To be so cross at the government

[Hillary17]

I honestly have no idea what we’re going to do next year and it’s now keeping me up at night worrying about our financial situation. We’ve been sensible and cut back as much as possible, got rid of all the luxuries people on here suggest to cut back on but there’s still a massive hole forming in our finances. Ours savings have been wiped by buying our first home and general cost of living over the last six months. We saved for ten years to buy our first home together, worked incredibly hard and sacrificed. It’s hardly a mansion either, your bog standard first house! Currently paying around £750 a month on the mortgage. We fixed for two years due to our jobs being a bit in flux and not sure if we’d need to move - this runs out next year and have just been quoted £1150 for our new price. How can this even be possible?! Where do the banks and government think people are going to find this extra money? We can’t even sell up and rent because there’s a huge crisis in the rental market near us and sales are bombing; we’re absolutely trapped here for god knows how long. We’re not extravagant, just comfortable middle earners who wants a normal life. I know there’s people worse off than us (I’m terrified for them because I can’t even explain the rise in our food shop or household bills) but I’m genuinely starting to think nobody cares about the middle income families. We work really hard, earn a decent amount but still won’t be able to afford to put the heating on this winter. I know I’m going to get bashed for this but I’d expect to at least be able to afford a bloody takeaway on a weekend without being in a state of panic. How is that even a situation in 2022?! I’m just so furious with the government honestly. No point to this post other than to say god help everyone who is a low income earner because if things in the middle are this bleak I dread to think.

@TokyoSushi

"It's 2022, you should be able to use your bloody heating!"

+++

Yes you should be able to afford putting your heating on but in order to do that right now in 2022 would involve cutting a deal with Putin and throwing Ukraine under a bus.

The choice you need to weigh up here is what is more important to you personally: standing up to the unprovoked Russian invasion of Ukraine or being able to afford using your "bloody heating". Because in the short term you can't have both, no matter what anyone tells you or seeks to blame the "Government ".

@1dayatatime - I don't know what your circumstances are and whether you were involved with furlough. What I remember about that time was complete terror. I have been in my current job for a number of years and I have a senior position managing key accounts, which are largely well known enterprise size clients. We pivoted and sent everyone to work from home during the week before 23rd March. It was a mammoth task as we did not at that point have people working from home. In the following week, one by one all our clients cancelled their work. I was furloughed along with most of the rest of the company. I didn't know my furlough would be 6 weeks and if I had it would have been easier. We all thought there was a strong possibility the company would go under with the loss of c. 200 jobs. Fortunately we survived but it's only in the last 6 months or so we have turned a profit. It's been a struggle.

So forgive me for being really annoyed with your comments about furlough. They are actually quite ignorant and dismissive. There was nothing we could do and it's offensive to suggest otherwise. During lockdown I was constantly upset by people treating the 'furloughed' as the new underclass. I would far rather have been at work.

Your posts are peppered with mentions of what we may have forgotten. I haven't forgotten and I am as annoyed today as I was then by people making sweeping statements.

Especially as until now mortgage payments have generally been lower than rents in most areas

I wondered about this , I live in quite an affluent area and rents are expensive, but if you look on rightmove at houses for sale and mortgages which it now calculates at just under 6% and rents, the rents generally come up a bit cheaper. Also due to all the other CoL increases, people might not be able to save as much as or as quickly for a deposit. Also I am sure lenders are going to be adding in all the CoL increases into their stress testing and checking how likely a redundancy might occur ? This will surely effect the number of people who can enter the market and could have a stagnating effect on prices ?

Sorry?

One half of the country is angry at the other half for what is their opinion (rightly or wrongly) bad choices that came with consequences be that the Brexit vote, the 2019 election or the reaction to Covid.

Brexit being a "bad choice" is not a matter of opinion. It is fact.

To finish off let me give you an example; "Eat out to help out" cost £600 million yet how many people were critical of this use of taxpayers money at the time and how many went "Hey let's tuck in to a half priced Nando's"

Many of us did indeed think this was absurd, said so at the time and did not participate.

I wondered about this , I live in quite an affluent area and rents are expensive, but if you look on rightmove at houses for sale and mortgages which it now calculates at just under 6% and rents, the rents generally come up a bit cheaper.

That's simply a time lag due to when mortgage arrangements have to be refinanced. The higher rates absolutely will feed through into rents, mostly over the next 24 months.

Nicked off Twitter

Exactly. It would be more accurately phrased as WE can't fix all of YOUR problems Sunak. Fix them yourself instead of gaslighting us into believing we should pay for them. Fuck off.

Can’t find any Hovag mattresses on the IKEA website

Whoops wrong thread, apologies.

That headline, " the State can't fix all your problems."
It is becoming more surreal by the day.
Total of around 171 billion would have helped .

Well that is mainly the case because of the trade deficit that makes us dependent on foreign investment to stay afloat. It was 2% before Brexit (not great). Brexit has quadrupled it. So again, what is the best idea of how to fix this as much as we can as fast a we can??

I may have mentioned it already a couple of times if anybody is so hard of thought that they can't see it as plain as day.

Or the £120bn loss per year, increasing every year through compounding, from Brexit.

Indeed. My first ever mortgage in 1998 was at 6% and we were paying £580 a month. Now on a different mortgage (different partner/life) and still paying £575 a month - on about twice the mortgage. I thought, wow that's cheap when we got it. I"ve always thought budget for the mortgage at 6-7% and just feel happy if it's lower.

I could have sworn too when we got it, they went through the scenarios of this how is much it will be if it's at 6%?

