My professional salary only just covers my rent. How can this be?

[Rentmakesmepoor]

I am an occupational therapist in the NHS. I am a single parent. After tax, student loan and pension I take home roughly £1900.
I live in the South East of England. My rent is £1750 a month for a 3 bed, SMALL semi detached house with a courtyard garden

How is it that we have got to the point in this country that my salary literally just pays for my rent and nothing else??

I am permanently skint. I am not looking for solutions as I do nd claim everything I can (which is not alot).

But how can this be?

Yep it is not right but we moved away from the south east 35 years mainly because of high housing costs. We both found jobs 250 miles away and brought our children up there. Much nicer quality of life and more affordable and we both had professional jobs. We had to move away from family though.

Personally I don't care if the South East is left without services. My families quality of life is more important. They should pay proper wages for the area if they want people to live and work there.

Yes yes of course its OPS fault for living in South East ....how dare she!! Yes of course it's easy to just move to a cheaper area, leave her parents and friends uproot the children and move so she can bring up the kids drop them at their new school and commute 20 miles to n from work in time to pick up the kids from school or find a new job along with a new cheaper house and a ñew school for the kids SMFH!! Let's just overlook the sheer greed from landlords and focus on the location of OP! The contempt i feel for these people who own more than one house and have brought the country to its knees buying up the houses , reducing supply and raising the cost of a First time buy that can now only be afforded by a few not the many then raising rents so high it wipes out 80% of the average salary because they can....

Going back 40 years, very few teachers or nurses could afford to buy in the SE on a single salary.

Going back to the 70s/80s lots of people bought in London on single salaries with normal jobs. Half of my neighbours growing up were teachers, police, etc.

Partly. Also because labour didn't build any. Also because labour continued with Thatcher's policy of de industrialisation thus cutting huge swathes through union representation. And got rid of clause four. Also because the Actual Labour Party chose to roll out a full scale programme of benefits for workers rather than supporting unions to require employers including the state to pay decent wages. And because the Tories have been literally printing money and creating new credit lines since 2008, to the point that money just doesn't mean the same as it used to, and there's loads less of it anyway for the average worker, while those who have any spare cash at all get to hoover up what assets there are, housing being one of those assets.

This is a great explanation of what's happened

Wages can’t get higher, the cost of living must get lower. That’s the only way to fix this mess.

wages should absolutely be higher. People don't realise how much they have been eroded away.

32k in the mid 00s is equivalent to 55k ish today. Yet you are now a higher rate tax payer & people will tell you you earn plenty.

@mnhq

Op has left this thread due to unpleasant replies

Not all OTs are single-income households with two kids to support. The SE will always have OTs.

I always think posts like these reinforce the need for social / affordable housing. If Op had affordable housing then would have little/ no entitlement to top up benefits. Surely it makes sense to invest rather than paying private landlords mortgages for years.

Yes.

https://www.gov.uk/widowed-parents-allowance/what-youll-get

Why is this entire thread full of people saying the government needs to intervene in all of this?

Why are we so absolutely dependent on them as our sole masters?!

NHS pays OP's salary, UC pays her benefits, the govt needs to provide her with council housing, presumably subsidised to below market rate so she can afford it...

The whole problem here is that the state is paying flat-rate wages to everyone in the whole country, with very limited employer-competition because the NHS is a monopoly by design to reduce wage costs...

If the NHS had more competition and OP could negotiate her wage, she'd be in a better spot, but of course most on MN would rather have everyone equal on lower wages than some variation and higher wages!

It’s actually incredibly liberating to not be dependent on the government for anything. And it’s amazing how much better your life will turn out once you step away from that dependency cycle. I have friends who literally have turned down an opportunities because it would affect their benefits. And then the government cuts their benefits.

It’s very short term thinking, if you cannot be reliant on anyone for anything, you’d be so much happier, although that is of course much harder to achieve.

