Fed up of having no money

[Needablueskyholiday]

Just that really. I’m fed up of working my ass off (and DH) for what feels like nothing. I know I’m luckier than a lot of other people, food on the table, roof over my head, so please don’t bash me for that. It can’t just be me that is fed up of work, work, work, bills, bills and more bills. I see other families going swimming, going here there and everywhere and I just think “how do they afford it?”. Please tell me I’m not the only one that is so fed up and “robbing Peter to pay Paul constantly.”

To all the naysayers - do you realise that local economies are breaking due to the lack of funds?

OP cannot afford cinema anymore so it loses her £20per month, multiply this across 10 families and cinema is £200 down.

Eventually a cinema worker loses hours/job cannot afford their DC swimming lessons/hairdressers/boozy brunch.
we have a snowball

What do you think will/is happening to all those industries and employees?

It's not the point of the thread but swimming costs (and accessibility) have changed a lot. Pools shut in the pandemic and didn't reopen. Swimming for one adult and one child was £15 total here pre pandemic but £10 in my parents' (nearby) town. But their pool went bust...

In PILs city (much poorer northern city 200 miles away) they have three lovely recently built pools and an over 65 can swim for a year for a single payment of £5! (not that they do and local health is awful and obesity high, hence the subsidy I guess).

These things (which stem back to the UK's tax transfer system where an area can pay a lot of tax but get little spent on it) do make a big difference to quality of life.

Imo the point is that every single person on the planet has their own set of priorities, in addition to their own set of circumstances - even within families so of course vastly across MN

What poster A thinks is essential, might be optional to poster B, and unnecessary to poster C.

And all that is before getting into -unavoidable for poster D, unavailable to poster E, unreachable to poster F, or even just undesirable to poster G

It’s really easy to suggest changes to other people when we don’t know how those changes will fit (or not) into their lives

And particularly smug easy when it’s something either we have done, are already doing - or know we will likely never have to do 😂

@GKD regrettably we are all paying the costs of Covid, the furlough scheme and fir closing the country quite unnecessarily. However on MNet the clamour for closure and its subsidies reached hysterical levels because healthy people thought they would otherwise die when the statistics did not. The country went stark raving bonkers. Labour would have done the same if not harder and sooner.

We are paying the cost of having one of the most unequal societies amongst counties with similar overall wealth

The rest is an excuse to try and hide the inequality and all the grief it causes

@RosesAndHellebores Aye, because everything was just tickety-boo before covid 🙄

Maybe if the Cons hadn’t seen it as a public finance shake down opportunity, they’d be a bit more cash to go around.

oh and Trusseconomics, all our housing costs went down didn’t they! How many orgs have increased costs because of her interventions.

This. Even being able to just feed your family adequately is much more than a lot of people around the Globe can do. When did eating out, and going on holiday become such a right for so many people?

Was it Marie antoinette that was thought the poor should be happy to eat cake whilst she swanned around in her frocks and luxury ?

Was it ok for Henry the whatever to let riff raff eat the crumbs from the royal table and expect them to be grateful ?

Was it ok for a rich white South African to say to me didn't understand the revolts because "they were happy living in the bottom on my garden in a shack and working for me because I'm so lovely "

Gross inequality is what we have - it's not right and it's arrogant to tell people to put up with it and to pretend they can change it with just a bit more effort

Did those benefitting from low interest rates not realise they would go up and put aside a little during the gravy days rather than bolstering an economy increasingly based on nail bars and take aways?

Energy was cheap for years, did people not realise there would be a correction, admittedly it was made worse by Putin.

Do those clamouring fir the redistribution of wealth not see how that went in Russia and in China?

Life isn't fair but I'd rather live in a democracy where free speech prevails than elsewhere.

It's awful isn't it . I think what makes it feel worse is the shit winter weather . It's freezing windy and wet . Who wants to take their child to the park in that?
We can't afford to go swimming it's nearly £6 for an adult and £4.50 per child and the cinema is so expensive nothing worth going to see at the moment anyway. Out only luxury we have is Disney+ and I pay £4.99 pm . I gets watched a lot and so much cheaper than the cinema . It's been a god send really

I see you clearly have no money worries. Congratulations.

THIS! We were recently described by an economist as a poor country with a few very very very very rich people. I think this description is true. We have an aging society and the middle home-owning classes are shrinking. This is a problem. And no amount of counting pennies is going to help. I have been watching Gary's economics on youtube, he was the World's most successful trader in 2011 and what he has to say about assets is interesting and a bit scary.

I don't understand why some posters begrudge @Needablueskyholiday 's feelings about their situation. It is rubbish not having spare money to get a treat now and again to bring a bit of joy or just mix life up a bit. That's not asking for much really. No one is saying they don't want free speech and would prefer to live under a dictatorship but you do realise how those countries ended up with those regimes - it was a large part due to such high levels of inequality that the result was revolution and civil war!

@catsrlife yes indeed but communism wasn't better than what they had before.

Let's get the Mao Suits on order!

The way I look at it...when I was in school (late 30s now) we were always told that if you worked hard you'd get a good job and live a comfortable life.

Well lots of people have done all of those things, earn a decent/good salary and expect to be able to afford a trip to the cinema...and rightly so.

I appreciate the argument that it was harder years ago/doing so many activities/holidays etc years ago wasn't the done thing (it actually was in the 80s and 90s as I experienced that). And maybe our expectations now are slightly higher.. but I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing - if you work hard I don't think it's unreasonable to also be able to enjoy yourself!

