blonde poker forum

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/7171345.stm

if the most popular job in the country is working in a call centre earning about 14kpa

mortgage on a 80k house 500pm ish = 6k
council tax = 1k
gas,electric, water probably going to between 1k and 1.5k pa for the average household.

that pretty much takes up our post tax earnings.

Surely we are heading for a meltdown if the bottom rung breaks? and with the credit crunch etc this seems inevitable.

Any opinions?

You're forgetting to take into account if the house has two earners or not.  Also benefits.

i know it's very simplistic, it just seems the cost of lving has gone mental in the last 5/7 years. I remember thinking 14k was pretty decent.

Lots of people choosing to live alone nowadays

It is getting very scary as everything just seems to be shooting up in price at an alarming rate,  Diesel @ £1.08 pl is truely shocking,  I was self employed in the construction industry up until last summerl and really don't think i could survive running a works vehicle nowadays with the miles i used to do, I have a company fuel card now so doesn't directly effect me much but my company now must find ways of allowing for these huge increases which will surely put a strain on any future wage increase for me?

Add sky subscription and a takeaway every other night to the costs.

CYPRUS

Hence my struggle with fuel cost's and my now role as an employee  :)

I was discussing my fears of meltdown in this country with my wife the other night. I truly feel that this year is going to be very bad. Less money available for workers and all the time becoming more expensive to live every day.

I foresee many strikes and demonstrations this year (pensions, fuel, just to mention a couple of areas) this year, if we cannot even give our Police force a proper backdated pay rise what chance for others.

Not looking forward to this year at work. I work for a very large pensions and investments company and we know we are in for a hard time this year. Unfortunately the burden falls on us lowly administrators and those in call centres to attempt to appease the general public when they call in or write to us.

Immigration, Prison overcrowding, rising crime, especially of a violent nature, NHS trusts under severe pressure. it really is difficult to see where/when it will get better.


Oh, by the way, Happy New year everyone.

James, you need a butler and housemaid by any chance??

Grumpy old man

Geo

Not a good time to return to the UK then?

In answer to your OP.

Some (and maybe most) survive with credit cards and loans, until they can survive no more.

So much truth in that statement.

Wrong - it's ALWAYS a good time to live in the UK. Yes, there's doom & gloom if you look for it, but there's plenty of wonderful things in Great Britain that are awesomely wonderful, unique, & are our heritage. And are free.

and dtd

Britain in itself is an amazing place to live. Without doubt one of the most stunning countries in the world.

I only have a problem with the people who run the country and the mentality of most who live here today.

yes but you cant eat them, wear them and live in them ... neither can you light your house with them, heat your house with them or power up your electrical goods with them... we are not looking at idealistic things here, more the necessities of daily living ... 

Unfortunately Tikay, the good things in this United Kingdom rarely put food on our table and shoes on our kids feet.

I think it will be a very tough year

In response to the credit crunch banks are already tightening lending criteria

House prices look over-extended and affordability is about to get poorer

inflationary pressure from Oil prices and other raw materials is high..so everyday cost of living rises..fuel, utilities etc

I expect a lot of talk about recession in 2009...not the end of the world but a downswing in what has beena  long upticxk in the economic cycle

I also expect the government to have a tough time this year, and believe the Conservatives have an even money chance of being elected in 2010


Off to pile the lot onto Red at the casino, best way out of it at the moment!

I agree, Billy, but it's pretty much the same the world over. Just not as nice......!

someone's after a pay rise :)

The Philippines is a lovely Country, but it's NOT Cornwall

Many of those things are not bad at all, really.

Peeps moan when there is a credit crunch - well we should not live beyond our means. That's why we use Credit - to spend more than we have to spend.

Peeps moan when house prices fall ("our House is worth less than we hoped") - but they also get uppity when they rise ("we can't afford the home we want"). We can't have it both ways!.

