This country as gone into terminal decline

[Carmes]

I have 2 young children in school.

I am becoming more and more anxious about what sort of jobs / careers they will have open to them.

I work for very large company with 10,000s of employees.

20 years ago whe I started work here there would be 100s of entry level jobs at any given time. These are jobs that don't require experience or a degree, ideal for a school leaver, and I know dozens of people who started their career this way.

Now there are maybe 10 jobs that would fit the same criteria.so. All the jobs have been offshored.
Now are the vacancies are for very specific technical skill set or experience.

This doesn't bode well for someone who has left school at 18'or even university.

The current generation of older people or later baby boomers will die quicker than the past war babies so life expectancy will decline in any event. This is due to excesses eg drink and poor diet. Fewer people will make it to 90.

The younger generations coming through will become more aware of diet and exercise needs to stay fit.

What is needed is the cure for the various dementias as without dementia most people can self care for longer. Also tech should help more here.

Overall we need the shrink the population by having fewer kids. It’s beginning to happen world wide but not quick enough.

Do you mean you don't think the degrees were very good, so the organizations didn't really want to hire them?

Business & the country is up in arms that they have to pay a small extra bit of NI, how do you you think they'd react if asked to part fund an insurance based model, costing them 100s of billions?

Quite, the NI increase is going to destroy the economy & reduce jobs so I’m not sure why the extra funding for healthcare will be so easily absorbed.

There are service charges on houses. The roads often aren’t owned but as I say you haven’t done the maths otherwise you wouldn’t be comparing it with renting you’d be comparing it with alternative ownership.
Currently, you are renting.
And paying interest on a mortgage. You will need additional lending at some stage you will pay approximately double what you would’ve paid if you’d have been able to save up a deposit. A short-term gain which will cost you dearly in the long-term, which as I have highlighted you may not have been able save up and therefore it is the best thing for your family.

Overall we need the shrink the population by having fewer kids.

Where are you talking about @Noras? We are not growing our population here by having dc.

Fortunately adult DS won't be having any DC so we don't really need to worry about it much in our household.

There are a lot of ways to use tax money to find the NHS.

In both Canada and the UK it's a model that is cradle to grave, free at point of service, and centrally controlled - in Canada it is at the provincial level but that is due to the difference in size, it comes to much the same thing.

In a way Canada is more extreme in that it's not possible in many cases to see doctors privately even if you can pay, it's not allowed.

This is quite different than European models.And I don't think it's chance that the NHS and Canadian models seem to be having similar problems.

17yo DS works at the local recycling centre. There's loads of jobs out there for young ones. He applied over the summer and started beginning of September. They struggle to recruit because loads of people don't want to get their hands dirty. One of his friends asked where he works, and DS told him. His friend said he couldn't do that type of work as he likes to be clean😬

So daft as he's actually better paid than most his age working in supermarkets...
DS isn't afraid of hard work. He prefers being outdoors where possible, rather than cooped up in a shop. He has to speak to the public which helps with social skills. He enjoys his job and I am very proud if him for getting out there and having a work ethic whilst many his age just rely on the Bank of Mum and Dad.

Think positively! And teach them to think positively too.

Manifestation will save us? I’ll practice it daily but I don’t think I will get a better fix when my mortgage deal ends 🤔

Let’s just say they left with the idea that the degree was the end of the road rather than the beginning of the journey and the only place they got that idea from was the university. They certainly didn’t get that from us. Now they’ve started work The Penny has indeed dropped that they know very little and have a long way to go.
Both are now doing masters alongside working full-time.

Which to be honest, they should’ve been doing whilst studying for an undergraduate degree. That was probably my mistake thinking that it was better to concentrate on getting top grades.

@Almostwelsh tell your DS to not give up. He'll get there and something will turn up. Wishing him loads of luck for 2025🍀

The service charges on my house are minimal I only brought service charges up because all the horror stories I've seen relate to service charges on flats in London which people then use to claim all shared ownership is bad. By the time I'd saved up for a typical mortgage deposit I'd probably be too old to biologically have kids which is an issue I've seen happen to some people.
Not to mention the privately renting families I've seen get evicted and had to move into b and bs with their school age kids.