The trouble is everyone thinks they are middle class and people have become entitled. For DH in the 60s/70s a week in Brid, Scarborough or Filey was the norm, sand in your sandwiches holidays. Nowadays everyone expects AI in the Med. But teachers/nurses, even middle management didn't have that.

I'm 63. When I bought my first flat in 1981, the first 4/5 years were budgeting to the nth degree and "living" took a lodger and even then purchases were based on need not want. A fridge or washing machine equated to a month's wages. For the first 18 months I had no central heating. I had to wait for two pay rises to add £1200 to the mortgage.

When we had DS and we were comfortable, I had to give up work because he was very poorly. For that first year there was no money for discretionary spending from what was coming in and we stuck to that to maintain my savings. There was a period when the fees weren't coming through when we budgeted £35pw for food and for DS's first Christmas he got an alphabet book and a Mr Men book. DH got a Mars Bar and I got a bath bomb. That January were were £17 away from not being able to make ends meet. Then thank goodness some fees were paid and I'll never forget DH saying "do you think we could have some decent meat next week?".

That first year, we did make entertainment for nothing and it was fun. Admittedly it was a short lived period but if it hadn't improved, I'd have had to go back to work or we'd have had to move out of London to a commuter town.

People in their 30s think my generation had it so easy. We didn't. Mat leave was 6 months, there was no free childcare for three year olds, no working tax credits, etc. There wasn't a coffee, takeaway or nail and brow culture either. It was the four terrestrial channels and a vhs video if you were lucky.

I’m unsure what your point is. Mat leave was 6 months in the 70s/80s but most women didn’t work after having kids or if they did, it was part time. You could live on one income. It’s not easier now. We have very high childcare costs, people are scraping a living. The squeezed middle is a real thing. Not destitute but no money for anything other than bills and housing. We have a govt who don’t give a shit about working families or anyone else for that matter apart from elderly voters and the top 5%. I say this not as a socialist but as a regular (reasonably paid) full time working mother who is fed up with this country and people who don’t sympathise but berate people into feeling grateful for this crap situation.

There are so many things wrong with what you have said -you sound tone deaf.
Unless you live by the seaside going to the beach for the day would be expensive if money was tight.
Also people did have money then -you just didn’t know them 😆 you sound like my mother who used to say things like;
we didn’t have contraception in those days and everyone smacked their kids -er nope!
Finally don’t rubbish the present, it might be challenging buts it’s someone else’s life. And there were lots of negatives about being a kid in the 60’s, you just have chosen to gloss over them.

This thread is pretty heartbreaking in places, am really sorry so many people are struggling.

I know extreme thrift ideas don’t always go down well so apologies if anyone is not impressed, but sometimes desperate times call for desperate measures.

Things I have been known to do or known others to do:

make the most of anything free at work like hot drinks or shower facilities
go to bed early so lights and other electricals are off
sign up to https://www.toogoodtogo.com/en-gb
do paid online surveys at ipsos
sell things where possible
walk rather than drive places (appreciate not always possible)
take shorter or slightly less frequent showers/baths
rinse plates and mugs in cold water rather than in hot or dishwasher (hygiene permitting)
wash clothes, bedding, towels less frequently or at lower temperature or check for energy saving settings on washing machine. Things that aren’t dirty can be freshened up by airing outside rather than washing.
Line dry where poss
send off for free products/samples (various websites, admittedly not tried this one myself)
check out mumsnet frugal threads for other ideas. MSE also has some extreme money saver ideas

It feels exhausting sometimes having no spare money and seeing others doing things. But there will alwys be people with more (and less!) money than you. And people who have the same amount but who spend it differently.

We've been conditioned to think everything needs to be purchased, but there are lots of things you can do that cost nothing. Find like-minded people and have fun. There are also lots of small ways to game the system. I did a couple of bank account switches before Christmas and we got £175 and 6 cinema tickets for moving one current account, then did it again with DH's account. The cash was useful and we ended up with 12 free cinema tickets.

It’s not a tiny minority. And we are talking here about families where both parents already work full time.

But you crack on pretending it’s all down to people just not trying hard enough rather than us having ridiculously expensive housing due to active decisions made by successive governments and the most expensive childcare in Europe.

It's not a binary choice between serfdom and Communism. There should be middle way. For a while there, post-war and in the 60s/70s the wealth gap got a little smaller. Decent healthcare and free education and good enough pay to have a good standard of living.
Now we seem to be going backwards. People at the top get ever richer while people who just want to earn enough to live on are called greedy. I don't know what the answer is.

This is such a ridiculous argument. It’s perfectly reasonable for a dual income household to expect to have some leisure money, rather than staying in everyday being grateful they aren’t starving to death.

No wonder incapable governments thrive when such daft opinions are held by voters, who think ‘the poor’ ( or perhaps poorer than them) should be grateful merely for not starving, no matter how much they are working.

Now we seem to be going backwards. People at the top get ever richer while people who just want to earn enough to live on are called greedy. I don't know what the answer is.

Voting the tories out at the next election will be a start…

@catsrlife Thank you so much for posting about Gary's Economics on Youtube - I looked it up and he's really interesting

The way that on one podcast they said that they didn't even know jobs/ careers etc existed until it was too late completely resonated with me, as it's what happened to me

This!