Preparedness for when

cornishchick

MrsLurcherwalker wrote: »

I've just dug out from my bookshelf a lovely old cook book published in 1935 and it lists 3 weeks worth of menus for 2 adults and 3 children and says that the smallest amount of money you can exist on is £1.7s.6d per week!!! There are 4 meals each day , every day there is an afternoon tea plumbed in and supper as well. Often the breakfast says 'Bacon for the man' and fried bread in the bacon fat for the rest of the family, often breakfast is fried bread and fried potatoes and sometimes it's porridge, cold cooked bacon (ham), bread and butter, marmalade/jam and tea so pretty substantial. lunches are overlap meals, i.e roast meat one day and cold meat the next followed by a pie using scraps and topped with potato the next and the meat bone is always made into a hefty soup for supper with bread and butter and cocoa. Tea is a more sedate affair with bread and butter, jam, sometimes cake, sometimes scones, sometimes biscuits but always with tea to drink. Lots of emphasis on seasonal fresh fruit and veg and things like making marmalade when the seville oranges are round, jam in the fruit season and lemon curd when the eggs are plentiful. It's a different world now but it sounds like good common sense to fill up on 'afternoon tea' and supper if you're frugal with what you serve. Of course most housewives were at home in the 1930s and were expected to cook, make do and mend and garden along with all the household chores and child rearing but I think it would be possible to run a menu along those lines nowadays, but certainly not for 27'6p! The buy a joint for Sunday and then use it for as much of the week as it stretches to has always been used to stretch meat. There are a couple of pulse based meals each week usually using a couple of ounces of bacon for flavouring and fish pie or baked herrings with a substantial steamed pudding every day too. It's carb heavy and I guess folks worked that off way back then but I arrived in this world 13 years later and it doesn't feel like that long ago when I look at it in that light. I wonder if perhaps adapting our menus today to have better breakfasts, smaller lunches, something at teatime and then a light supper might just make our pennies go a bit further?

There's an old saying along those lines

Breakfast like a King, lunch like a prince.dine like a pauper.

I am trying to , but my work patterns mean I never eat at the same time or in the same place. It's a night mare.

Butterfly_Brain

1Tonsil wrote: »

I can see it happening again and I think its a toss up which politicians get lynched first...the old boys or the new ones. I can see the likeness to the turkeys voting for Christmas as well here in Greece.

At the moment, we have YES politicians and No politicians resigning left right and centre...pardon the pun. While the rest are locked in parliament arguing about the proposal to give Greece away for free....the IMF have decided they, and no one else, can do anything without a debt haircut... or a thirty year grace period for the country to recover from the austerity. The EU have deliberately under estimated the damage done by the banks being closed by the ECB....who also say no more. I can understand the other countries refusing to give any more money....its all going to the German banks. Incidentally, the Deutsche bank is now being investigated for laundering Russian money.....and were asked to do so by Putin.... Interesting times we live in eh?

There are demonstrations tonight and tomorrow in Athens, as the vote is expected tomorrow..they have a deadline of midnight to vote, but some of the changes have to become law tomorrow morning. I can feel revolution in the air....the citizens will NEVER allow this to go through and Greece to be given away, complete with ancient monuments, Gold, oil , gas and bank deposits.

Its not the size of the dog in the fight, but the size of the fight in the dog:D

Meanwhile, there is word that the banks will not be allowed to open till at least Monday of next week.....:eek:

That is what the Troika wanted all along, the oil and gold.

I hope Greece just tells them to go to hell and breaks away on its own and brings back their own sovereign currency.

Butterfly_Brain

nuatha wrote: »

Strip him of his assets and force him to sign on and exist on what's left of the benefits system, in social housing (if he can get it) complete with bedroom tax.

Smug git reckons he can live on £53 a week but still hasn't done it.

Butterfly_Brain

Bedsit_Bob wrote: »

What's the alternative to cutting public spending?

