To think money ends poverty- not education, not mindset, not budgeting advice, just actual money?

[WildHazelCritic]

I keep seeing discussions about “breaking the poverty cycle” or helping people escape hardship and the solutions are always long-term or conditional: learn to budget, go back to school, change your mindset. But poverty is often just not having enough money. And people giving money - whether through better wages, benefits, or direct support, would make the biggest difference. AIBU to think we over complicate it because people are uncomfortable with the idea of redistribution or just giving people what they need?

Education and proper wages for all work, given that not everyone is suited to education, or going to become a high flyer.

Well you hand money to the unintelligent and they waste it all then what?
Poor doesn't equal unintelligent. The taxpayer picks up the tab for the handiwork of entitled idiots all the time - the government paid £45bn to bail out RBS/NatWest after Fred Goodwin drove it off a cliff. Goodwin didn't even lose his pension!

I'm talking more about those not working who can't get any jobs due to lack of skills which is a huge problem. They're living "in poverty" due to a life on benefits.

Thing is that there is different attitudes with money. An example from my two girls at uni.

Both of them at one point phoned me to say that they were tired, walking home their loan hadn't arrived, and they hadn't much food. In both cases I transferred £10 and told them to buy something on the way home.

1. Stopped in at the shop and bought mince, veg, cheese etc and got home and made a lasagne for the next three days and some cheap bread so she could have toast if she ran out of money again before her loan came in.
2. Stopped at the takeaway and bought a takeaway. Two days later they phoned me again in the same position.

So money doesn't take someone out of the position if they don't use it in a way that helps them long term.

I think the everyone down the academic route is damaging to many children, but when we're talking education seeing them out of poverty, it's not just academic routes. We're talking about the electricians, the plumbers etc. Education includes training in other ways.

But there also has to be a drive. My dad had a huge amount of drive to get out of the poverty he was in. He used education, and was not just the first in his family to go to uni, but the first from his school too.
His brother ended up in emergency accommodation (with a family) on benefits until he realised nothing would change unless he did something, and applied for training for a trade. With that training, he got himself out of poverty.

Those people are as rare as unicorns. It is not as big a problem as the rightwing media wants you to believe.

Most people on benefits want to work and have worked in the past, but there are not enough jobs to have an employment level of 100% or even anywhere near 100%.

The families who have generations of unemployment are even rarer than unicorns. There is one vacancy for every two unemployed people currently, and the gap between job seekers and vacancies is growing.

We need to create more jobs, which again, requires money. Whichever way you look at it, the answer is money.

People always say this about the minimum wage being too low for an acceptable lifestyle. One set of figures for 2025 gives the minimum wage in the UK as being the second highest in the world (only Luxembourg has one higher). Another website puts it at third, just behind Australia and New Zealand, but a place above Luxembourg.

Whatever the exact place, the truth is that the UK minimum wage is in the top few in the world. And I don't have experience of living in New Zealand, but Australia and (particularly) Luxembourg are very expensive places to live.

If you can't meet salary requirements to rent or achieve a mortgage

The poster was a graduate. Assuming they didn't live at home, during Uni, they were probably in shared house accomodation and working to top living expenses. I've taken on recent grads and non grads. All earn enough to rent a shared house. Most don't drive and use public transport. I've employed migrants who start with no support in the UK, other than communities such as churches/mosques and all find a way to live and work. It's been wonderful to see how after a few years they progress to saving/getting a car/going on holidays etc.

Renting is too expensive, no argument there but it doesn't mean there are no solutions. I grew up in poverty so I have genuine empathy but my (single) parents attitude to education/work gave me a way out. I have been that young person coping on tiny amounts of money and moving areas to make a life work.

If people cannot live on the NMW without top-up benefits, then it is too low. I have no issue with small and medium businesses needing to have their workers' wages topped up, especially ones providing essential services like child care settings, but I have a massive issue with the likes of Tesco, Asda, Amazon, Starbucks, etc having their wage bill propped up by UK taxes while their CEOs and shareholders rake in massive bonuses.

This. Also having enough money increases Self efficacy, I Q, health, self esteem, sense of safety.

