to think there is no such thing as poverty in the uk?

[spottyzebrahasthelurgy]

i mean no one is really starving to death are they?

I just think the flipancy on this thread is really hard to bear!

An 8k debt is fairly minimal considering the return I was expecting and considering the national average. If some people who could have managed their debt better, had not been so quick to take up the ridiculous offers of credit that were out there, I mean beyond their reasonable expectations and then coming to me asking for more credit I might not be facing redundancy now. And to think I used to advise on the side of caution!! It was totally fucking ignored and now I'm paying the price with sleepless nights and stress.

My debts were within my reasonable expectations. How many of the fuckwits mortgaged up to the hilt and maxed on their credit cards could say the same???

I say again...fuckwits! No apology!

oh and did I mention that as things stand at the moment I will be officialy homeless sometime after Christmas??

No I don't think I did.

You know what - when you live like this day to day, and have been for a very long time, you soon learn that the only way to stay sane is to have a sense of humour and (occasionaly) be a little flippant.

If you'd care to read my posts - you'd see that I think the OP is talking utter bollocks

"How many of the fuckwits mortgaged up to the hilt and maxed on their credit cards could say the same???"

I think moaning about an 8k debt that YOU ran up is laughable... It is no one else's fault that you are now in the same situation as many borrowers, that ran up debts they could not afford. You have done the same thing!!
Most people don't have the option to run up that kind of debt. The only person you can blame is YOU..... DONT SPEND IT BEFORE YOU EARN IT COZ IT MAKES YOU A FUCKWIT!!!!!!!

My eyes are going crossed with all these fuckwits dotted about the page...

I think we have established poverty does exist in the UK, indirectly and directly.

Agreed Lady, however , now we have a little miss, complaining that they are in debt that they can't afford, because lots of other people took on debts they couldn't afford, which means WE are now ALL "Fuckwits".... Not the apparent financial advisor!!!

Am I completely ignorant, or am I right in thinking people really living in poverty probably won't have a fucking computer ffs?

Ok FAQ thats you and exH. Apologies to you.
But seriously in my line of work finding two of you in one go is a fairly major phenomenon!

And when you consider than with all the transferrable skills and experience I have in the finance industry, I cannot get a single interview, not even an admin job, you have to realise that things are pretty fucking shitty. No one is hiring and I have to retrain. I have reduced my debts by a massive amount to the absolute minimum. I have no more savings so the plight of Icesave is irrelevant to me now!

I have a sense of humour, I can see the silver lining in most situations but there is just so much bollocks you can listen to when you have been warning people for the last year or more.

Is the credit crunch real? It is so real you will be thinking you worst dreams have come true. We are only just starting. It is not a case of tightening your belt, the shit is going to hit the fan in the worst possible way!

Sweet dreams.

I would just like to say

(for those of you that care}

I have finished my ironing

Well done FAQ I have given up on the housework, have an hour in the morning - shall do it then! Have totally lost track of this thread now, cannot fathom if I am a fuckwit or not

you had savings

I cann't fathom it out either (fuckwit or not), I'll have to do the rest in the morning, hope I can get it looking respectable upstairs before the viewers come....in the mean time I'm going to have a fag (ooooo fancy that someone living in poverty smoking tut tut tut ) and then crash on the sofa for a few hours before the DS's get up.

Well Miss, I think the reason that you cannot get a single interview is that you must not be very good at your job, or you would not be in the same situation as us minions!! And if you were warning people for that last year.... MAYBE... JUST ... MAYBE, you should have taken your own advise!!!!!!!

Bastards! Sod it, if you can't beat 'em... I'm off to do my ironing... I mean you still have standards to maintain even if you are below the poverty line..ffs.

ermm yes standard are to be maintained even below the poverty line - I've never visited a household in the 3rd world that lived in poverty that wasn't clean and tidy

Do lines like 'Poverty - it's all relative' just not fuck anyone else off?

It's not relative - it's shit, it's a struggle and 'does it really exist?' YES IT FUCKING DOES!

