How can people be so greedy?

sazziecee

I went to uni at 19 because it was the "done" thing, my sixth form and my parents sort of pushed me along that path and because I am reasonably intelligent, I went along with it. But I didn't even last 2 weeks, the stress of moving away from home was too much for me and I became ill. I came home, got a part time job and rented a flat with my boyfriend.

I am 27 and bought my house with my ex-partner when I was 20 for 19,000. I worked 13 hours a week in a shop at the time and he worked full-time but the wage was pretty poor.

I remember at the time being told we could only borrow £24k and at the time even though there was a lot of houses available, we would have been pushing it to afford to go to our maximum, therefore we went for the £19k house.

I really had no idea house prices would rise so much! People who I work with are struggling to even get a mortgage on 2 x full time decent wages, and the houses are cheap here compared to the national average. My house is now worth £65k, not a lot really but it is a lot compared to what we paid.

I have a degree now I went to uni at 21, when I had an 8 month old, did a year, had another baby, split up with my partner and then did my remaining 2 years. I also worked 16 hours a week in a shop. I was eligible for grants and got my tuition paid but still owe £16k in loans which includes 2 payments from the first degree I attempted.

I still work in my part time job... there is nothing I can do round here that wouldn't mean sacrificing seeing my kids and being able to put them to bed at night. I work 9am-3pm and even though the wage isn't great, I manage (yes I get tax credits but I don't want to start on the in's and out's of that, I agree it seems unfair that I can work part time and bring home as much as a single person who works full time but I am entitled to it so claim). I did manage to get a reasonably paid job at 24 hours £18k pro rata but I had to travel 2 hours a day,getting home at 11pm some nights with no petrol expenses and so with the increase in tax etc it was hardly worth my while.

I seem to have waffled on... I think the point I was trying to make is I feel very lucky that I got on the property ladder when I did, even though it was hard at the time financially and I really feel for those trying to get on the ladder now. It has been lucky for me that prices have gone up so if I wanted to move now, I could get a decent price and probably afford somewhere else but if I was thinking of becoming a first time buyer, right now I would be scared because you just never know what is going to happen.

I was also lucky that my ex signed the house over to me, without wanting me to buy him out which has helped enormously.

I will probably never use my degree to be honest, I have a new partner and we have discussed having another child and once the kids are old enough not to be so dependent on me, I will probably need to retrain as what I know will be out of date. I don't regret going to Uni though, I have proven to myself I can do it and made my dad proud.

You definitely can't have it all, but you can be happy with what you have got. I have my own home and car, a brilliant bloke and 3 gorgeous kids (includes my step daughter to be). I would love the higher paid job with a garden for the kids but we dont *need* it, we are happy and we have a home and we can always take the kids to the park instead

Again sorry it's been so disjointed, my monkeys are distracting me

Sarah

Kaz2904

Anyone seen the film Idiocracy?

Margaretclare, you keep saying how difficult it was for you as a student nurse working your 14 weeks of night shifts over the summer. I trained in 1999-2002 and although we still got a bursary (wages) it was £4000 per year. Projections had stated that if we had been paid at the same rate as pupil nurses we would have been on £10000 per year. We never had the option of choosing when to work, we didn't get 14 week summer holidays. I worked on agency and in a nursing home every Friday night. I got pregnant during my second year and we weren't entitled to any maternity leave. We fell through every net, not students because of the bursary, not in full time employment although working 60 hours per week and not unemployed because working. (Thankfully that has changed for student nurses).
When I got to my final placement I had been put down to work every Friday late shift and Saturday early (we were supposed to be supernumary). I explained that I worked every Friday night to pay for childcare and my mentor was most unsympathetic and said
"Tough, you'll have to give your job up won't you?"
When I mentioned it at uni they were horrified but wouldn't take any action. It really didn't matter to them that I had a mortgage to pay and childcare to pay for. Their mortgages were all less than the £330 per month we got paid so they couldn't imagine how difficult it would be to live on that amount.

I still say that we are better off than todays youth though. I mean youth too because they really haven't had any opportunity to get on the housing ladder.

Another thing to remember is that those of us who were brought up in villages (mainly because they were cheaper places to buy back then) have had to move away from our homes into the towns because we couldn't afford the homes that were getting snapped up from under us.

neverdespairgirl

margaretclare wrote: »

Much later, in the 1980s when I was a midwife teacher, we asked every student we took on, groups of 10 at a time 3 times a year, to commit not to get pregnant.

How very illegal that was, after the 1970s Act!

neas

scorpio_princess wrote: »

Ha, try telling that to the newly qualified midwives or doctors who can't get a job in this country!

Out of 5 friends who went to uni, only 1 is in a graduate level, professional job. 20% - not great is it?!

Think about it - if 50% of 20 somethings in this country all have degrees, they'll also all be after the same jobs, and there just ain't enough to go round!

Basically universities are businesses - the more people they attract, the bigger their share of government funding. So of course they're going to perpetuate the myth that getting a degree is the only way you will ever earn any decent money. And the government earns big because of the interest students pay on their loans, plus it makes the unemployment statistics look good while these kids are in uni. Smoke and mirrors

That was my original point, i got on a graduate scheme I did a degree that 'needed' graduates.. engineering... others who do media studies are less fortunate and find jobs at local charit shops, tesco manager courses, RAF/Army etc... rather than get the job they studied for... for this they have been shafted by being lulled into a false sense of 'security'. Some know they wont get a job others are [SIZE=-1]naive.