The UK - indeed most of the developed world - get what we pay for. We've had excess for a few years, & now we gotta pay the bills. It's always been thus, for centuries, the certainty of economic cycles  - if not their timing - are the most predictable things on earth. Ally them to the incredibly clever, & faultlessly immaculate concepts  - they NEVER fail - of supply & demand, & market forces, & you have the answer. What goes round comes round.

It's all relative, & ex Prime Minister Macmillan got it spot on.

Nowhere on earth is like Cornwall, & the beauty there is free. Ditto Yorkshire, Derbyshire, Wales, Scotland, Ireland, Sussex, Wiltshire, Berkshire, Herefordshire, The Dales, the Pennines, Gloucestershire, and so on. All that beauty is there, for free. I exclude Essex, of course.

Some of the country is nice Tikay but as you well know, there are a lot of Sh1T holes that are ignored.

Couldn't agree more with the wise old one.

The standard of living in the UK for the vast majority is better now than it's ever been (but yes, it's far from perfect).

On a tangent, I was watching the story behind Monty Python's 'The Life of Brian' on New Year's Eve, and it was amazing how close it was to the film not being made due to blasphemy laws.  At the same time as the film was being written, Mary Whitehouse and her cronies were bringing a case against the editor of a gay newspaper for something written about Jesus and homosexuality.  The bloke ended up getting a custodial sentence, and the judge was damning in his sentencing.

Although there are still issues with racism and homophobia in the UK, I'd say it's a better place to live now than it was 20, 30, 40 years ago.

I would agree with that, but is society itself better than it was 30/40 years ago? I think not

No, it's far worse. Everywhere though. We are kidding ourselves if we think it's confined to the UK. And if it's bad everywhere, I'll take bad in the UK every time.

I'm glad I'm living now and not 30-40 years ago.

"Although there are still issues with racism and homophobia in the UK, I'd say it's a better place to live now than it was 20, 30, 40 years ago."

I disagree with this statement so so so much.

Even in my short (and hopefully alot longer) life, I have seen so many changes in the behavour of children. These children are the future's adults - GOD HELP us is all I can say!

When I was school age, you had the minority of kids that were rude and badly behaved - now, it seems to be alot worse, and dare I say the other way around?

Who is to blame? We as parents MUST take some responsibility, but the blame (imo) lies with the "Do gooders" who have gone too far. Children have so much power now, and they know it, AND use it!

There was so much more respect when I was a kid. You knew how far you could push it without getting in trouble - some pushed it that little too much.
Now, kids know they can pretty do much as they like - nothing happens to them.

Take schools for example, 20-30 years ago if you were "out of line" you were punnished and your school day was miserable. Now, schools have no control and cannot stop a kid even if they want to run out of school, so what do they do if kids are "out of line"? Yep, you guessed it, they "exclude" them.
You would NEVER dream of shouting at a teacher, but nowadays it is all too common.

These children then leave school with the same attitude "No one can make me do anything I do not want to do". I beleive this to be the main reason why so many kids struggle to move into the "real" world when they reach adulthood.

This subject is close to my heart, as I have seen an immense change in my two youngest (3 and 5) since they have been at school. It is hard enough trying to bring up children, and made even harder by the fact that most of their waking day is spent at school who are powerless to teach them respect.

Ive rambled on, sorry.

You didn't go to my school then.  It was a zoo.  I was the only boy in my year to go on to sixth form and then university.  I could go on, but it wasn't a pretty place.


Again, at my school (15-20 years ago), teachers were hung out of the window by their ankles, our form tutor had to leave teaching because he had a nervous breakdown.  We had a supply teacher in once and one of the students thought it would be funny to stick his head in a vice and leave him.  I didn't see much respect to the teachers at all.  In fact, the only teachers who had respect were the ones who dished it out as well.


It's not all kids at all.  Far from it. 


I'm not a parent yet, so I don't know what it's like to be a parent and to worry like you will be about how your kids will turn out.   Like you've alluded to, it's not just parents that dictate how a child grows up - sometimes the environment they grow up in is the overriding factor.

Well there you go, it shows that some things get better, & some worse. Things change. They just do.

