I very much want to escape. Hopefully 2 years into the future. But could easily not happen
How do people afford to work in expensive areas of the country?
- Thread starter Stu999
- Start date
I very much want to escape. Hopefully 2 years into the future. But could easily not happen
Caporegime
I did a 13.5 hour day yesterday and what is this 8 hours sleep you talk of?
I only work 3.5 days a week though.
Soldato
Stay in the north, buy a place and stop renting.
Associate
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We managed to buy a flat in zone 2 London about 14 years ago.....only managed it due to having 2 of us and the flat was ex council and was proper in the stab you up ghetto.....but from that and moving up chain we are ok....
So in answer to your question I think it's luck of where your born / buy your first house....
So in answer to your question I think it's luck of where your born / buy your first house....
Always so negative, like every single time in these type of threads.
If you continue to do what you’ve always done then expect to get what you’ve always got.
Bingo!
Unfortunately too many people have the “why should I have to” entitled mentality and spend more time and energy moaning than actually doing anything about their current situation.
I mean all the time spent on here could be substituted for retraining for a better paid career.
Rocket science it isn’t.
Caporegime
Which would work great, if Stu999 could find a suitable job in the north, but has already stated that these roles seem few and far between. Rock and a hard place.
Associate
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My entire working career has been in London (living within the M25)
It's only more recently that I've noticed the bite. The cost of a non-Tescos meal deal lunch has doubled. The cost of travel has increased significantly. The cost of a post-work pint has nearly doubled.
It's only more recently that I've noticed the bite. The cost of a non-Tescos meal deal lunch has doubled. The cost of travel has increased significantly. The cost of a post-work pint has nearly doubled.
Explain to me how a society works if everyone is able to train for and get a "better paid career". Who does the myriad of unskilled labour type jobs?
This once again is the sort of broken mantra that is so often spouted by people. Unfortunately, even with all the will and effort in the world, our society/economy is not built to accommodate this, so a huge amount of people will fail.
A healthy society would still allow someone who works hard and full time in an unskilled job to be able to afford a reasonable/relatively decent quality of life.
Working full time and expecting to be able to afford a roof over your head, food, heating, and a couple of modest treats is not being "entitled".
I'll tell you what actually IS entitled. Absurdly paid CEOs and executives milking all the cream off the top of everything, so they can spend an average person's yearly salary on some stupid bottle of champagne on nights out.
Do you know the primary reason that causes people to think and have the mindset of "why should I have to/bother" etc? Absurd wealth inequality.
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Soldato
My eldest works for Oxford uni/remote and son in law London/remote , they live in Farringdon Oxfordshire so it was £280k newish 3 beds 3 baths big garage, think my daughter is thinking more about moving to a place with more countryside rather than nearer work, its lovely in town but other than that sprawling estates of new builds, no option but pavement parking when we visit as they build them so close together the roads are 1.5 cars wide
Go on then, put a positive spin on working 60 hours a week on min wage. Really extoll the benefits and the virtues... I'm all ears.
And then perhaps remind people that you're of the rentier class (a landlord). Who gets to sit back and watch money pour in because you own a valuable asset.
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Caporegime
Unfortunately both views are fundamentally bad. We live in a rich country where people doing every sort of job should be able to enjoy the fact we are a wealthy country. You shouldn't have to have a well paid job to be able to afford a house or a holiday or the luxury of children. Society works on the basis that you have thousands of jobs of every skill level but you still have to pay the people at the bottom enough to live. Fundamentally work is work. No I am not in any way advocating socialism or communism because both are fundamentally flawed.
You simply cannot have everyone getting well paid jobs. Thats not how an economy works. If everyone doubled their salaries tomorrow, inflation would go through the roof and very quickly everyone would be earning twice their current salary and yet would be no better off.
The problem is that we have created a disincentive to work for people near the bottom. We have a generation who look at the idea of working hard and see minimal pay off for it. They see their parents generation with much of the housing and wealth and cannot see that in their future even if they work hard and do all things they are supposed to.
We are creating a welfare state where far too many people need to dip into the public purse to survive because we have this stupid idea that all of them are lazy and fundamentally bad. You have to incentivise work and you have invest in early intervention. Austerity has done a cracking job of stagnating the country, raising the tax burden on the middle class and absolutely killing the services taxes pay for. The result is just a death spiral towards a complete mess of a country.
We might live in a wealthy country but much of that wealth is super concentrated at the top.
Our economy is also large a rentier economy these days. Just pulling a random article from Google to highlight that this is at least now being discussed. And viewed as a problem.
www.opendemocracy.net
But work itself is disincentivised when increasingly every kind of work is only providing you with the money you need to feed the rentier classes extracting from you everything you can earn. That is to say, not only the unskilled labourers but also the skilled workers in many sectors cannot get a foot on the ladder. That so much is now extracted from them that they can only subsist.
And this is a generational problem. The skilled workers of yesteryear look at us with contempt, but won't acknowledge how our rentier classes are now bleeding everyone dry, much more than before.
Our economy is also large a rentier economy these days. Just pulling a random article from Google to highlight that this is at least now being discussed. And viewed as a problem.