I agree. Minimum wage isn't too low. The real problem is cost of living, particularly housing costs, childcare costs, utilities etc. All within control of the government who could change and shake things up if they wanted. Lots of other countries have much cheaper childcare, cheaper utilities and more options for cheaper housing.

Scale! The "Bonuses" etc may appear massive, but divide them down by number of stores, number of staff, etc., and the figures are actually trivial. If the "bosses" stopped taking bonuses, and shareholders stopped taking dividends, the amounts saved really wouldn't give their workers any meaningful pay rises. On a "per customer" or "per worker" basis, supermarket profits really aren't that different to your typical small/private convenience store. I did the Maths once for Tesco and it's quite illuminating. Supermarkets run on very small margins, even less than small/independent convenience stores on a percentage basis.

But people aren’t just going to give you money . To get money you have to earn it which means getting a good education , applying yourself to your chosen career/ job and that is the spring board to earning .

I'm talking more about those not working who can't get any jobs due to lack of skills which is a huge problem. They're living "in poverty" due to a life on benefits.

And what about those people in minimum wage jobs, still living in poverty and still needing significant top up benefits?

No amount of education or budgeting is going to help while landlords can continue to increase rents without constraint and whilst housing is a convenient place to park money while interests rates are low, rather than being a home.

The ‘back in my day’ argument doesn’t work. Rents and mortgages and deposits were affordable. They are no longer. This is the single biggest reason for poverty.

So, you know, shop for cheap veg, buy second hand, give up the fags/booze etc is all very well but it won’t pay the rent. It just won’t.

A lot of people benefit from the current approach to ‘housing as investment portfolio’ so it’s more convenient to continue to lay the blame on fecklessness and migration.

Definitely education. broader view, more opportunities, better qualifications, more life chances.

And neither will being employed - the UK has never before had such a high proportion of WORKING people living in poverty.

Tesco had an after-tax profit of £1604 million last year alone.

Indeed.

I'm interested to hear the answer to this as well, it's the area of this topic that always gets studiously ignored though.

I find this thread more and more interesting as I read it. As I have said already I grew up in a terribly deprived area, I still live in it although on the ‘good’ side now.

The jobs that people keep mentioning here, bin men, cleaners, shop workers, I know lots of them (relatives/neighbours/school parents) and they all seem to be doing just fine and these jobs are considered perfectly respectable. I mean they aren’t driving Ferraris but they have decent houses, yearly holidays, their kids are all running around with their stupid fucking Lafufus just like mine.

My area is quite affordable though, I probably couldn’t have my lifestyle in London for instance with my current income so yes that will be a struggle for a lot of people but there are plenty of affordable areas where people will be managing fine.

Also as stated repeatedly (but the bleeding hearts can’t get through their thick skulls) education when mentioned in terms of reducing poverty does not mean university degrees. There are families who fall into the trap of generational unemployment and educating them, or the children at least, about the opportunities that they could access, how to manage money, how to save, how getting a job can provide a bridge to other opportunities and can provide value beyond just wages, is an important step in ending this. No one is suggesting they should all be sent to bloody University.

There are a lot of stupid, privileged snobs on this thread.

There are families who fall into the trap of generational unemployment and educating them, or the children at least, about the opportunities that they could access, how to manage money, how to save, how getting a job can provide a bridge to other opportunities and can provide value beyond just wages, is an important step in ending this. No one is suggesting they should all be sent to bloody University

Where are these families, and why could the Joseph Rowntree Foundation and others not find them when they tried to investigate generational unemployment, only to find out it was a myth?

https://www.jrf.org.uk/work/are-cultures-of-worklessness-passed-down-the-generations

The whole tax system needs reviewing as well.

HMRC will pounce like vultures when those on the lower end of the wage scale get a pay rise. Not sure if it's still the case, but second jobs used to be taxed at a higher rate than the primary source of income. Side hustles - subject to tax on ridiculously low thresholds - Internet commerce being a huge target as it's boomed. In reality the effort of flogging off your old tat on Ebay or Vinted is often miniscule profit with maximum input, as customers expect individual hobby sellers to perform to the same alleged "standards" of Amazon and their ilk.