Keep spending and borrowing, like the previous administration, until we can no longer pay our national debts, and end up bankrupt, like Greece?

Make the tax dodgers and the banks pay everything they owe us back with pay day loan interest for starters £600 billion in QE just to keep crooked banksters afloat.
We are owed Trillions by the greedy rich

[Deleted User]

Do we all need bigger piggy banks BB?

Frugalsod

Bedsit_Bob wrote: »

What's the alternative to cutting public spending?

Keep spending and borrowing, like the previous administration, until we can no longer pay our national debts, and end up bankrupt, like Greece?

The problem is that we made the first mistake in 2008. We bailed out the banks. So now basically all the excess spending is going to be sucked into boosting asset prices like the stock market and housing, and bailing out the banks again.

What we should have done is nothing. Let the banks fail and collapse the mountain of credit and debt in the economy. All we are doing is maintaining that mountain of debt. The second massive mistake is equating an economy like a household. It is nothing even remotely the same. So trying to treat the economy like a household is just going to make things worse. The fact that people have been mislead to believe this is fact make things even worse because we definitely need another massive financial crisis to have any hope of re-educating everyone. Fortunately that is coming regardless.

What everyone is failing to appreciate that the economy means for everyone. If the government keep slashing spending and gets to a surplus then that means that to balance the books between all the sectors that means the private sector has to borrow what the government is saving, just to keep things stable. The economy runs on what are sectoral balances and they should add up to zero. So if the government spends a lot then this boosts household and commercial surpluses. Depending on the balance of power between commercial and household sectors is dependant on things like unions. Without unions commercial sector simply does not have to make pay increases. Which is why businesses have done so much better than households over the last decade.

What will happen is that as you cut the deficit of government then you also shrink the surpluses of businesses and households. Since households will have no bargaining power they have to take all the strain of a falling surplus. Businesses will be able maintain their surplus through lack of wage power so can transfer all that burden on to households they are unwilling to borrow to maintain the spending so have to cut their spending as well, because they are too indebted to start with and are unable to take out more credit to make up the shortfall. This is what happened in Greece. Greece has a primary surplus but because they were too indebted already and many had lost their jobs they were unable to borrow. So the economy went into a deflationary spiral. This is what is about to happen in the UK with the government doubling down on bad policies. It is also what would happen regularly should we ever adopt a gold standard again. Which is another reason why it is a non starter.

Also Spain and Ireland had government budget surpluses before the crisis but still did not help them avoid the crisis. Who on earth thinks that our getting to a surplus even quicker will stop us following Ireland and Spain into an abyss?

There is only one example of a successful case of governments following austerity. That case is Canada in the 1980's when they had the advantages of a global commodity boom and they exported the commodities that were needed. We do not have a booming global economy and we also start with a massive trade deficit as well.

The problem is that everyone has too much debt, especially the household sector. Yet everyone is fixated on government debt and ignoring the elephant in the room - private debt.

There are also significantly better ways to spend government money that give a far better boost to the economy. Yet because of the influence of lobbyists these are cut to fund expenditure in even less efficient policies. All government spending has a positive or negative effect on other spending. What the government should be trying to maintain is spending with as high a level of multiplier effects. What this means if you have a spend with a multiplier of 1.5 then if you spent £1 billion you could expect a net boost of £1.5 billion in the economy. Some spending like defence has a multiplier of only 0.4 so actually slows the economy down. Subsidises to businesses are similar in that they are a drain on the economy. For example governments have privatised public services in the name of efficiency but the costs have kept rising because they no control over the business. Spending on benefits has a high multiplier of 1.8 so should be maintained even if you clamp down on the abuses. Spending on infrastructure projects has nearly the same impact except when you do it via PFI or some other PPP which sucks out all the benefits to banks.

