eggs, baskets, difficult decisions

dharm999

I would worry that once you dropped your hours the university realised that actually they can manage with the reduced hours, and they never go back up again - seen that in the private sector so many times. And as others have said your redundancy entitlement would be reduced, as well as pension benefits, so I wouldnt rush into any decision. Why not post your ins and outs on the right forum here to see if anyone can help to reduce your outgoings.

If it were me, I would carry on as normal for the next few months, to wait and see how the land lies. I would carry on with the consultancy work, and start to make enquiries about how I could increase it. Increasing it will take time, so you need to start investigating now.

Good luck.

LindsayO

kunekune,
Just wanted to mention something about reducing hours, I reduced hours to cope with my illness, but it was done during a "managing staff reduction" exercise, and a colleague also reduced her hours and we managed to avoid the planned redundancy for our group of 10. Anyway, we were both able to have our pension protected to a certain degree, we are both in USS, and although reducing hours through choice and then retiring means that your pension is based on your part-time salary, reducing hours to cope with ill-health or at the request of your employer, means that the pension is based on your full-time equivalant salary. You still accumulate years of service at the part-time basis, but it is something to consider, if you are in USS, or if your scheme does something similar.

This means that if you are thinking of reducing your hours anyway, then doing it during a staff reduction exercise has an advantage for you.
I would also caution that your department may well still try and get full-time work out of you. Certainly this happened to me. We agreed that I would do teaching and admin only. Then barely a month later at me yearly review they tried to "encourage" me to keep doing research, surely I wanted to stay research active, it would be good for me etc, etc. They did the same with my colleague. Then a month after that they tried to increase my teaching load. It took me 4 months of negotiations to get my current load reduced so I could take on the extra work. I had to stand firm and refuse to do the extra work for a long time before the accepted that I could not do it in the time I had.

The people I was working with and for were all decent people who I like, but their default position when it came to part-timers was to try and get us to keep doing what we always did before

paulwf

Hi OP,

I think part of what is making you stressed is that you are thinking about everything at once. It usually helps to solve problems if you break them down into manageable chunks. In your case try and think about what you need to survive now and separately what you need to do to prepare for the future.

At the moment it sounds like your joint gross pay is in excess of £50K. Even after tax that is a comfortable amount. You seem to be exhausted because you have so much to do and so little time. On that kind of salary you should be able to afford as much help as you need - a gardener, a cleaner etc. In fact it is probably worth paying someone 3 hours a day as a home help so you can come home to a clean house with the shopping and some of the cooking done. Paying someone £8 an hour whilst you singlehandedly can earn nearly £200 a day is actually very MSE!

Although it will come as a big shock to the system you will be able to manage if you go part time. Combined with your part time jobs you can probably still bring in well over £20K and that is a lot more than some couples earn. Remember that your tax rate will go down and you have a tax free allowance so you might not lose as much as it seems.

You might also be able to access more grants for carers etc, a lot of grants and working tax credits are means tested. Even if you end up in a min wage job there will be more benefits opened up to you to cope with your caring roles.

You may also have other options available in the future such as downsizing from a house to a flat, perhaps giving you £100K, so again don't worry about the future too much.

Of course take some MSE steps now to protect your future, that is the most pro-active thing you can do. If you do intend to stay in the house long term then making sure the boiler, shed, windows, electrics etc are all renovated so they'll last for the next 10-20 years could be a good idea. Maybe get a couple of smart outfits in case of future interviews. This might not sound MSE but my thinking is if you avoid any big expenditure in the future by getting it out of the way now you'll be able to adapt to a lower income much easier. For example you can live on £100 a week for quite a while but if the boiler blows up you'll be stuffed.

kunekune

Oh wow, you've all blown me away. I was so scared of posting, because this can be a pretty brutal forum unlike OS where I'm a regular (ah, yes, I also try on top of everything to cook all meals from scratch, LOL). You have all been so kind and understanding.

Paulwf, I'm almost embarrassed to admit that our household income is still over £70K. The trouble is that we spent a long time overseas and never benefitted from HPI, only several different HPCs! So for people of our age, with quite young children, our mortgage is quite big. It's cheap at the moment, but the moment OH has to give up work it'll get pricier because he currently gets a bank staff mortgage. At 48 and 50 we've only been paying into pension schemes for a short time, because something odd happened in my last job and the uni never told me I was eligible and at the time, it wasn't at the forefront of my mind. So we're trying to fix that by paying off the mortgage but when you're used to a very high joint income, it takes time to adjust. Also, if I'm going to be honest, I've got used to buying expensive ... we shop at Ocado ... and although we stay in the UK for holidays, I don't choose cheap cottages. In a year, though, the boy will probably finally be continent at least during the day, and holidays without private washing machines and dryers might just about be possible. I've just visited the supermarket comparison site, and it was a shock. Asda here we come.

