Absolutely rinsed in this budget - almost £1k a year worse off.

[Mushroo]

Honestly in despair at this government. On a very high level calc, we are so much worse off!

We both pay a lot into pensions, so the NI change is about £700 a year worse off.

We have an EV car, so based on our 4k a year mileage, it’s about £120 a year. (Although how it will be enforced I have no idea).

Stagnating tax thresholds, probably about £100 a year between us.

Council tax F house (4 bed end terrace, not a mansion, needs renovating). So risk of revaluation after having paid a fortune in stamp duty. We didn’t get first time buyer stamp duty relief because we bought about 2 years too early, and we moved before Covid so no relief there either. So overall we’ve paid about £30k in stamp duty already over our lifetime.

Weve already had the private school hit (which is a separate debate and we’ve accepted that) but wow, we are just being kicked on all sides.

We are classic ‘middle earners’ - earn about £70k each, but have mahoosive mortgage and pay over £2k a month in nursery fees already.

Every measure just seems to have a negative effect on our lifestyle, which is ‘comfortable’ but increasingly squeezed.

What is so obscene about his wife's family being wealthy from running a successful technology company? Why is it so bad that his parents did well for themselves? Then he himself went out and did a good career.

None of them should be working. We really shouldn’t be subsidising businesses who don’t pay their employees enough to live on.

And this affects you how? This is life I’m afraid some people are born into wealth and most of us aren’t.

I believe that any billionaire is obscenely wealthy. Even if they liquidated all their assets today and never spent another penny, they’d have hundreds of millions of pounds to spend every year for the rest of their lives. They have more than they could ever begin to spend in their lifetime.

Meanwhile half the population of earth are living on less than £5 a day. So yes, I think it is grossly obscene to hoard more money than you could ever dream of spending while humans are starving.

We were told that Sunak should be admired for his wealth. I was just pointing out that a person shouldn’t be worthy of admiration just by virtue of being rich. They could be a psychopath who has been gifted a fortune. Why is that to be admired?

There are much more admirable qualities a person can have - compassion, selflessness, humility, curiousness, generosity, kindness, warmth… I’m very comfortable myself but when they’re putting me in the ground it isn’t my bank balance that I hope I’ll be remembered fondly for.

I’d have more admiration for someone from a humble background who built a fortune. In fact I’d have as much admiration for a struggling nurse/teacher/etc who was penniless. It is very easy to make money when you’re already rich.

Oh come off it. Last year our household paid well into 6 figures of various taxes, this year it will be even more. There are no GP appointments, my relative is left for many hours needing emergency care and even twenty years ago, I had a delayed NHS diagnosis that was life-changing - and the only “excuse” was ‘there’s no money’. Meanwhile the public sector unfunded pensions liability (not even on the UK’s books) is trillions, and growing.

We are just utterly shit at state services in the UK. I don’t know why, but I’m certainly not willing to see even less of the money earned by me confiscated for some mythical greater good, when what actually happens is that tax pays off a lot of debt interest, the public sector gets a whopping pay rise and productivity goes down yet again.

I also think Reeves position is untenable (and Starmer’s, by extension), but I’m afraid for what incompetent lunatic will be wheeled out of the sixth form common room next.

Sorry that should say “never earned another penny”. It won’t let me edit it.

Subsiding business or people who can't garnish a wage good enough to live off and/or need to budget better?

Also I've had a look at DWP statistics most aren't even working full time. Only 1/7 work FT, most work 21 hours a week.

Lol

This shows you don't understand economics or business. I'm all of tackling actual evasion and avoidance. But I actually think billionaires can and should exist if they play by the rules. I used Google today - 2 billionaires. I have a MacBook - another billionaire. My work laptop is a Windows one - I thank Bill Gates another billionaires.

If they liquidated all their shares in their company the market and people's investment portfolios would tank, meaning that more people would be in poverty.

I remember seeing on X the other way how much the NHS wasted on replacing some doors.

What did they pay for the doors? Doors are a bloody nightmare on healthcare projects, they are expensive, often have automotive aspects that need to be built in, fire rated and properly certified which often means all ironmongery needs to be fitted by the manufacture and the ironmongery used has to have been tested with the door to confirm compliance. I can't think of a single health care project I've worked on where the doors haven't been on the critical path because of the long lead times.

Quite. Anyone with an ounce of intelligence should be able to grasp that doors in a hospital setting can't just be some MDF with a hinge attached

To be fair, the amount of public money wasted on PFIs is sickening. My DS works in a school, and just a simple job like moving a plug socket can cost thousands, and they’re forced to pay it.

We all thought PFIs were great 30 years ago when they were building all these state-of-the-art hospitals, schools and public buildings on tick, but it was like financing our public services with a Wonga loan and now we’re stuck with them.

I often wonder what would the legal implications be if the government decided to just stop paying, and compulsory purchased them all back?

100%. DH is a consultant doing NHS and private work. About 7 years ago, every consultant got two brand new ipads in the course of a year because the NHS hospital was in surplus and didn’t want to lose the budget. Meanwhile, the “main” hospital up the road is permanently in special measures with grannies on trollers 24/7. 🤷‍♀️ Piss-ups and breweries spring to mind!

We also worked out that DH would need a pension pot of >£2.5 million to obtain the same annuity as he will receive from the NHS pension scheme. Very nice for us, you may think, but if we multiply that by every senior medic in the land (not to mention NHS management and GP’s - who aren’t exactly winning patient satisfaction awards rn) and you get a flavour of why the UK is so very turbofucked, and why Reeves is taxing the bejesus out of anyone who bothers to drag themselves out of bed in the morning.

https://beta5.contractfinderpro.com/doc/GNqYj/gloucestershire-nhs-trust/bedroom-door-replacement-wotton-lawn

Out of pure curiosity, what field of medicine does he specialise in?

We all thought PFIs were great 30 years ago when they were building all these state-of-the-art hospitals, schools and public buildings on tick, but it was like financing our public services with a Wonga loan and now we’re stuck with them.

I never thought that PFIs were great and neither did the government of the time, but apparently they were the least worst of a few terrible options.

it was like financing our public services with a Wonga loan

No it was like financing capital spend with a mortgage. The principle of PFI was sound, the execution was atrocious. Instead of employing skilled professional contract negotiators to ensure value for money each organisation was allowed to do its own negotiation and they were outwitted every which way by the provider organisations. There was no regulation in the process.

Oncology - works in a specialist hospital.

Bless him. Being a cancer doctor must be difficult.

Thank you - it can be, but he mostly loves it. (Massive physics/chemistry nerd, and he gets to do it on real people!) 😊

This is true. I was peripherally involved in a few PFI contracts, and it was abundantly clear that the contracts were unworkable (and practically unreadable - hundreds of comb-bound appendices that I doubt anyone ever checked). The government lawyers/external counsel seemingly had no bargaining power and were mostly walked over.

I assume also there are many cases where people pull through and beat the cancer?

Absolutely, although much depends on the cancer type. DH’s two specialisms are on the list of “good” cancers to get (no such thing really!) in terms of survival. They also tend to be the more popular areas in which to specialise - some specialisms get pretty depressing, I gather.