Longer term you need radical policies that will stabilise the economy over the longer term. First there needs to be a ban on lobbying and donations from companies. As well as a cap on political donations from individuals. Next to clean up politics have instant dismissal for fiddling MP's expenses. If you or I did it we would be sacked instantly, make it the same risk for politicians.

Second break the banks up into commercial and investment banks again. Reduce the risks to savers.

Then ban banks from the mortgage market entirely. Limit them to commercial loans and to the public but not secured on property. You could also ban banks from lending more than they have in deposits in so making them 100% reserve backed. Do the same with building societies. This will end the flood of money into the house market, and end the risk of excess credit creation. Longer term this will make housing affordable again. It will also mean that building societies will have to offer higher rates to get funds so reducing the scope of interest rate cuts.

Introduce draconian laws for the directors of failed banks, that ban them for life from any directorships or advisory positions even for non executive directors. Require that they get court approval for any job that pays above national average pay rates.

To boost job creation which happens in the small business segment tax multinationals and bigger firms on a unitary basis and at a higher rate, which means if they make 7% of all sales here then they pay taxes on 7% of global profits so ending the scope for transferring profits out of the country like Google Amazon etc.

charlies-aunt

Bedsit_Bob wrote: »

The social security system does provide sufficient to keep you off the bread line.

Of course, there will always be a small number of people, who will spend it on drink, smoking, gambling etc., but there's little TPTB can do about that, short of forcing such people into rehabilitation, and I certainly wouldn't be happy, with such state interference in the lives of adults.

I work full time as a Benefit and Debt Worker & professionally I have to be non-judgemental but privately, I have to agree with Bob - there are no children living in poverty because of low benefits but sadly,there are plenty of children living in poverty as the consequence of their parents life style choices


The option of increasing the family income by claiming additional benefits is evaporating rapidly, similarly charitable grants are already stretched to breaking point . . . . unless the parents are planning a life funded by the proceeds of crime - they are going to have to embrace a frugal lifestyle.


Things are tough at the moment - just wait until the full effect of Universal Credit is realised.


Time to lay in supplies and pull the drawbridge up!

GreyQueen

:beer: Frugalsod gets my vote for chancellor of the exchecquer!

If you want to read about poverty, check out the early-mid twentieth century in this country. Rationing actually improved the diets for many in this country because they got enough to eat, instead of far too little. People have starved to death in one of the most prosperous countries in the world, because they had the misfortune to be poor and lose their jobs.

Like charlies-aunt, I have a background in debt and welfare rights advice, have worked with charities supporting lone parents, at the CAB and live in a pretty deprived neighbourhood with several homelessness hostels and move-on type of intermediate accomodation. I see plenty of human frailty and plenty of abject stupidity, too. When people are damaging their children's health and life-chances through their selfish choices, I become very very sad and very very angry, too.

If someone abuses drugs or alcohol, gambles or fritters all their money on unnecessary carp, you don't improve their lives by giving them more money. You just fuel their behaviour. You get what you pay for.

If I knew the answer to getting people to behave sensibly, I reckon it would be good for a Nobel Prize, since it's the great unanswerable issue of the human condition.

[Deleted User]

GQ you can't TELL people how to manage their lives, they'll never ever listen but you can SHOW them how you live yours, show them how hard you work to keep yourself fed and clothed and and content with your lot, show them how you're even savvy enough to be looking to the future and building up your supplies and all on a salary that most likely doesn't earn you as much as their benefits. You can show them what making sensible and informed choices gives you, you can only lead from the front. If you do they might see the practical common sense that is you and your lifestyle and they might just decide to join you and change their ways but they will not do anything except dig in their heels and put on the brakes to anyone pushing them from behind will they?

[Deleted User]

Frugalsod wrote: »

The problem is that we made the first mistake in 2008. We bailed out the banks.

Agreed (not forgetting who was in power at the time), but there's no use crying over spilled milk.

The current administration has to (and is) acting to straighten out the mess.

At some point, the deficit has to be tackled, and the sooner the better.