Paulwf, I've resisted getting help in the house, but I think I have to, even if I reduce my hours (because the extra time would be used on research so that I could publish more and compete for Russell Group jobs). It is a bad sign when you go to buy more socks and shirts because you've not got the washing under control, LOL. But I just remembered my very socialist welsh granny saying that the socialist thing to do was get someone in to paint your house because that meant that they had a job and you could still have a life. The curious thing as this thread has gone on, with lots of long and thoughtful responses, is that I can see that this is actually about getting a life back and learning to live differently.


LindsayO, once I've cooked tea, I'll pm you, because I'd like to talk to you some more.

teabelly

Your uni sounds a bit scary..... Is there any way you could relocate to somewhere else and do a similar job? It sounds like a lot of its problems are out of your control which make them harder to deal with.

There have been a few incidents at one of the unis near me and this one is a pleasant campus location so I think violence can happen anywhere these days. A friend's relations moved to a new city and there was a shooting at a nearby travel agents the week they got there! Put them off the place a bit.

ceridwen

Re your comment about O.H. having a bank staff mortgage and access to that will cease when he has to give up work

- errr....WILL it actually?

Obviously access to that cheap rate mortgage would cease if he left the job of himself (ie resigned) - but in his case it will be more a question of the job leaving him IYSWIM. The job will be "leaving him" because he has to take some sort of ill health retirement. This being the case - ie he isnt leaving the job of his own volition - then I wonder whether there might be some sort of provision by the bank for employees in this sort of situation to keep the cheap rate mortgage?

Maybe you've already looked into this?? Personally - I think it would be worth asking his Union as to what happens to a staff mortgage in these circumstances, rather than just assuming automatically that he will lose it. He may not lose it...and I would certainly bear in mind that even if there isnt some sort of laid-down rules as to what happens in circumstances like this - the Bank might still choose to "exercise their discretion" and let him keep it anyway.

kunekune

Ceridwen, it is surprisingly difficult to get information about the finer details of staff mortgages - there is no summary of terms and conditions with the rest of the paperwork. If he leaves in the normal way, it reverts to a tracker at 2% above base rate, and is still quite a good mortgage as it isn't a fixed term. Leaving in the ordinary way is not impossible either, because if I got a job offer elsewhere, we'd take it and live on my salary sooner rather than later. Although there are special pension rules for medical retirement, his pension is not big enough for that to be a factor, since he has only been in the scheme for 4 years.

Anyhow, to update on what has happened in the last few days. I spoke to my boss about the dilemma - he knows about the consultancy income, as I inherited the job from him, and he was still working for these people himself till quite recently. He was more sensitive than usual - we don't get on particularly well - but it was pretty clear that if I went part-time the reduction in workload would not be pro rata. I would certainly be working more hours for an 80% contract than some of my current colleagues work for 100%. So that isn't an option. So far as the bigger picture about departmental future is concerned, I was at a presentation yesterday by the VC. It was all very depressing, but there doesn't seem to be any particular threat to my department as yet ... though I suspect that research that has no commercial outcome or that isn't externally funded will be endangered. That impacts on what choices I make about the kind of research I do and it does reduce my academic freedom (no-one's very interested in the philosophy of criminal law ... but the work I do on disability and social welfare might be more sellable).

As I said, this is clearly about lifestyle as much as anything else and so the decision made so far is to hire someone to do cleaning and ironing, and perhaps also become a bit LESS old-style in the kitchen. In other words, use the money in order to buy in some of the things that I don't have time to do. In some ways it makes little sense, as I'd prefer to do these things myself in an ideal world. But we don't live in an ideal world, and while I can afford to lose 10K a year right now, I know of long experience that we can't predict what's around the corner.

Ta to all who helped me work through the options.

paulwf

It's really nice to see you tackling what is such a big and quite scary topic so well OP.

I just wanted to add a couple of quick thoughts:

- have a look at the debt free wannabe thread and there is info there about posting a statement of affairs (SOA) which board users can then analyse. Putting it all down on paper (or rather on screen!) may help to indicate where money can be set. For example you might be able to divert £30 a month from Sky TV and use that for 5 hours help cooking and cleaning

- a visit by both of you to an independent financial advisor or accountant could be really useful if you haven't done this already. There might be ways of cutting your tax bill and you've got a lot of things to think about with your pensions and mortgages. Having someone not close to the situation look at your overall options may help. Obviously they may want to sell you something so you have to take time out to think through your options but they can be very useful.

teabelly

How about having someone live in like a nanny/housekeeper/au pair type of person that can help out with your son, do some cooking and keep an eye on your OH if he has to reduce his hours?

Are there any postgrad students that might reduced/free board and lodging in return for some housework/child distraction?

kunekune

No room, unfortunately. We do have four bedrooms but I have to keep a study at home, and also we only have one bathroom.