You sell a house - we'll have a chunk of that. You run a business - we'll impose rates that make your overheads unmanageable. You inherit, be it money or property - we'll have some of that. You want to drive a cab - we'll make you buy a license to operate that makes it unprofitable.

I'm not saying I'm in favour of no tax, just that the rules and thresholds make getting ahead harder at the bottom end. And the pursuit of this end of tax probably costs more than is generated.

Meanwhile, tax avoidance is legal and fully exploited by those with the most, so they can keep more quite legitimately, and any attempt to change that is met with threats by high earners and big employers to leave the country because they're single handedly paying for all the benefits and it's not fair, even though they are monopolising and ring fencing the employment market to garner the most profit for shareholders, enabled by the state to pay the lowest wages possible.

Big employers thrive on zero hour contracts and part time workers, because it cuts their wages bill and therefore their taxes. I appreciate part-time work is better for some, but again in retail and service industries and hospitality it leaves employees permanently insecure and still state dependent because of rising costs.

Round and round we go, which is why inequality is growing at an exponential rate.

Someone mentioned investment upthread, which of course can mean a few things, but in terms of the stock market, if you have 50.00 spare quid and buy shares in a big company, and that company goes bust, it's a pointless exercise - akin to playing the lottery or gambling. Unless you have multiple "spare" 50.00s, you're 50.00 down with no recourse. So "investment" when you're living hand to mouth is too high risk to try.

I could go on, but I hope you get the gist.

@MistressoftheDarkSide

Someone mentioned investment upthread, which of course can mean a few things, but in terms of the stock market, if you have 50.00 spare quid and buy shares in a big company, and that company goes bust, it's a pointless exercise - akin to playing the lottery or gambling. Unless you have multiple "spare" 50.00s, you're 50.00 down with no recourse. So "investment" when you're living hand to mouth is too high risk to try.

Not sure if it was me you were talking about but I wrote about investment in my comment - although I didn't suggest that you start to invest as soon as you "have a spare £50" or "when you're living hand to mouth". I wrote: "but be willing to save and then, later, invest for the future".

Of course no-one should be investing without proper knowledge/education about investment - including how and when to start investing, how to invest as safely as possible and the diversification of investment portfolios. But then I never suggested that they should do that in the first place!

Someone mentioned investment upthread, which of course can mean a few things, but in terms of the stock market, if you have 50.00 spare quid and buy shares in a big company, and that company goes bust, it's a pointless exercise - akin to playing the lottery or gambling. Unless you have multiple "spare" 50.00s, you're 50.00 down with no recourse. So "investment" when you're living hand to mouth is too high risk to try.

Living hand to mouth you’re not putting a spare £50 anywhere but your food shopping. Being in a position to put £50 away every month in a divested portfolio over a long period of time will bring a decent return, especially with compound interest. I wish I had understood that in my 20s because my retirement fund would look very different. The point is knowing that investment isn’t just for the super rich, super secure and putting a small regular amount can make a huge difference - not expecting someone who can’t feed their kids to chuck £50 on black or red.

Sorry I wasn't having a pop at you specifically, my mind just started thinking about investment in general. I watch alot of YouTube and there are multiple videos and ads about investing, sometimes in the traditional sense, and sometimes in things like crypto, and in those there's often an undertone of pyramid scheme, another way of grifting by persuading people that "even the smallest investment" can be the start of something big, but usually the only winner is the person running the scheme.

Investment is the preserve of those who have enough money to take the loss of sometimes substantial amounts IMO and I appreciate you weren't suggesting it without a solid financial footing and learning how to play the game.

Obviously this thread is about achieving that solid financial footing in the first place, and how much harder it seems to be these days, especially when you factor in debt.

We invented money, we can "create" money, we control how it is distributed and manipulate who gets it and why for often philosophical reasons. I find it fascinating, confusing and infuriating in equal measures, especially given our current climate where constant conflict and disaster capitalism are rife.

So apologies for not explaining myself properly - no offence intended x