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!!

katiedd, sorry to read about your dh's redundancy.

But unfortunately I can live with that, even if we are one of them in order to bring normality back and start again.
One of our relatives got reposessed in the 1990's and spent 12 years paying off the banks. He bought again in 1999 and lives in a £500k house now.

The 'ordinary semi'in a suburb my father (who didn't go to university) could buy and pay a mortgage on with a modest salary would be beyond the financial reach of me and my DH--both us with well-regarded degrees.

It would cost nearly half a million.

People have to take responsibilty for their spending...
How many people have taken the equity out of their homes over the last 4/5 years and spent it on lavish holidays, cars, day to day spending etc...and now could be looking at having negative equity as the price of their house falls ?
How many people receive ESTIMATED utility bills for months/years and then moan when they get a whopping bill to pay as the estimate was way off?
Take responsibility.

so you mean you could live with blameless people who have never borrowed a penny in their lives losing their entire life savings?

People have to take responsibility for their own financial decisions

But they can't take responsibility for the financial conditions in which their society finds itself.

If you told ordinary people 30 years ago, that an average semi in a not particularly good area of London would cost 20 times the average national wage, they would have thought you were an idiot.

But that is the case.

The savings are guaranteed.
If we get hyper inflation they'll be worthless anyway.

Bella if you'd said that 10 years ago people would think you were nuts.

What do you mean? Savings were only oriinally guaranteed up to £30,000. The whole point of the taxpayer funded package was to ensure that people's savings were safe. And I wouldn't worry about hyperinflation.

£30,000 is quite a lot of money.
Nobody has a crystal ball so you can't possibly say don't worry about hyper inflation because I believe that is how the mess will end. We'll all be laughing at our £500k mortgages because we're earning that in a year, just a question of how long it takes.

Doesn't this show that we are actually quite poor at educating people about money and credit vs debit cards etc. I bet more schools spend more time on sex ed than on how to manage personal finances. Its not only the schools job to teach them but home too. Some people have short memories or don't think ahead - there will always be a 'boom / bust' type cycles in a free market economy. Still recall the 12% fixed rate mortagage deal we had on our first property back in the 80s. Although house prices have gone up way too much - I'm sure I saw that the average amount paid from income to cover housing costs is still less than back in early '80s. One of our bosses once said the share prices will never go down - they continued to peak to over $70 and then crashed later to less than $0.75 within 18 months!! Depending what you bought when you could be very rich or have your savings quickly go to zero.

I can say that KatieD because unlike you (based on your posts anyway), I am financial literate.

Interestingly, if interest rates returned to their 1979 peak, a £4K a month mortgage would get you a £275K house assuming a 21 year mortgage. (Well maybe not interesting to everyone...).

Chocolatedot - how can you be so confident. I don't claim to be financially literate but am worried about inflation (not right now obv) but in next few years.

"I'm sure I saw that the average amount paid from income to cover housing costs is still less than back in early '80s"

This is what I am wondering about.

But in the early 80's it was much harder to get any kind of credit, whereas until recently you almost had to make an effort not to borrow money.

You do not know what the future is going to hold and I'm not being rude to you so your tone is rather unnecessary.
I don't claim to know how to sort all this out but it strikes me that tax payers bailing out the reckless is not a fair course of action.

You are absolutely right to be concerned about "inflation". It is however nigh on impossible to come up with a realistic scenario of the UK facing "hyperinflation" which of course is dependent upon a dramatic and unchecked increase in the money supply.

I have a friend in banking who has been predicting armageddon for some time. He was v worried about inflation.

Even if we are in recession, the prices of everything have risen hugely and so I think inflation is a valid fear.

In a way we (my family and other home owners) are lucky as the recession has led to a drop in interest rates rather than the predicted leaps to keep inflation down.

I don't have a crystal ball but I can be quite confident that hyperinflation of the post-war-Germany-currency-as-toilet-paper scenario will not happen in the UK in the short to medium term, based on current fundamentals, the way in which central banks have intervened and fiscal policy.

There will be inflation, due to high commodity prices, some of which has come down in recent weeks due to the threat of a global recession. But this is not Zimbabwe. So don't burn your 5-pound notes for heating just yet.

As I said, fears about "inflation" are eminently valid,the same cannot be said about "hyperinflation"

There is no IF about the recession we've been there for 6 months already, locally we have designer baby shops, restaurants closing down, how many emails for letterbox, GLTC, white company etc have you had offering 20% off. Last Christmas that was unheard of.

Katiedd, I agree about the recession already taking hold. It was confirmed in recent figures released by the government.

DH, DS and I survive on about a fifth of that a year while DH completes his PhD; ok, less children etc. and we rent instead of pay a mortgage but we quite obviously can afford to live here....we're clothed and fed and sheltered and you just have to treat everything else as a luxury. We're happy. I'm sad you're not. £65k is an unfathomable amount of money to me...

while i wrote that I missed a lot-apologies!

UK is not officially in a recession yet (but obviously will be). "Recession" is defined as 2 quarters of negative growth and there has only been one so far.

My point is that these terms have definitions and should not be bandied around with emotive language. Apologies for being rude.