How can people be so greedy?

Wesker

I am buying my own place, i have a mortgage but only on a 1 bedroom flat.
But i sometimes wonder if i would be better off renting, at least you have no bills for house rerpairs etc
Its a 50:50 situation really, a mortgage on your own place feels more secure maybe but there's all the extras that go with it :rolleyes:

ginger

Because you pay them so much - or haven't you noticed you tax bill increasing!!

EMA - the government encourages 16+ to stay in education - pays them up to £30 a week to do so. It helps massage the unemployment figures. But if your family income is more than £30K you get nothing. £30K??? - hardly a kings ransom.

epz_2

ginger wrote: »

stevie 1 - I think you are a bit harsh. The recent governments have actually encouraged 18+ schooleavers to go into further education to replenish the stock of graduates/qualified professionals; the failing numbers being due not only to emigrants but also those working class youngsters whose parents could not afford to send them to university but also fell into the trap of being too "affluent" to receive grant aid. Take EMA - you receive nothing if you receive more than £30k family income - typical wages are £23k - so a two parent typical earning family would, as you would expect, not be funded for EMA - but what about a single parent family earning just over that £30k limit? Receives nothing.

On the news today was an item about salaries with or without the benefit further education - the "advantage" of further education is worth approx £2/3K a year. For the sake of a £30/40K debt! You'd have to work 15/20 years to pay off that advantage. And then the question of whether having a profession is worth the hassle. I know that sometimes my over average wage (ha) is not worth the daily stress - give me stocking shelves at Asda for minimum wage any day! I'm not denegrating the asda workers - far from it - I know only too well but too late who has the better option.

personally i would rather do my job for a supermarket workers wages than the other way round, i have neverseen job where the work is so automated and the staff pushed so hard.

frankly while i probaby wouldnt have my current job without a degree as a prerequiset tick box i seriously doubt its value, 4 years studding thermodynamics etc when i would have learnt a lot more doing a real job, just nobody will give you a serious one till you have several years experiance.



re the ops point there i plenty of reason to be frustrated mostly cause previous generations have constricted planning regs to prevent cheap housing but hey, the joy is they broke the generational covenant by charging for education and hoarding all the resources so we dont need to pay their pensions lol.

Stevie1

I did my degree part-time, and worked. No grant, no loan, no aid. It wasn't even that long ago.

Nowhere does it say you have to move to a different part of the country, take out loans and spend your days sitting in the student union bar or buying clothes in designer stores? Yes, the students in my city seem to have a damn good standard of life!

PasturesNew said it best - this generation seem to expect it all handed to them. From the chavs sitting at street corners complaining they have nothing to do (no one gave it to them), to students and graduates who expect free education and managerial/executive positions straight after graduation accompanied by huge salaries, a Merc and enough disposable income to shop at Selfridges.

Ginger - I have yet to hear of the person who was stopped from handing their notice in. Put the virtual violin down.

ginger

wymondham - my point exactly. When you are 18 - do you really know what you want to do? You are being pushed by parents; school, and government initiatives to go into university education - is the downside ie large debts, non guarenteed employment really that clear? Kids are being channelled down a certain route and half of them (most of them?) don't realise what is waiting for them at the other end.

PasturesNew

Stevie1 wrote: »

... From the chavs sitting at street corners complaining the have nothing to do (no one gave it to them),

No generation has ever had anything to do.

I used to walk a mile to sit on the village pump at the village green. Where boys would also be. And we'd all chat.

Never any trouble. Nobody was drinking. No noise. No vandalism. No weapons. Just a chat, then when it got close to being dark I'd run off home before my mum told me off (aged 14-16).

They just can't sit and chat nicely these days. Having an innocent, non-threatening laugh.

aztec21

ginger wrote: »

EMA - the government encourages 16+ to stay in education - pays them up to £30 a week to do so. It helps massage the unemployment figures. But if your family income is more than £30K you get nothing. £30K??? - hardly a kings ransom.

EMA is specifically to help those that can't afford to stay in education without it - not to massage unemployment figures. It is only for people that really need it.

ginger

stevie 1 - I did my degree exactly the same way as you - only because my parents couldn't afford to send me to uni and I couldn't at the time get a grant. So I did it whilst working full time. I was 26 by the time I qualified whilst my counterparts at uni were 22.

Do we really expect this generation to do that?

I might have learned the lessons of life but so are the kids of today who leave uni with all the promises that they have been given, just to find that they can't get a job to pay off the student loans and the houses in the part of the country they may live in are out of their reach - not related you may ask - but perhaps if they had started work at 18 they might have had a better chance of getting on the housing ladder.

Instead of arguing which generation got it right and whether or not this generation should expect less (my generation expected free education) should we not be looking to government who propogated all of this?

ginger

aztec21 - is that right? So the kids who would leave school at 16 and go on the.........dole/umemployment register? What is it now? That's right - there's no record of figures 16-18 but there soon will be. So, give them up to £30 a week to keep them in school and then deal with it. You think the government would actaully pay out money to youngsters not in education if it did not need to. Get real.

Stevie1

It's not about who got it right and who got it wrong, it's about unrealistic expectations and not taking responsibility for your own actions.