This will probably get me into trouble... but how can you have money worries...

[emkana]

... when the wife is a full-time GP and the husband a solicitor? I'm just reading "What about me?" by Kate Figes and the narrator in the book is the GP and she moans about not having enough money to buy a decent car or to fix the roof. Now, I estimate that the combined salary of that couple would be about £150.000 a year, wouldn't it? How can that not be enough????????
I know, I know, the woman is the narrator of the book and so it's subjective and you spend what you have so it never feels enough and all that...
but still it puts my back up, am I supposed to empathize with the narrator now over her troubled lot or what???

Except if you can't pay the £1000 mortgage you have something to sell. If you're so poor you can't afford the 29p for a tin of beans you probably haven't got anything to sell.

Quite, Expat.

Possibly, if you have a few extra assets, which are not absolutely necessary then you could investigate the possibility of selling them... if anyone were to be so blessed...

Expat, you mean I can sell my house if I can't pay the mortgage?

Well, yes, lonelymum, if I may come in here, if you have a £1000 per month mortgage which you can't pay, what stops you from selling your house and moving to one with say a £500 mortgage?
(Not you personally btw)
That's not a real money worry in my book.

"Except if you can't pay the £1000 mortgage you have something to sell."

ermm yes - and what if you've only payed of a year or 2 of the mortgage and you don't actually make anything from selling it??

If we sold this house we'd make nothing, house prices have slowed right down, and we'd be lucky to get what we paid for it a year ago.

We couldn't get another mortgage at the moment, so we'd be no better off infact probably worse! As we wouldn't have that 'security' if something were to happen to DH of me being able to afford to stay here..

if you have a £1000 mortgage that you can't pay by the time you have sold your house you will be bankrupt unfortunately .. even if it takes a really short time say 3 months you'd be stuffed ..

i suppose a lot of points made in this thread depend very much on what your definition of "poor" is.

poor, to me, is being homeless or living in squalour with no food and ripped filthy clothes.

but it seems, to me that some people here would class me as poor.

they would class me as poor i imagine because i claim Benefit and live in a council property . that would indicate i have no money. admittedly, i dont have a great deal of money, just enough at the moment to pay the bills and maintain the things i had before i was...very important point coming up so drum roll please...made REDUNDANT. just for those who dont know...i just won a case for sex descrimination against my former employers and so after working since i left school, i was unfairly made REDUNDANT and i HAD no choice but to claim benefit to live.

now then, i have a broadband connection. it costs the same as a dial up connection. I have not complained that i am poor, that is the image other people have of me. the cost of my broadband connection was fine when i worked out what i could afford when i was working. it then became a lifeline for me when things went wrong and i can honestly say that without it i would not have got through some of the really tough times ive had since. so dont begrudge me it. when i starve my children, put them in ripped dirty clothes and dont pay the bills, THEN you can tell me off for having an internet connection.

i admit that i too get really peed off with hearing people with nannies, cleaners, multiple cars etc complaining about money. i have worked hard all my life and dont have anything to show for it. (well, i have come very far actually but to a lot of people here i have very little). its not jealousy, its just to me that is not the real world, those are things a lot of us can only dream of.

but i dont want to go into too much detail because then it wont be a case of trying to make my point, it will be that im trying to win the crown for "poorest mumsnetter (with broadband)"...which is not my intention.

i think you will find that people are not looking for sympathy, they ARE just trying to make a point.

and when will some of you get over your obsession with people on benefits? we arent a different species you know and you havent a clue how we got there.

oh and btw, i dont recall ever complaining that the benefit i receive isnt enough, and i certainly wouldnt if i chose to be on it. i complained when the IR didnt pay me correctly, and when my benefit claim wasnt sorted out even though i had been unemployed for two months and was living on bugger all. i complain about other people's inefficiency, not the amount i get.

this thread has been a rollercoaster of emotions for me..ive gone from being mildly peed off, to sitting here in tears, to fuming. the internet is bad for me i think, i should cancel my connection and save the money to buy cigarettes and false nails.

I didnt think I was poor till I realised that when the kids need new clothes, even 2nd hand ones, theres no cash to buy them with. I want to cancel the BB, dps reluctant. Its the one luxury we do have, and he works all day 6 days a week for that one pleasure. Im going to see how hard it is to pay the next bill and then decide.

well I don't personally think we're poor, as I said b4 we pay the bills have a few luxuries, we have food, and there's often £200 or so left over for 'extras' sometimes there's not it's just the swing of things really. as long as our bills are paid that's the important thing, thankfully we rent from the army so luckily we can't ever 'miss' the rent/council tax/water as it's taken from DH's wages b4 we see it. we have an average car and do have some debts, but it's debts we've ran up so we're paying it back, we both work in order to have the stuff we've got. and on the estate we share food etc esp around the end of the month and the lads are away and one of the girls hasn't the food till payday.

