For my husband to earn £65,000 per annum and we still can't afford to live in this bloody country!!

[winegoddess]

Mortgage has gone up, electric has gone up, 5 mouths to feed, 3 children to clothe etc etc and month after month is a bloody struggle. Am fed up with straping money together when my husband earns a good wage and we should be able to get by! I now need to search for a way of 'me' bringing in some money but with a young baby at home and 2 others at school i am at a loss as to how! Please give me some job ideas or ways to make money!!

Healthy risk not rise, goodness knows what my minds on lol

Healthy risk and leveraging is not gambling. It is sound financial management investment. Sorry Katiedd if I keep responding to your posts in particular. That is because I feel you are using emotive language and throwing out the baby with the bathwater in the process.

I agree the general public could do with a crash course in managing their finances. But it is not all evil banks and feckless people. Lots of otherwise sensible people get caught up in the credit debacle.

There is nothing wrong with credit cards if you use them correctly - we put almost everything we spend on a month on a credit card. Simple reason is we either then get cash back or card points and use these to treat us. The cards are set up to then automatically pay the full amount each month so we never pay interest. We also effectively had a 3 year loan using 0% credit cards that cost us an equivalent rate of less than 1% for the overall loan (as there are some fees to pay) so CCs can make your money go further. Plus you have automatic rights on certain goods etc etc. The problem of course comes when you don't pay these off and then end up paying huge interest rates and sometimes fees. Too often credit cards are given out when they shouldn't be - they should really be called debt cards - if you don't pay up you are in debt and really the goods / services you bought are not yours until the debt is paid off.

How do you know how people are paying for their shopping KatieDD? I would hazard a guess that a large proportion of those cards are actually debit cards - that's how I always pay for all my shopping, as do many people I know. It looks exactly like a credit card, you would have to be really up close to me to see the small word 'debit' on the card.

Nothing to do with this debate really, except it seems like yet another generalisation!

We'll have to agree to disagree, lots of well meaning people got sucked in I'll give you that but the bank is not your friend when it comes to small business' or home ownership (well renting off the bank until the day you make that final payment which is unlikely to be ever in most cases from 2002 onwards).

I totally agree there will be times in everybody's lives when you need to borrow money but it should be as little as possible for as shorter time as possible otherwise you are the rabbit caught in the headlights as soon as anything changes in your life.
If one person reads this and pays off a credit card or better still doesn't take one out then that'll make my day.

katiedd, this mythical golden age when people had a pot of money to pay for hte MOT instead of paying with credit cards, only existed for about 30 years, between the you never had it so good years and the credit deregulation explosion of Nigel Lawson, which co-incided with the selling off and non-replacement of social housing and consequent soaring in housing costs.

Before that, debt was the absolute norm for most working people in this country. If you look on old postcards, you'll see that there were several pawnshops in every street, not just one, and people didn't just give in electronic gadgets and gold jewellery, they gave in things like winter overcoats. If you read any social history or ask any old person, the normal state of affairs was for people to be broke.

Debt was the norm until the advent of the welfare state and full employment with wages which had some relationship to housing costs. Now that we've gone back to housing costs being totally disproportionate to the level of income, debt has become the norm again. This is nothing new, it's just returning to what was always the way. The only difference is that we use credit cards instead of pawnshops.

Sensible people use credit cards as charge cards ie paying off the outstanding balance every month - for all the reasons SDD described. Credit has a valid role to play, if not misused to live beyond your means.

Eco of course most people don't carry around £150 in cash for the weekly shop, I fully appreciate that 90% will be debit cards, I was bloody gobsmacked at how many weren't. And the reason I know which are credit cards is that I designed a presentation of the difference because believe or not some people were being issued with credit cards and pins from the bank and thought they were debit cards and were shopping merrily with them and racking up £60 a month in interest when they had the cash in the bank.

Bella do you not feel we should have progressed then ? With all the developments and technology what you are saying is we haven't moved on from the 1920's, that's quite depressing.

KatieDD, didn't those people notice that a)the money was not being deducted from their bank account and b)they were receiveing a monthly bill for the goods they bought?

I can only comment as far as what they told me, but they said that they didn't and tbh fair most peoples reaction when they find they have more money in their accounts is yipeee I must be wrong, the banks don't make mistakes.
Of course when the credit card bill dropped on the mat the panic and some were paying it, contacting the bank and were fine and some were like yipeee free money.
Until they hit the credit limit and the banks want it back.

God yes of course I think we should have progressed.

And to some degree, we have. We do have access to more material goods than our predecessors and to an extent, we do have more comfort in our lives.

But we haven't progressed enough. There was once an aspiration that everyone should be able to afford to live on their wages without much trouble, because wages ought to have some relationship to what things cost.

There's no longer that aspiration. Although for most people, if you take housing out of the equation, wages are enough to live on. But since housing is our biggest cost, that is what for most people, makes income and outgoings incompatible. Though if you are on a very low wage, things like transport and fuel costs (which were more or less non-existent in the old days when people walked to work and didn't run cars) also have a huge impact.