Replacing rentier capitalism is one of the defining challenges of our age
Two new books reveal how our economy is increasingly oriented around the interests of asset owners – and increasingly uncaring about the fates of everyone else.
www.opendemocracy.net
But work itself is disincentivised when increasingly every kind of work is only providing you with the money you need to feed the rentier classes extracting from you everything you can earn. That is to say, not only the unskilled labourers but also the skilled workers in many sectors cannot get a foot on the ladder. That so much is now extracted from them that they can only subsist.
And this is a generational problem. The skilled workers of yesteryear look at us with contempt, but won't acknowledge how our rentier classes are now bleeding everyone dry, much more than before.
Soldato
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So much negativity in general and also about the UK, I personally don't understand the sentiment. You can find fault with plenty of places throughout the world and yeah the UK is far from perfect but there is much to appreciate.
Caporegime
That is a fantastic way to live and I agree whole heartedly as I am always trying to improve and live within my means but if everyone who does "normal" jobs is extremely poor you end up with an economy that suffers. When 1 rich person buys a TV but the other 100 cannot. Industries start to close, job losses etc. I know it is a very simple analogy but unfortunately these poorly paid jobs are critical for a functioning country (NHS, Teaching, Services, Logistics etc).
I wouldn't call myself negative but watching your country go down the toilet when it could be so much better due to greed. We could have had a UK sovereign wealth fund that rivalled that of Norway. Our oil reserves are bigger than the whole of Western Europe combined but instead of it going to the country it is lining the pockets of the very few.
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Plenty of remote and hybrid roles depending on the sector.
I live in Newcastle and work is hyrid remote, in London 3 days a week (my choice, could go fully remote).
It's more cost effective for me and my family to live in the North (large 3 bed townhouse with 50% mortgage paid off after 7 years, child in the top local private school, clean air and vast open spaces yadayda) and stay in London hotels 2 nights a week.
But to be fair it seems it's the South East as a whole that is overpriced
To be honest I don't think we're far behind being this way ourselves. So many people going private out of desperation now and I've got a "healthcare fund" for later in life running on the assumption that the NHS might be in its death throes when I really need it.
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Caporegime
I'm mid thirties and the NHS won't exist in its current state when I am retired. Thats almost entirely because the average person in this country is a physical mess. Overweight, under-exercised and their diet is appalling. People have absolutely no idea how much healthcare costs the country and how little they pay towards their own care in the grand scheme of things. Chances are good that you haven't put enough into the NHS in your lifetime if you get a serious illness for any amount of time. People want the best care, best drugs and best treatments and don't realise that some of these cost hundreds of thousands of pounds.
People are utterly blase about it. One of our friends mum has hundreds if not thousands of pounds of drugs she doesn't take for her artritis and she still gets them every month. Doesn't take them because she doesn't like them. Likes to have a whinge about them but doesn't like to take them. Doesn't tell her doctor this of course and asks my partner whos a pharmacist if she should be taking X, Y and Z. How about talking to your damn doctor who actually knows about your condition and treatment.
My partner spent one of her jobs going into old peoples houses to deprescribe medications they didn't need and would find ridiculous amounts of drugs that they had been hoarding for years.
Also the factor a career isn't a choice for everyone, where I work for example we've quite a few people who could be in much better jobs but have considerations like caring for elderly parents so need flexibility they won't find in better paid jobs, etc. in the past not a huge issue they just had to make some compromises but increasingly being pushed to the wall, for the most part due to a small number of things which have become very expensive like housing.
Yes the UK is a good place to live in the whole world.
But it's **** to see it going backwards
Seeing the state pension go up by inflation while people's jobs lag behind.. Knowing you'll probably never see that pension you yourself are paying for.
The boomer generation is the peak.
Where you can have one parent earning and a family.
Where many have final salary pensions.
Where a mediocre job and some. Sensible choices like buying a house can make you a millionaire.
I can't see that happening again. UK is on the decline. I don't see anyway to stop it that's going to happen.
It doesn't get me down. But I'm damn glad I'm not a kid now. (as a curve ball add growing up with deliberately addictive social media), certainly glad I didn't have that.
Im glad I don't have kids to worry about. Because if I did I would worry about them. Without a leg up from parents how will the majority of kids now ever manage to survive. With dwindling public services, an nhs that's heading private, every increasing rent, and no pension?
I have no solutions to this other than the end of capitalism
But it's **** to see it going backwards
Seeing the state pension go up by inflation while people's jobs lag behind.. Knowing you'll probably never see that pension you yourself are paying for.
The boomer generation is the peak.
Where you can have one parent earning and a family.
Where many have final salary pensions.
Where a mediocre job and some. Sensible choices like buying a house can make you a millionaire.
I can't see that happening again. UK is on the decline. I don't see anyway to stop it that's going to happen.
It doesn't get me down. But I'm damn glad I'm not a kid now. (as a curve ball add growing up with deliberately addictive social media), certainly glad I didn't have that.
Im glad I don't have kids to worry about. Because if I did I would worry about them. Without a leg up from parents how will the majority of kids now ever manage to survive. With dwindling public services, an nhs that's heading private, every increasing rent, and no pension?
I have no solutions to this other than the end of capitalism
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I'm not sure if it is a good thing or not, that most of the kids growing up now won't have the inter-generation awareness people like myself at just over 40 have. I think they'd be very very angry at how the boomer generation has essentially, even if not always intentionally, sold them down the river (purposeful choice of words).