Poverty in the UK

[diamond lil]

Think this is a complicated one and I agree with all of you . It is possible to be in poverty and have little food, while at the same time having plasma tvs and mobiles and X-boxes etc. Because some people buy things they cant afford & then struggle to pay for them, or get them buy-now-pay-later. A lot of people don't manage their money at all and run short the last week of the month etc however much they earn. And a lot of people work but have had hours reduced wages frozen and higher fuel bills or rent. I just hope that people make themselves heard and don't all let the govt away with murder.

[diamond lil]

My daughter drives me mad. She has no sense of money or prepping or making do or thrift at all. I think I picked up the wrong little pink bundle from the hospital ! She has 5 kids, is using £45 a week in coal, £20 a week in elect, and god knows how much they spend on food but they all seem to eat all day and never have a proper meal.
She just bought a 50" plasma tv - her second one. Last one cost 3 grand, lived 3 years, and then died - and now here we go again. They have tvs in all bedrooms as well Xboxes, dvd players, and take the full Sky package. The waste of money is phenomenol and I honestly dono where I got her !
Forgot about the iphones and the Blackberry !!

[itsybitsy]

My daughter drives me mad. She has no sense of money or prepping or making do or thrift at all. I think I picked up the wrong little pink bundle from the hospital ! She has 5 kids, is using £45 a week in coal, £20 a week in elect, and god knows how much they spend on food but they all seem to eat all day and never have a proper meal.
She just bought a 50" plasma tv - her second one. Last one cost 3 grand, lived 3 years, and then died - and now here we go again. They have tvs in all bedrooms as well Xboxes, dvd players, and take the full Sky package. The waste of money is phenomenol and I honestly dono where I got her !
Forgot about the iphones and the Blackberry !!

Hellfire. Do her and her hubby have good jobs or is it all on chucky?

[diamond lil]

Is a bit of both really. They get a lot of money IN, but it all seems to go OUT again very fast
And the stuff they spend it on seems very silly to us. (But what do we know, we just the Olds !)

[southernPrepper]

And then there is the case of people who used to work, bought their TV, washing machine etc then but now find themselves unemployed or on a lower salary. It would all look good until you saw the cash flow.

A lot of people who work qualify for housing benefit on account of rents being so high and wages so low. If you find your self starving your children to pay your mortgage then you have different priorities to me.

[counsellor]

Ok for some poeple it has gone really wrong and that can be tough
but I also believe that in some cases that people actually believe the sh*t they see and hear on the telly
Messages like “because you’re worth it” and “it’s you’re right”
Well maybe for some people it is time to wake up and get real, in this life there is no such thing as a free lunch
We can’t all be pop stars and footballers
And the only way to get rich is to work for it and that means working really long and hard and then it doesn’t always work out well

[southernPrepper]

Ok for some poeple it has gone really wrong and that can be tough
but I also believe that in some cases that people actually believe the sh*t they see and hear on the telly
Messages like “because you’re worth it” and “it’s you’re right”
Well maybe for some people it is time to wake up and get real, in this life there is no such thing as a free lunch
We can’t all be pop stars and footballers
And the only way to get rich is to work for it and that means working really long and hard and then it doesn’t always work out well

That's odd because most of the really rich people don't work for it at all.

Making money from money or just skimming a small percentage from large value deals, that's how to get rich. Work hard and stay poor seems to be the message I see all around me although I particularly like it when people who paid £25,000 for their house tell the younger generation how hard they've worked to pay it off. That always makes them laugh

[diamond lil]

I hate those adverts - "Because you're worth it" - Yes it's so worth it giving us your money cos we want it off you ! I find a lot of things quite weird about people and their attitudes to money. Like the ones on MSE forums who talk about their tons of debt, and yet who find it unthinkable, old fashioned and quaint to take cash out of the bank once a week and then live on it
Then the ones who pay elect & gas by DD and just hand over however much the utility company says. Some are in hundreds of ££ credit and yet the company keeps putting up the DDs, and these people keep paying it

[Red Doe]

I’m denigrating the people in the story, but, do they still have satellite TV, Internet connection, mobile phones and the like.

Not to mention Fags n booze.

Yes it is sad, but is it the "Whole Truth"

WW

Well, that isn`t the truth for so many poverty stricken folks. (of which I`m one)
A lot of us are like me..self employed, hit by recession and rising fuel and other prices fed back to us by suppliers. When I get sick, I can`t pay myself sick pay, because the money simply isn`t there. There have been times recently where I`ve literally had to not buy food for a week or so, in order to pay the rent, or where the cost of going to hospital for necessary treatment have set household budgets back a very great deal so that we do go without things others consider essentials.

I don`t smoke, don`t drink, don`t have Sky and the net is necessary as it`s the only way I can sell what I make due to geographic isolation. Mobile phones don`t get a signal here so don`t have one of those either.
I`ve no doubt there are wasters and those who abuse the system and plead poverty....one of my pet hates is someone who pleads poverty but has never known what true hunger really is (trust me, I know...) and who is whining because they can`t afford a foreign holiday this year...
but on the whole, most of the poverty stricken people I know are there because of no fault of our own...many of them, including myself, have worked very hard all our lives, but circumstances now mean all of that seems pointless in retrospect because econonomic `downturns` and the taxman and rising costs of just about everything take it from us quicker than it`s coming in.
So yes, I know what it is, to go without food to pay bils.

[preppingsu]

I suppose we only comment on what we have experienced or seen for ourselves, so apologies Red Doe if we have lumped everyone together.
From my view point I live in a socially deprived, housing association area and many of them are scrongers who have never worked a day in their lives but continue to have children, get bigger houses with the rent paid, and everytime they have another baby they go out and using my tax money buy new equipment costing hundreds of pounds (I listened to them talk at the local childrens centre). Makes me mad as both my kids had second hand everything, we pay our own rent and have had occassion when we couldn't buy food. Prepping means that won't happen again.