We took out an additional loan 3 years ago (5 yr loan) taking this into account knowing that when it ended, that money could be used if needed for the mortgage. Yes, I am somewhat fucked off that it will be needed and I was looking forward to having that extra £300 a month but c'est la vie I guess.

I'm actually annoyed at the number of people who've clearly been allowed to borrow massively beyond their means if going up to 6% means you haven't got a cat in hells chance of paying it. (as in, annoyed on their behalf for shit advice)

I know exactly what you mean on paper we should be having a merry old time with a mortgage of £600 and both of us working in professional jobs.
But reality is very different with cost of nursery going up, energy bills,food and also our mortgage.
We are putting what our predicted mortgage increase is into a instant access high savings account (Tandem is 2.55% currently) so we get used to the additional cost each month and will use that money towards the end of our fix next year to bring it down.
Doing so will be painful and means we cut back on a lot of things. Vinted is now my go to place for everyone's clothes and shoes. We cut our shopping right back and reduced to meat twice a week.
I've also done my sums and going onto the SVR is actually better at the moment and your not locked in so we will probably do that rather then remortgage and try and ride it out!

“The state can’t fix all your problems”

Where do you even start with such arrogance. This isn’t because of a bad decision I took. I can decide, to some degree, what job I do, where I send my kids to school and what to cook for dinner. And if I make a mistake, I can try to fix it.

The economy, stupid, is not up to individuals to fix - it is YOUR problem to fix.
Fiscal policy as well as monetary policy - not MY problem to fix.
Unsustainable energy prices, not MY problem to fix.

Sunak, you will find out at the next general election at the latest that these are YOUR problems!

@CoastalWave - it's not that helpful to compare the situation we are in now to the 80s. Property prices have risen so much and the amount of multiples of your salary you can borrow is far more. Rent and mortgage costs are a far greater chunk of income so the effect is worse.

Well thats not true.

France, by nationalising EDF/Nuclear energy industry, has capped increases at 4% and next year 15%, inflation is 6.5%, so half what ours is (rpi)

So, why can't we nationalise the 67% of UK energy we produce here.
Its not going to cost anything like the £200 billion we are heading for and with far lower bills.

By nationalising energy, do you mean the government buying up the shares on the stock exchange of the listed energy companies in a legal way following the takeover code? Because shareholders in those tend to be pension funds etc. because typically energy is a dividend paying stock.
Do you really think the government will run the companies better?! Do you really think it won’t cost heaps to buy them? And if you don’t buy them fairly the financial markets collapse and rest of the world never invests in UK again and we probably go bankrupt overnight.

Indeed.

He can start by explaining how £30bn of headroom in July became a £50bn deficit by October, and why this is the public's fault.

Yeah all those things have happened in France haven't they?

France 10 yr bond 2.8%
UK 3.5%

Markets have faith in who exactly?

2 years of energy support (no guarantee that it wont be needed for many years) £200 billion - at least if NS production and Green energies were nationalised, the Govt would have an asset, which could be privatised again in the future.

We are all told we can't have a WFT because profits are made Worldwide and NS actually makes no money, which is it?

Pension funds have a very wide and diverse portfolio's, less that 4% of funds are in energy at all.

Consider this, if the UK were at war, would we allow UK produced gas to be priced as a global commodity, sold back to consumers at prices way above the cost of production?

Russia is trying to destroy how we live & our financial stability (aided by the Tory party) we are arming the Ukrainians to the hilt, Russia blew up Nordstream pipeline - looks like a war to me.

@Hillary17 have you looked through your outgoings?
NOT THE POINT OF YOUR THREAD I KNOW THE UK IS GOING TO SHIT but If both of you are above average or 'high' earners as you say with no kids/ childcare costs a £1100 mortgage is usually ok (I only say this as we are as you describe and can manage ok)

Some headlines today saying they are contemplating stitching up middle earners again by cutting pensions relief, so taxing people as they contribute to pensions and when they withdraw! You really couldn't make up this level of lunacy.

As usual lots of "echo chamber" comments from remainers about how everyone regrets Brexit and should "campaign" to rejoin.

We are facing the same problems as the rest of the world with energy prices causing inflation, and the knock on effect of energy prices affecting the price of everything we buy or do.

Add on a war restricting the supply of energy (and some food stuffs) = more global pressure on prices and supply.

Some gung ho ideological economic policy lifting mortgage rates rapidly and causing more financial pain.

But remainers still trying to make everything Brexit, Brexit, Brexit.

You might be able to pontificate about macro economic effects on your mumsnet 100k income but for people who work in care, retail and hospitality labour shortages added to by Brexit at least mean a slight upward pressure on wages and terms and conditions. Basically at least in these times of global cost of living pressures we can get work. If our employer won't give us anything but a zero hour contract we can look around for one that will.

People on here talking about "campaign to rejoin" because of their cost of living pressures with 5k a month coming into their households could try "campaigning" for carers to be given stable contracts and enough mileage money and wages to be able to afford to run a decent car to get to their calls. Maybe that would ease the recruitment crisis somewhat.

Remainers like to endlessly accuse leavers of racism but seem to be happy to have groups of people living in unsanitary conditions overseen by gangmasters as long as they can buy a cheap cabbage.

People on lower wages deserve to earn enough for a decent quality of life and to have reliable work and terms and conditions too and remaining wasn't providing that for lower earners.

If we had a vote on rejoin you might find - just as last time- that remainers are just the ones with the loudest mouths.