I have private health insurance and own my flat but we are dependent on the government. We aren't even eligible for child benefit as DH earns above £65k As private healthcare in the uk is very much a concierge service (they will refer you to the nhs if there is anything expensive or difficult to do) and there is no private A & E.

The vast majority of people- those who earn below £35k consume more services than they pay in taxes. Even people like my DH who earn £75k was dependent on the government as a child in receipt of free school meals and EMA payment. There was a time when I was a young graduate earning little and paying hardly any NI and tax but still used the nhs to remove an abscess. Unless you start out earning £100k and you fly abroad for your medical treatment and you live on your family's land, I would say you are definitely dependent on the government. Some are more dependent than others but a lot of it is also dependent on vocation and honestly my salary would be a lot lower if everyone chose to work in the financial services industry/

Lol. A 2 bed flat is 1800 a month where I live (also South East, not London). Yes, it's shit. I had to retrain out of Hospitality and into Finance just to "not drown"; I am also always skint.

The private market exists to make profit. if OP was not employed by the state but by the private sector, we would be spending 20% of our salaries on healthcare aka a US situation. OP might earn more but most of her earnings would be swallowed up by healthcare insurance costs for her 4 children, expensive private housing (same situation as now) and without benefits to cushion the blow. The only people who would benefit from such a situation are those on £250k and above, DH and I are on £120k combined (with no kids) and have private health insurance but we are too poor for a world where the government does not intervene, thank you very much. We cannot afford £100,000 for cancer treatment.
Sorry for being poor. It must be hard for someone of your status (i assume to even have such ideas) to understand the plight of us plebs who work over 40 hours a week to earn our meagre salaries of £75k and £45k respectively.

most of her earnings would be swallowed up by healthcare insurance costs for her 4 children,

Untrue. I have private health insurance for our household. Children’s health insurance is very low and has always been low. Obviously when they reach adulthood it increases.

@lavender2023 yes, of course we’re all dependent in many ways. However, I am not in the situation that my friend has been in where they have come along one day and decided that she’s entitled to 50% of what she’s currently receiving as an income and the shit has hit the fan. I appreciate of course being self-employed that my customers could effectively do that but I am much more in control of the situation.

I thoroughly recommend that if you can.

We cannot afford £100,000 for cancer treatmen

Again if you have health insurance, you don’t have to pay high sums for treatment. That is the point of insurance.
And private health ins. is nowhere near 20% of salaries.

Private insurance models need to be very carefully designed and managed otherwise the rich pay more than they need ( to cover advertising and profits) and the poor don't get any heath service at all - they won't solve the OP wage problem

Which is actually a house price problem
Bring back proper council housing . Guaranteed basic home for affordable rents ( ie the rent does not make the council any profit ) for everyone to reset the housing market and stop the wealthy profiteering on the backs of the less well off

@Wakintoblueskies funny. You'd be amazed at how difficult and expensive and often impossible it is to get medical insurance if you have, or have had, cancer, or any number of chronic medical conditions.

The insurance model has to be taken out as young as possible. It isn’t a case of taking insurance out after being diagnosed. No business could operate like that. The problem is people think what’s the point of having insurance when young and healthy and put off taking it out until they think they may need it. My children have had private health insurance since they were born (this is encouraged by private health insurance companies by having low premiums for children).

I don't have any interest in moving to the US for various reasons, but "they are all worse off financially because they have to pay for health insurance" is completely incorrect. Especially for a skilled professional like OP. Ignoring lifestyle differences which are subjective, people are only really better off in the UK if they're in the bottom quintile or so.

Given the professionals I know who left to the states and came back I beg to disagree

I mean could you comment on how great the Silicon Valley housing situation is ?

Is this in the UK or the USA. In the uk health insurance is cheap because the insurance companies know that the nhs would handle all difficult and expensive procedures. In fact DH has been referred back to the nhs for a really simple abscess removal cos the private GP thought it would be faster!

I like using private healthcare(esp GPs) in the UK but I would never want to be without the NHS cos the NHS is the ecosystem