Thinking about this last night, if someone is supposed to sell their house because the mortgage is crippling them, is it OK for me to say that someone who can't afford a tin of beans can sell their TV? I have heard people go off the deep end before when others have implied the TV, stereo, DVD, foreign holiday etc is not necessary.

Yes, a £1000 a month mortgage may seem extravagant to those who can afford no mortgage at all, but to imply anyone with one has no right to feel money worries as they can always sell their house is simplistic in my opinion.

Lm - fwiw, I agree steros dvds surroundsound and videos are non essentials, (infact me'd make do with a tiny tv if the need must) I think it's a bit unfair yes to tell someone to sell their house if they can't raise the morgage money, althou it's also unfair to expect a less fortunate person to sell their only tv/somthing along those lines to afford food. althou I can see food is obviously an essential as well.

What's wrong with dirty ripped clothes? My kids' clothes are usually filthy about half an hour after they've put them on, and quite often they rip them too. Whereas I make some attempt to keep my clothes clean and unripped. So what?

As with everything, it's about priorities. I'd rather my children wore dirty ripped clothes and continued to have guitar lessons, than buy them nice new clean clothes and have no guitar lessons. I'd rather cut my food budget viciously and live on lentils and bread for a year, than give up the freedom my car represents to me. Other people would think my priorities are bizarre. That's fine, I would probably think their's are. But I wouldn't question their right to decide their priorities. I suppose I would question their right to whinge about them though - just as they would mine.

I think whether you get irritated by rich people whingeing about their financial problems, depends on the attitude of the whinger. I have friends who also complain about the cost of the extension, the cost of the new car, etc. etc., but they do have the grace to end up with "but I know I'm lucky, I suppose I should count my blessings that I can moan on about this sort of thing." The truly irritating person is the one who thinks that not being able to afford that John Lewis kitchen for another 2 years, puts her on the same level of misfortune as those poor sods in New Orleans, whereas the one who knows she's being ridiculous and can raise a wry smile about it, is OK in my view.

Okay, I agree it's a bit simplistic to say "Well sell your house then" if you can't afford a £1000 mortgage, but still I'd find it irritating to have somebody complaining in that situation. Say you have a £150000 salary, you don't have to mortgage to the hilt, you could choose to buy a smaller house in the first place so that you have more disposable income. I mean, for people with lower incomes nowadays it's difficult because houses are so expensive that you have to take a mortgage out which is many many times your salary, but if you have a really high income you have the choice of not spending all on it on a mortgage, while still living in a decent enough house.

I agree with Caligula that is about priorites. I have very little spare income precisely because I have a crippling mortgage. I chose that crippling mortgage because dh and I grew up in well off homes (though as a couple we are not as well off as our parents) and we wanted the nice house in a nice area. To achieve that, we live quite frugally (I know because we had a financial review a few years back and the adviser couldn't believe how little we spent on things such as clothes and holidays). So if you saw my house, you would think I was a rich bitch, but I can assure you we struggle to make ends meet financially every single month. It might not be life or death struggles, but I am sure if these things could be measured, you would find the strain is taking its toll on us. My ambition now is to have a few pounds over at the end of the month to put into savings as we haven't saved a penny for nine years.

Just an aside, but we DID sell the house! We had to: DH was redundant, I was heavily PG on maternity leave, benefits and WFTC were messing us about. We rent now, it's not the same as owning a house 9), but it's a roof. The sale took 3 months, and we just had enough money to pay the mortgage up to then. So the house gave us a lifeline. If it happenned again, we wouldn't have one. Dh can't work withoput the PC (he trades on EBay), the car is our only way o getting to the supermarket with our AS son.

So imho, having money worries over a £1k mortgage IS solvable; (if heartbreaking), money worries over bills / food etc is a very different thing indeed.

but Peachy - that's assuming that everyone who has a mortgage can sell their house and actually 'gain' something from it?

If we sold, we'd end up paying the same in rent (even in cr*p part of town) and gain no money from the house at all.

No I'm not saying that applies to everyone, but some people. And we didn't necessarily gain, just stopped the continued expense. The rent wasn't a lot cheaper TBH, BUT we could get housing benefit with that and we were in a DIRE situation- DH was getting more and more ill and couldn't work, I was facing possible redundancy on my return as employers were going bankrupt.

We did end up in a crap area. It was awful: they even tried to torch DS2's bedroom. But two years on we moved again, to somewhere cheaper but better (Wales).

I miss my house, it was small but I loved it. leaving broke my heart. It was made harder by the fact it wasn't our fault: Dh's employer eventually got a tribunal ruling against him (by which time DH was way too ill to work). But if we hadn't done it, we wouldn't be here, happy in a new place, with more prospects long term (ie when I graduate) and with a better lifestyle for the kids. We'd be bankrupt and livi9ng on one of the many sink estates at home, DH would never have become well and I'd have no prospects because Home Start did make my position redundant.