Basically all these economic debates come down to the price of housing.

Which no mainstream political party is interested in, except to the extent that they want to keep housing costs really, really high. Someone posted a thread the other day about how the average cost of a house in England has gone down to something like £168K. IE 7 or 8 times the average annual income. And that's in a housing collapse situation. So at the height of the boom, it's not unreasonable to suppose that a house could cost the average person 10x their income.

OK I know those figures are distorted by stately homes etc., but still. House prices compared to wages are astronomical, and no mainstream politician thinks that should not be the case, or at least are prepared to propose even thinking about a solution.

This is what a mortgage of £4K will buy you these days

link.

Its a lovely house, but essentially a semi on a rather busy road with no off-street parking. To be fair, its more likely that somebody buying this house would have bought their first property at the bottom of the last crash and wouldn't be taking out a mortgage for the whole amount. However, its not exactly Beckingham Palace.

Part of the problem in mho is that young people wanted to live the lives their parent have in terms of owning, spending and holidaying.
What they didn't see was that when our parents left home they were usually dirt poor for years and only over 10-20 years of hard graft and scrimping and saving did they have the lifestyle that everyone now takes for granted.

My parents couldn't afford carpet when I was born as they were trying desperastely to afford a mortgage to start to own their own house
They didn't go out
Didn't have designer or luxury clothes and didn't holiday abroad
My mum cooked food and used up the left overs.
My dh's parents talk about having to go to bed early as they didn't have heating and were worried about the electricity bills. They wouldn't even go to friends houses for dinner as they couldn't afford to have them back!
Eventually things worked out well for them but in those days your rent/mortgage was a massive part of your income and it is the same today and you lived within your means. They now have enviable lifestles but they deserve them!

Nowadays there is a wrongful sense of entitlement. Everything must be immediate gratification Our priorities have become skewed.

Having read this morning that most banks are now pulling their tracker rate mortgages I doubt the cut in interest rates will have a great effect on borrowing. Interbank lending rates are still at almost 6% and that is what fixed rate mortgages are based on, not the bank of england rate.

The banks are cutting savings rates by 1.5% but not passing on that saving to their borrowers. Argh!

To a degree you are right and I've certainly heard that said before but what we also forget is back in the day my dad was home for 5pm most days and my mum didn't work, she didn't have to.
I think we've shot ourselves in the foot basically.

Yes of course they are susie, the bank will not put their customers before profits, can you see why I have steam coming out of my ears when i hear tax payers money is bailing them out ?

Yes of course they are susie, the bank will not put their customers before profits, can you see why I have steam coming out of my ears when i hear tax payers money is bailing them out ?

Yes I can, I agree they are out for themselves. BUT I don't think letting them go bust will help the average man in the street. No high street bank (bar HSBC perhaps) was immune from the problems, where would salaries be paid etc. It would have been chaos.

KatieDD, in your opinion, do people who borrowed excessively bear any responsibility at all?

Don't know if anybody will find this link as interesting as I do, but talking of changing perceptions of wealth, look at how high interest rates were in 1979/1980. For more than 6 months the base rate was 17%!

history of base rates

Yes of course they do, there will be plenty who deserve to go under and who won't and plenty who have done nothing wrong who will it's always the way.

When we were in an estate agents about three years ago, hadn't sold our three bed house in the south and wanted a nice 4 bed house up north. No problem the mortgage advisor said we'll just get the estate agent down south to say that the first house has gone up by 25% (it had gone up by 10%) and then you can cash in your endownment and put that down as 10% deposit on the next house up here. Nevermind that the two combined payments were £500 more than my DH earnt and I had a 10 week old baby at the time, you can rent out house A, which would have covered 80% of it's mortgage.
I sat there close to tears trying to get my educated, professional DH out so we could think about it and talk it over.
Thank god, one of our friends is an accountant and sat down with DH and went over all the figures and pointed out if the first house sat empty for just one month out of the year we would go under, any boilers blowing up, car needing repairing we would have been stuffed.
I can totally understand how somebody could have been sucked and gone along with that deal after all the man telling us all about it was an IFA.
We were offered 10 times his salary on the basis that he isn't at the top of his profession yet, but he's 40 this year so we only had 25 years of working to pay it off and that was interest only. Thank god we said no, he'll be made redundant on the 21st November.

This is what a £4k mortgage gets you round my way. This is in what used to be the murder capital of the country - don't know if it still is though.

So for whoever thought everyone in an expensive house were in some way lucky - every house round here is well over half a million and pretty much everyone has a frightening mortgage.

katiedd: "Yes of course they do, there will be plenty who deserve to go under and who won't and plenty who have done nothing wrong who will it's always the way."

If Gordon Brown let the banks fry, it will precisely be the scenario of the plenty who done nothing wrong who will go under.