Hey

McKneff

Could you get your mum on here to do a proper SOA and we can maybe help her budget.

Does she get the £1200 as salary from nursing, plus tax credits and she will also be receiving child benefit for both of you (if your brother is younger than you)

McKneff

paddedjohn wrote: »

OP does you dad not chip in anything for your brother?

Or both of them, the OP is still in full time education as far as I can tell.

midnight_express

sloppy wrote: »

Yeah, I've been applying for jobs for a year. It's very hard to get one with no experience. I have really good grades at school and my a levels at college, still can't get one.

Does anyone know if it is actually legal for a family or 3 to feed themselves on 75 pound a week? Seems ridiculous how expensive food is now.

Why do you think the world owes you a living when you have contributed nothing to society ?

Family of 3, why aren't all 3 working ?

enabledebra

midnight_express wrote: »

Why do you think the world owes you a living when you have contributed nothing to society ?

Family of 3, why aren't all 3 working ?

Yawn. Yawn. Yawn.

Apparently I need 10 characters to post so had to say it 3 times .

[Deleted User]

midnight_express wrote: »

Why do you think the world owes you a living when you have contributed nothing to society ?

Family of 3, why aren't all 3 working ?

if you have nothing positive to add then dont bother posting you are wasting everybodies time

sloppy

Thanks for your posts. We have been trying to cut down on bills which saves a bit of money. food is a major problem for us it used to end up quite expensive around 100 pound a week or more which is crazy. Definately need to start looking around the cheaper supermarket as tesco are getting more expensive by the week.

Getting a job seems to be really hard at the moment for people my age with no experience. Most of the people I know with jobs know somebody on the inside of the place who got them it. I regularly apply for jobs and hand out my CV, I'm very proactive. I know alot of people who can't get a job either so I don't think theres something hugely wrong with me. Just going to stick with it and hope for the best.

My dad doesn't play a part in my life and refuses to pay for me or my brother.

To the couple of you who were rude and made out I was trying to scrounge off the government, that's such a close minded thing to say. I'm in education bettering myself so I can hopefully get a higher paying job later in life. This will pay more in tax back to the government over my lifetime than if I quit education and worked to cloth myself. Same with my brother, do you expect both of us to chance it and see how far we can get in life with only GCSE's? The government are likely to get the money back and some. I can't help that I was born into a non-wealthy family. At least I'm trying.

enabledebra

There's nothing 'wrong' with you, it's a recession and jobs are hard to come by no matter how hard you try. Good for you staying in education to set yourself up for a career rather than a minimum wage life (even if minimum wage jobs were plentiful for school leavers- which they are not.) People who leave school at the earliest opportunity have limited chances of a good life these days and unless the old style apprentice routes to good jobs are taken seriously by employers again it will stay that way. The 'turn2us' link by Woodine is a good place to check your family is getting all the income available and various posters' advice about reducing expenditure is the other side of the 'money in/money out' equation.

BigAunty

sloppy wrote: »

...
Does anyone know if it is actually legal for a family or 3 to feed themselves on 75 pound a week? Seems ridiculous how expensive food is now.

It's great that you are looking into helping take responsibility for a household budget at your age but you are asking the wrong question which isn't 'why doesn't the govt give us more money' but 'how can we help ourselves'. It's not rude for people to suggest that you look at the issue as a budgeting, rather than benefits issue. You have ommitted from your budget all the benefits she is currently receiving.

I think you are ignorant about the economic reality of our country which is in recession and can't afford the public spending that Labour saddled us with. In 2009, the govt paid out more in benefits than it collected in income tax receipts (tax paid by employees) by some £25 billion pounds, an imbalance that shows how unhealthy the public purse is, and that was set to be the norm. The expenditure on housing benefit alone nearly doubled over a 10 year period.

Your mum earns about more than 17k per year, well above the national minimum age and can easily find extra bank work with her skill set. She can take your father to the CSA.

