How much is 'enough' for a single pensioner?

iris

Pollycat wrote: »

TSB current account:



So - the 3% is only applicable to balances of between £3K & £5K.

AND you have to pay in at least £1000 per month.

Not looked at the other suggested options.

I think that the question the OP posed in the title of this thread wasn't really asking for actual amounts. :cool:

It's clear that the OP's MIL would not consider a budget of £20 pm for clothes and would need far more than £30 pm for entertainment.
I can't really see her 'hunting for bargains' either.

£125 per month for food and toiletries would hardly be enough for a lady who likes:



Incidentally, I think £25 per month for metered water is quite high.

Yes, you do have to pay in £1000 per month, but this is easily doable by opening two accounts with £3,000 in each and just transferring £1000 from one account to the other every month. Simples.


Obviously, if you haven't got £6,000 in savings then this can't be done, but if you are on pension credit you can have up to £10,000 before it affects your benefits.


I am just making suggestions and I realise the OP's MIL wouldn't want to do as I am suggesting, but someone else asked the question 'But how much money can a pensioner live on?' , so I just gave my thoughts.


Yes, £25 pm is probably high for metered water for one person, but if you live in the south west then this amount wouldn't probably cover the cost!

moneyistooshorttomention

iris wrote: »

This has been asked on another thread and I worked out the following figures, but obviously this doesn't apply to everyone. However, the figures do show that it is possible to live on pension credit.


(No council tax if on Pension Credit).
£125 Food/toiletries per month
£90 gas/electric
£16 house insurance (would only be £8 if in rented)
£22 Telephone & broadband (which includes evening & weekend calls)
£5 Mobile phone PAYG
£5 (hair cuts)
£15 car insurance (I am assuming a small car with no Road Tax)
£20 car service/mot
£30 petrol
£25 water (metered)
£12.12 TV (free at 75)
£20 clothes
£10 presents
£50 Contingency sum for white goods replacement & car repairs etc
£30 Entertainment & holiday fund

Total £475.12

Pension Credit £628 x 12 = £7536

Amount left £152.88 x 12 = £1834.56


Plus, of course, £200 WFA, £10 Christmas Bonus and also £135 for Warm Home Fund and free Bus Pass.


A lot of over 65's also get AA at a minimum of £53 per week. If you had £10,000 savings there would also be the interest off this money i.e. another £300 per year.


Even when you are 65+ you have to look for the bargains and shop wisely if money is limited. You can get free cake and a drink in John Lewis. You can also go to the cinema for free. I haven't bought any toothpaste, shampoo/conditioner or dishwasher tablets for years. You can also get free postage stamps for very little effort. I enjoy the challenge and 'no' I am not on pension credit.

Whew! Well that is news to me, as I have been telling myself the half-pension I'm on at the moment (whilst waiting to reach revised SPA and get the rest of my income back) about equates to Pension Credit....but I didn't know about not having to pay Council Tax_pale_, whereas I cant even get a low income discount on my CT bill and that would still apply even if my savings had been used up.

Just as well I'm not trying to run a car on this income. There IS no contingency fund money available in my income each month either at present. Contingencies just must NOT happen until I get to revised SPA, as there just isn't any income available to deal with them (I'd have to dig into my savings...currently rapidly being depleted by house renovation costs anyway) to deal with any that cropped up.

I was consoling myself with the thought that "People MUST be able to live on an income as low as mine, mustn't they, because its about Pension Credit level". Looks like I was wrong...:eek:_pale_

My house insurance is a bit more than that at about £21 per month. My entertainment bill....errrrmm....quite possibly around £100 per month.

If I sat down and worked it out, I have a distinct suspicion I'm not actually managing to live on my income at all and my savings are dribbling towards my living expenses each month...

Parsimonia

Gosh, some interesting posts added to this thread!

Re Friday's appointment with the solicitor - we postponed it for 4 weeks as MIL wouldn't give us a copy of the will (claimed to have lost it) so we've sent off for a copy...and in the meantime we didn't want to waste any of our free 30 minutes with the solicitor by having incomplete or misleading information.

I spent the evening with MIL yesterday and went through the rest of her bills and I've now managed to save her £2,138 a year (about £41 a week). The savings break down as follows:

£290 pa saving on home insurance
£240 pa saving on car insurance
£220 pa (estimated) saving on gas/electric/phone/broadband
£81 pa on magazine subscriptions
£260 saving from cancelling her milkman and buying the equivalent products from Aldi instead
£807 from cancelling her Sky (we went out this morning and bought her a Freesat box for a one-off price of £199 instead)
£240 pa from downgrading her mobile phone package.

I think that's all we'll be able to find on the 'painless savings' front at the moment, but I'll keep checking her bank statements monthly to see what else pops up.

I also moved £5,760 from her current account (where it wasn't earning any interest at all) into an easy access ISA. I wanted to lock it away to get a higher interest rate, but she panicked so we compromised on the easy access one.

Baby steps!!

Tomorrow she, hubby and I go to Aldi together to do our respective households' weekly shop. Hubby and I have a budget of £25 maximum for the two of us, which has to cover EVERYTHING. We then don't spend a single penny on household stuff until the following Sunday. If we run out of milk we use powdered from our storecupboard. If we run out of bread or fruit/veg we curse our poor planning and do without...It will be interesting to see how much she spends with the 2 of us breathing down her neck and tutting over everything she puts in her trolley!