Yes, children are "different" these days. That's worse. Racism is much less these days. That's better.

By the bye, I grew up in an age where my Grandparents openly talked about "bloody blacks", there was Apartheid in South Africa, & in Rhodesia the tyrant Ian Smith tried the same thing, & there were awful race riots in Notting Hill. Now, thank God, that's largely gone away, & instead Eastern Europeans are taking the abuse.

There's a downside, a glass half empty, to everything. An an upside, & a glass half-full, too.

Point taken about the environment.

Labour have created this situation

Tax

I love the UK and I can't imagine living permantley elsewhere. I think too many people have a grass is greener on the other side syndrome. I spent christmas in Egypt and i guarentee 99% of the population would be happy to swap their lives with a person who has 14k year job with credit card debt in the uk, you only have to look at the amount of Eastern europeans coming to this country doing menial jobs as it is better than life where they were at home.

We do have social problems though and M3boy's post echoes my thoughts. I worked briefly as a secondary school teacher before choosing the comparitively easy life of poker. It was at least weekly event maybe daily to get sworn at and witnessed pupils throwing punches at teachers, throwing chairs at them and all manner of other things. All this happened in the ghetto that is Melton Mowbray, in a comprehensive performing above national average results wise. Lets say I have no desire to get back into teaching at the current time, a tough profession these days a mixture of social worker, policeman and teacher now.

Kinboshi your school sounds rough as, but that kind of school is becoming alot more common than it was 15-20 years ago.

Not too far from Melton Mowbray either.  It was in Corby in Northants.

This country is great :)

As for the comment about Labour and tax, rofl. I remember the poll tax, nuff said.

I agree with Longy, go live somewhere else and then tell us how you feel about the Uk. Where people say their skint with a 40" TV, consoles, mobiles phones and takeaways everynight.

Makes me laugh when people abroad constently tell me how great it is there. Maybe they have to tell us all the time to convince themselves.

Where's better?  :dontask:

LOL, council tax is much more relatively than the poll tax ever was, taxation as a whole is up massively under labour and the binmen refuse (:)) to come to my door.
I think i read somewhere it equates to nearly 50p in the pound, not funny.

Taxation as a whole massively up under Labour?? I disagree strongly, no proof for that statement.

Notice how the conservatives dont even bother to attack labour on the econ or taxes as its been solid for the last 10 years since the boom and bust. Health/schools etc but not taxes.


Labour remind me of the Clinton regime, people dont realise how good they have it until it all goes pear shapped afterwards

A five second google............

http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/politics/article240541.ece

"The Centre for Policy Studies reported last month that Labour had introduced 45 new tax rises, double the number under the Tories after 1992, and that the net increase in taxation over the past four years has been £36 billion."

"Labour promised not to increase taxation at all. Thanks to Gordon Brown, there has been an increase by stealth, the equivalent of a 10p in the pound rise in income tax,"

the article is how old? and if u read it, it explains why they were initially increased.......due to a number of factors not all labours doing. 2001 article sure backs up that we have had to so so bad under labour. I dont have to google the fact if people want to work and earn a decent crust they can in this country.


To say labour somehow created "this situation" whatever you think it is, mystifies me.

2002, that was just the beginning........

Wheely? 

But they have their reasons, don't they ;)

I am late on this thread but couldnt agree more with you mate.

If people want to pine for the good old days of yesteryear, then they should do so without the internet, as it doesn't exist in your bygone era of perfection.

I'll also be taking your mobile phone and putting kak back on the television

Putting kak BACK on TV? Like, it's good, now?

just switched on to find Phil Collins on the box.....you work fast :D

3 channels that finish at 12pm is much better than 24-hour-watch-what-you-want-when-you-want tv

I went to high school 1984-1989 and loved it! there was no knives, the only mention of drugs was a few who sniffed glue..and you feared most of the teachers, 20 years later police patrol the school most days, knives are taken off pupils and there are lots of expulsions...times have changed....