on top is another £100, then there’s parking, food and all other bills on top.
I own my house outright (that there is now absolutely no way I could afford, if I was starting out - even on the relatively “better” salary that I’m now on, compared to when I bought it) and my bills alone (nothing on finance, including Sky TV) are £1900 per month - and that’s before food!

I assume if their like me they live in a cheaper area there's no way I could afford to live in an area where rent is £1750 a month that's ridiculous if your on a low income

Absolutely not alone lol. I earn a lot less than that total ha. So does my partner!

£1900 take home is (depending on pension payment set up) roughly equivalent to £28k which is median full time earnings. So yeah obviously most people don't have that left after housing costs.

I think many people are dismayed by having x amount left after the mortgage payment because it no longer funds the lifestyle they have worked hard to attain. No one likes to scale back their lifestyle, rich or poor.

My parents were poor for the first ten years of my life, despite working long hours. I told myself that I would get qualifications so I could buy stuff. The kids in the street played out while I went to the library and read books and did extra homework. They bought cars and went on club 18-30 while I wore crap clothes and studied at university. I got the job I wanted and ended up with a great lifestyle. It was fantastic when the kids were young; holidays, toys, activities, savings, nice house. That was my money. I earned it by getting skills and qualifications and making sacrifices.

I'm still working FT, like I have for most of my working life, same job. DH works full time. No money for luxuries any more. I make it work, but I feel a bit cheated. I do not console myself with the fact that some people are less well-off than me because it's a drop in the lifestyle that I actually worked hard for many years to achieve.

When it's £190 or £1900 left over, if it means your lifestyle is compromised, no one is happy.

So where are all these low wage people going to live and work in the cheaper areas and who's going to do all the minimum wage jobs in the expensive areas? Not to mention the fact that if they have to move away from where they grew up, who will be their support network when they move away from all their family and friends?

I think MN is simply not that reflective of the majority of women.

I keep reading about women in jobs making 60K-100K and I always wonder what/where are these jobs?

The UK average income is closer to 33K-37K but yet most of the posters here seem to be on huge incomes, live in a 4 bed house and send their kids to private school.

Yet this is only how a tiny minority of people in the UK realistically live.

So we either have a a disproportionate number of people from specific backgrounds who tend to be detached from reality using this site or we have a lot of people fibbing...

Our bills (excluding mortgage) are £1400 a month. Add in the food shop, child care etc then no £1900 is not a lot to live off.

Obviously it all depends how much your outgoings are.

PPs saying they live on under £1900 extra as a single person isn't really relevant - a second adult (and obviously children) in the household require food and clothes as an absolute minimum, usually travel costs too.