At the moment we still have her debit and credit cards and cheque-book...the plan (agreed by her!) is that we go with her to the hole in the wall, let her withdraw £150 and then pocket her debit card for another week. We did the same last Sunday and she'd spent £90 of her week's £150 within 2 hours and phoned up saying she needed her cards back. We held firm for 4 days but then relented and allowed her an additional £25....we are being cruel to be kind!!!

We've had tearful phone calls from her most days, but to be fair she is saying that she knows she's brought all of this on herself and she knows we're trying to help her keep a roof over her head. She's asked us to help her to be strong and to say NO NO NO if she asks us to give her control over her cards again. We've said we will, but it's actually quite stressful constantly saying NO, as I'm sure the parents of toddlers could testify! Unfortunately neither hubby nor I have 'controlling' personalities, so turning into little Hitlers is difficult for us....but we're bolstering each other's resolve and trying to make each other develop a backbone!

Re those who have chimed in about how much one needs to live on...from 19th Feb hubby and I have a very restricted income.
We've budgeted as follows (all weekly):

Household expenses (food/toiletries/cleaning products etc) - £25
Petrol (I work 21 miles from home) £25
Council tax £25
House and car insurance/MOT/car tax/breakdown cover etc) £17.50
Christmas/birthdays etc £10
Entertainment £10
Holidays (which for us means weekends away) £10
Mobile phones £5
Professional registration fees (for me) £5
Utilities (electricity/water/phone/broadband) £50
Prescription prepayment certificate £2.50
TV licence £3
Total excluding mortgage: £188.00 per week
Including mortgage: £368 per week
This leaves us with a contingency of £30 per week.

We hope to be able to reduce our utility costs....

We also have about £6000 in savings in case of disaster!!!

I don't know how our £188 for 2 adults and a dog equates to living on a pension....I guess we could make cutbacks if we had to (the entertainment and the mobile phones are a luxury I suppose, and once I retire I won't have to pay professional registration fees and we'd probably be able to at least halve our petrol expenditure). So, at a push, we could probably get it down to £160 a week if we absolutely had to, once the mortgage is paid off in 4 years.

We do spend October to April swaddled in 4 layers of clothes, as well as hats, scarves and gloves because our house is so cold, and we're always snuggled under blankets to watch TV etc....not sure if we'd have to spend more on heating the house if we were older and felt the cold more....

We don't have a clothing fund as such as we have nice clothes and shoes at the moment - good quality ones, that we look after to make them last as long as possible. When something wears our we've already developed a habit of scouring charity shops and vintage fairs for bargains, so we'll just continue that habit through the leaner times. I''m also very lucky because my best friend is a fantastic dressmaker, and she's made me some fantastic dresses from old curtains and bedspreads - sounds awful, but I get tons of compliments when I wear them!!!

Hubby's bald so no need for haircuts, and a friend cuts my hair once every 6 weeks for a fiver....

I used to spend a lot on books...but a library card is worth its weight in gold!!!

margaretclare

Well, you're getting somewhere!

Just one small point: I would disagree that a mobile phone is a luxury. Especially for an older person, I would argue that it can be a lifesaver. We'd not like to be without ours. Because we both use giffgaff, calls between us are free.

About TV - we've never had Sky, but recently we've invested in YouView. This is much better. I've often complained that, on the occasions when there are more than one programme on simultaneously yet some of the time there's nothing that interests us, it would be nice to be able to go back and watch, or to record. Both these options are standard with YouView.

DH is very good at getting 'deals', and often when we've been away on holiday it was because he managed to turn up a 'deal' for accommodation. We also go through our budget at least every 6 months to see where or if we can make savings. House and car insurance is looked at very severely every year when it comes up for renewal. At present we're insured with Churchill, but that may change another year.

moneyistooshorttomention

I'd say a mobile phone is a necessity for an older person too. I rather think it is for anyone, but particularly for an older person.

With the corollary that mobile phones are for necessity purposes only. That is, emergency phonecalls in the absence of a landline phone to use OR when wishing to say something in writing to someone who won't give you their email address (eg a workman). I keep mine basically for such purposes and am glad of the chance to find a way to contact workmen, for instance, when they aren't answering their phone and seem to have "forgotten";) to have the message-taking service working on it.

getmore4less

Mobile

OVIVO is a good one to consider it's the cheapest option with plenty of mins and text.

cupcake4

"Prescription prepayment certificate £2.50"

I am pretty sure that if you are on a very low income and fill out specific form, then you can claim free prescriptions, dental and optician bills.

pollypenny

Well done, OP, and the best of luck!

I hope your selfish MIL can learn from your example.

Savvy_Sue

pollypenny wrote: »

Tell me where I could get 3% on savings, please?

Santander 123 account, on balances up to £20,000, plus you get cashback on utilities (includes council tax and mobile phone). It's not a savings account as such, but that's where the bulk of my savings live ...

And Nationwide is offering 5% on balances up to a much smaller amount. But do look at the link given previously.

Savvy_Sue

WRT saying 'no', I'd learn some brief stock phrases, and use them. "No, dear MIL, you asked us to do this." "Sorry, dear MIL, can't stop to chat now, and you asked us to do this." "No, dear MIL, and ..." whoops, accidentally cut her off ...