As a lone parent doing a Nursing degree, she invariably received an NHS bursary, plus housing benefit, child tax credits, council tax discount and so forth for at least 3 years, plus her tuition fee was probably waived. She also had access to loans - did she take any? and a hardship fund while at Uni. Why do you feel the govt is abandoning your family when the the state purse has invested in her career to the tune of tens of thousands of pounds? That 3 year period alone where she was in full time studies probably cost the taxpayer around 60k in student finance and benefits.

You can point her to the Debt Free wanabee forum where the members there will help her sort out her debt repayment, if this is a factor in why there is so little disposable income. Benefits do not take into account personal debts, either.

Sadly, lone parents are most prone to poverty and they are also often the most costly in terms of what they draw from the state coffers in the way of benefits since many don't work for years during their working age and then are more likely to work part time and/or in low paid roles, so probably don't contribute much in the way of taxes unlike other social groups.

Benefits are largely based on income, not disposable income - they don't take into account how the claimant spends the money so your focus on 'we only have £75 per week to live on' is irrelevant to benefit calculators and benefit entitlement, so too, is your strong belief that you contribute more in taxes in the future than your household has drawn over the last 18 years (not that tax paid has much bearing on most benefit entitlements anyway, plus tax doesn't operate like a savings account for the payer).

There is much information missing from this picture, the age of your brother, why the tax credits have reduced (overpayment?).You indicate her rent and CT is £600 per month but not what her Local Housing Allowance rate is (if in private housing) or any LHA/housing benefit and council tax discount she gets. Probably she is not paying anywhere near this.

You indicate the main expense in rent/CT but not where the other £600 goes, although this is most invariably much higher due to the benefits she can claim.

You have ommitted to include the benefits that she is invariably receiving, such as council tax discount, child tax credits and child benefit, plus perhaps housing benefit.

Is it because you are not aware that she is receiving, at the very least, a 25% reduction in her council tax bill, £33 a week child benefit, plus perhaps working tax or child credits of anything up to £116 per week (I did a quick check on the turn2us benefit checker) and then housing benefit, too. Are you receiving any student income?

Double check her entitlements on the Turn2us online benefit calculator as it's quite likely she is getting hundreds of pounds more each month in support, or should be getting this, through HB, CTC/WTC, council tax discount and CB than you are aware of, making her net income closer to £1900 a month with both her employment income and benefits being more like the equivalent of a taxable income of around £28k. You are clearly not privvy to her actual budget, just her employment income.

Also, download the MSE budget planner and work through the site to learn how to slash household costs, both the forum (the old style moneysaving forum in particular) and general site. That way you can identify cheaper telecom and energy tariffs, cheap recipes and so on.

You can help your mum by learning how to buy cheap food and cook cheap meals which are largely those made from scratch rather than processed rather than focussing on your belief that you should get more know from the state purse now because of your future tax paying status, plus spending more time trying to find a job than writing on internet forums about how your family is being abandoned by the state when it is not.

Many supermarkets publish information on how to make a family evening meal for £5 a night and frugal recipes. Example,

http://www.sainsburys-live-well-for-less.co.uk/about-live-well-for-less/

Your local library is bound to have recipe books that have simple cheap meals, plus there are a whole One of the MSE members has published a website where a family of 4 can feed themselves for £100 per month. Here's how to save an extra £300 straight away.

http://www.cheap-family-recipes.org.uk/

Mara69

That is an excellent post

gingergee

I agree, top post.
May not help much but......im currently doing slimming world. They have a few cheap cookbooks about. The meals in them are easy to make (in bulk too), healthy, and really cheap to make. They can be found on google. Doing a meal plan that will include inexpensive meals and take into account packed lunches (for you all) will help a lot. No doubt if your mum is doing long/hard shifts, she probably eats conveniently, rather than cheaply (not a dig btw, just what i know from working shifts!). If she had a packed lunch with snacks, she prob would save money by not usig the canteen/vending machines lol x
Again well done and good luck xxx