Coming off a degree with 30k of debts... to the government with a 15k a year job is pretty demoralising for those individuals and im not suprised alot of my friends have emigrated to avoid payinf back the student loan... because quite frankly 30k rising at 4% pa will take 20 years to pay off from their salaries!.
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aztec21

neas wrote: »

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Coming off a degree with 30k of debts... to the government with a 15k a year job is pretty demoralising for those individuals and im not suprised alot of my friends have emigrated to avoid payinf back the student loan... because quite frankly 30k rising at 4% pa will take 20 years to pay off from their salaries!.
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If you leave university with a 30k debt you have done a very poor job of managing your finances.

Pez2

How can people be so greedy?

Well that's what this country's become. One great big orgy of greed. We're a nation of Del Boy's now, everyone looking for some new scheme to make a fast buck so he can have a bigger house/flasher car/more expensive holiday than his neighbour. And as people who have already made their money increasingly pricing everyone else out, those who haven't made their money yet find that they have to work harder and harder just to get by, let alone to actually improve their lot. Why do people think there's so much demand for site called MoneySavingExpert? It's not because the majority of people are finding it easier to get by.

The responses you get to this say a lot about what's going on in the country at the moment. There's the people who've had to work 60 hour weeks or relocate themselves hunderd of miles from their roots, and so they're damned if anyone else shouldn't have to do the same, and hence it's your own fault if you won't do what they did. They never seem to consider that their might be something wrong when, in what is supposedly one of the richest countries on the planet, people are having to give up on having any kind of decent family or social life, or much of a life of any kind outside of work, in order to achieve a decent standard of living. And nobody in seems to be prepared to put two and two together and figure that if no-one has any kind of a stability or social life these factors might just have a little to do with the family and social breakdown that we're seeing in this country.

Then there are people who are comfortably off because they inheirited wealth or got their foothold in the adult world at a time when the ratio between income and costs was more favourable and there was still decent state provision of services, such as free university education. They're the ones who tell you to stop whining, things have always been this way and that you're just bitter and jealous that you didn't work as hard as them to make your fortune. These kinds of people will always be with us. When they were trying to ban the slave trade I'm sure their were people saying, "stop whining, there has always been a slave trade, that's just the way things are and you're just jealous because you didn't make a packet out of slaves like we did". It's the classic British "I'm alright Jack" attitude.

I suspect that there is a recession on the horizon, and much as a recession will cause a lot of damage to many in this country, I'm hopeful that it might force people to re-assess these kinds of attitudes and convince them that there's something to be said for thinking of others and re-investing in the social fabric of the country rather than just being out to improve your own lot all the time, and sod everyone else.

aztec21

GavP wrote: »

How can people be so greedy?

Well that's what this country's become. One great big orgy of greed. We're a nation of Del Boy's now, everyone looking for some new scheme to make a fast buck so he can have a bigger house/flasher car/more expensive holiday than his neighbour.

I find this funny coming from someone who has started so many threads in the Gambling Introductory Offer Loopholes forum

Phirefly

neas wrote: »

That was my original point, i got on a graduate scheme I did a degree that 'needed' graduates.. engineering... others who do media studies are less fortunate and find jobs at local charit shops, tesco manager courses, RAF/Army etc... rather than get the job they studied for... for this they have been shafted by being lulled into a false sense of 'security'. Some know they wont get a job others are [SIZE=-1]naive.

[SIZE=-1]Coming off a degree with 30k of debts... to the government with a 15k a year job is pretty demoralising for those individuals and im not suprised alot of my friends have emigrated to avoid payinf back the student loan... because quite frankly 30k rising at 4% pa will take 20 years to pay off from their salaries!.[/SIZE]
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30K!! Ocado deliveries once a week was it?!

Sorry to generalise but thats what you appear to be doing when you cite those who have done arts degrees as naive (I'm assuming by using the example of media studies this is what you meant).

I too am frustrated by my pals who've not had the drive to stick it out and ended up in fall-back jobs after their degree. But I don't really get the point you're making here.

Pez2

aztec21 wrote: »

I find this funny coming from someone who has started so many threads in the Gambling Introductory Offer Loopholes forum

I have made the pricely sum of £2k so far from the gambling loopholes, all of which is going towards paying debts that my girlfriend ran up before we met. I have no qualms about profiting from bookmakers, who basically make a living exploiting the fact that their punters aren't very good at maths and/or have a gambling addiction. If I was ripping off little old ladies you might have a point.

Phirefly

I concur with much of your post, but I'm probably one of the people you're citing in the paragraph below.

GavP wrote: »

There's the people who've had to work 60 hour weeks or relocate themselves hunderd of miles from their roots, and so they're damned if anyone else shouldn't have to do the same, and hence it's your own fault if you won't do what they did. They never seem to consider that their might be something wrong when, in what is supposedly one of the richest countries on the planet, people are having to give up on having any kind of decent family or social life, or much of a life of any kind outside of work, in order to achieve a decent standard of living. And nobody in seems to be prepared to put two and two together and figure that if no-one has any kind of a stability or social life these factors might just have a little to do with the family and social breakdown that we're seeing in this country..

GavP wrote: »

there's something to be said for thinking of others and re-investing in the social fabric of the country rather than just being out to improve your own lot all the time, and sod everyone else.

I agree, a decent standard of living shouldn't have to come at the price of social breakdown. But if everyone (who is physically and mentally able to) put maximum effort into improving their own lot then we wouldn't have to rely on investment in the social fabric quite so much.

That said, while you're coming form a broadly socialist perspective and I'm coming across as a raving capitalist, much of what you say does ring true.