I have opportunities, interviews, avenues that I can go down. I have taken my own advice and reduced my overall debt to a minimal amount. Never mind the third world, what about all the people within the uk who have no opportunities? the cost of living is trebling, their income is staying the same. They have even less chance now of getting out of the benefit trap. Our country is already on it's knees and we are not even in true recession yet.

I know people are just trying to make the best of a bad situation but saying 'is it real', when it is already far worse for some than 'real' is just such a piss take.

Hmmn, I heard someone say 'you can't tell the ironing from the irony'. Oh yeah.

but it IS relative - sorry - it really is.

I've experience (lived) poverty here in the UK, and I've experienced it (lived it) in a 3rd world country - we had no benefits to fall back on, we sold almost everything we owned, it was a tiny 2 bedroom cottage admittedly, but by the time we left all we owned was what we could fit into our suitcases to take onto a plane. We drank black coffee (no sugar) as coffee was ridiculously cheap, we ate mince (also extremely cheap) every day, no tomatoes,onions,rice etc - just cooked mince, for breakfast we ate the remains of our wedding cake (was being kept as a Christening cake for our recently conceived child) - until it ran out.

We had over 20 holes in the roof of the cottage, the landlord tried to get them fixed (and to his credit a week before we left he did eventually manage to get it down to just 4), the night before we were due to leave he gave us the money to pay the airport tax - otherwise we would have been stuck there.

Here, if you have no job, you can get housing benefit to help pay for your housing, if you're lucky you may even get a council house, you get CTC, IS, CB..........BUT it doesn't mean that the poverty isn't real when that's all your getting (I get all of the above apart from HB which I don't currently qualify for). It's still a daily struggle to make ends meet and it sucks, both experiences of living in poverty were/are shit.

But it IS relative.

Hmmmm, I see where you are coming from BUT.

Within the UK we have been paying taxes, all the obvious ones and the stealth ones too, we are not a developing nation. We are not third world. We have all paid enough taxes to ensure that our most neediest members are not at the level which you describe.

Even if I were to concede that poverty is relative, it is/ should be relative to our circumstance not that of a third world nation pre industrialisation, otherwise what was it all for, and what the hell have we been playing at?!

I am not in the worst case scenario although it feels like it for me. I go to bed at night and there is a weight on my chest that keeps me awake for a good few hours and YES I know I am not alone but it feels like it at 3 am.

And I still will not retract the fuckwit comment.

I remember my first year of teaching and showing some pictures of St. Lucia (a contrasting locality) and asking the children to point out the differences they saw.

Child 1: Look, the live in tin houses with no windows. We don't have houses like that, do we?

Child 2, 3 & 4: Yes, we do - kelly lives in a house like that.

Kelly

And she did - lived in a council house made of tin with no glass in the windows. I drove past her house that evening to see. Same child came to school in the snow one day wearing summer sandals and no socks. I asked where her socks were and she said, "It is my sister's turn for the socks today" These kids had nothing They would steal story books from school that they couldn't even read just to have something.

Her neighbour, also in my class, slept on a pile of newspaper in his bedroom while a horse lived in the kitchen.

Social services were never able to help because "Mum won't open the door"

I should have said that this was eight years ago. The tin houses were rennovated and had bricks put on the outside

Like I said, not relative.

St Lucia, correct me if I am wrong, is dependant on bananas and tourism. I am not saying that is good, it is probably a bloody hard existance.
But it is not dependant on the UK GDP.

I wish there was a comparison, I expect tht 99% of the population would be better off if there were, But there isn't.

Christ it's late.
BTW XLR8 financial advisor has never been my role. I just tried to give the heads up. Que sera sera.

Yes, the point was that St Lucia is a very different place. Yet children live in similar circumstances in the UK.

The NSPCC has tons of information about poverty in the UK

Yes YABU.

erm believe it or not while exH and I were wokring and living in a 3rd world country - we also paid taxes - paying tax is not something that's unique to the developed world you know