Plus my monthly spend is just under 1k if I had a typical mortgage it would be over 1.6k a month. Trust me this is better 😉 highly recommend to anyone reading but I'll be called a shill

I know people who had shared ownership work out for them & others where it didn’t, I think the landscape today is quite different whatever you are buying.

I know there is no "imaginary pot" so it can't be a "figment of my imagination" as the "pot" doesn't exist.
I know perfectly well that you don't have a state pension "pot" in the same way that you can have a private/works pension "pot".
I made this quite clear in my post, and when referring to a "pot", I was merely quoting another poster.

Yes, but you’re not making the same level of capital gains and you’re going to need to borrow more money. That’s what you’re just not getting but as long as you’re happy.

The lack of training positions has been happening for years. I was once a general nurse who became burnt out with bedside nursing. Ideally, I wanted to enter primary care and train for an advanced nurse practitioner role at a GP's surgery. I already had a lot of transferable skills, in addition to which I self-funded several PD courses in various long-term conditions.

I searched for practice nurse roles for years but very few were advertised in my area (despite the media constantly reporting the shortage of practice nurses) and the ones that did all required previous experience in the role - there was not one single position which offered training.

This seems very short-sighted because without training positions the next generation of nurses can't get the experience required to fulfil the roles when more experienced nurses retire. Consequently, I left nursing as I could not relish the idea of remaining in bedside nursing until the day I retired.

This from the ONS " 22 Feb 2024 — There were an estimated 559,000 young people in the UK who were NEET and economically inactive"

'17yo DS works at the local recycling centre. There's loads of jobs out there for young ones.'

There are not loads of jobs out there. It is fact that vacancies have fallen markedly. Of course, this is only going to get worse with the Labour NI increase.

@lifeonmars100 is 550k high?

This is such a silly attitude. I am no Tory - I have a lot of hatred for both main parties. Severe damage has been done by both. It’s very silly to sit and delude yourself into thinking that the tories fucked everything and Labour will fix it. Why did we not vote Labour in sooner if they were the solution?

I remember life under the last Labour government - particularly as that’s when I was at university and that’s when my kids were born.

As a student, I received a flyer in 1997 saying that if Labour were elected, students wouldn’t pay tuition fees. Obviously that was a giant lie and tuition fees were brought in almost immediately. Not for me, but my youngest sibling ended up tangled in debt from it. I was in my late teens and remember being so utterly shocked at the barefaced lie on the Labour leaflet I received. I haven’t trusted any politician since.

the 2000s
I remember there being no bed or midwife when dd was being born. I was screaming, collapsed in the corridor and a midwife decided that she had better leave her current patient to see wtf had happened to me. She immediately shouted out that she could not return to her current patient. My dd was born 20 mins later. This was under a Labour govt - no beds, no staff. My db was a state school teacher under the last Labour government - assaulted and abused, followed home so the feral kids could throw his bins about and throw stones at his windows.

You are in cloud fucking cuckoo land if you lay all the blame for our current situation with the conservatives. Remember Blair being called a war criminal? (I don’t think he was a war criminal btw)

What is it as % of the population? How does it compare to other years? Other generations?

Oh I get what you're saying but my point is I saw people on this thread saying their kids aren't having kids because they can't afford a home so I just bought up shared ownership as a solution. These people aren't looking to max out their capital gains they just want a nice affordable home to start a family in

I have friends whose children would fall into that category. They’ve been privately educated and they’ve been to grammar schools. And their current job if you like is renovating houses that they’ve bought on the cheap with their parents cash. So for the couple of years it takes them to sort those houses out and then sell them whilst posting on YouTube and making content. They do look economically inactive but actually they might end up being in the better position than those that have worked all gone to Uni .
I realise this probably isn’t the majority but it’s at least a handful by where we live

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-52660591

My company is the same. Constant lay offs in the UK and moving the jobs to low cost. No career opportunity for anyone. People will just need to go into jobs that can't be done by AI or offshore ... or become insta influencer. Nowadays everyone wants to be one ... it's grim imo