When £35000 a year is not enough.

Kanaric · Feb 1, 2012

40-60k sure but 100k is laughable.

I know complete near downs syndrome idiots who make 40-60k. Not ripping on anyone who makes that just saying there are opportunities for anyone to do it.

Denny Crane! · Feb 1, 2012

Re: When £35000 a year is not enough.

Kanaric said:
40-60k sure but 100k is laughable.

I know complete near downs syndrome idiots who make 40-60k. Not ripping on anyone who makes that just saying there are opportunities for anyone to do it.

Dollars or £? Because I am smarter than your average bear and I can't make that.

bushbush · Feb 1, 2012

Re: When £35000 a year is not enough.

what kind of life can you live in UK with 35000 pounds? can someone give me a description? you can be more specific with 35000 living in London or other cities.

I am asking this because I met a US lawyer working for one of the big UK law firms. He makes about 100,000 pounds a year now but he is complaining that life is pretty tough in London with that kind of money actually given how expensive everything is there. I ask myself if 100,000 pounds a year is rough life, is 35000 pounds almost below poverty line?

Phier · Feb 1, 2012

Re: When £35000 a year is not enough.

If a city is very expensive to live in which London is, does it make sense for the government to pay people to live in that city? All that does is artificially keep expenses high. If you have no work, then you can't complain if you have to move to survive on the dole.

gaunty14 · Feb 2, 2012

Re: When £35000 a year is not enough.

Stryker77 said:
How is £35k a year, not enough? If the area you live in is too expensive then move like every other family has to when they try to find work.

Often the parents can't keep their legs together and have four children etc

Obviously that is a generalisation but you get the point

Robin de Bodemloze · Feb 2, 2012

Re: When £35000 a year is not enough.

gaunty14 said:
Often the parents can't keep their legs together and have four children etc
Obviously that is a generalisation but you get the point

All the more reason to relocate elsewhere where they can afford all those kids?

Poach · Feb 2, 2012

Re: When £35000 a year is not enough.

bushbush said:
what kind of life can you live in UK with 35000 pounds? can someone give me a description? you can be more specific with 35000 living in London or other cities.

I am asking this because I met a US lawyer working for one of the big UK law firms. He makes about 100,000 pounds a year now but he is complaining that life is pretty tough in London with that kind of money actually given how expensive everything is there. I ask myself if 100,000 pounds a year is rough life, is 35000 pounds almost below poverty line?

While London is rather an exception to the rest of the UK in terms of living costs, £100,000 shouldn't be "rough", unless your standard of "comfortable" is unreasonably high.

According to this, you're looking at around £30,000/year before tax to "comfortably" live with 2 children.

According to this couple, their cost of living is around £20,000/year, without children.

According to here, £31,600/year before tax will pay for a 2-child family.

As such, £36,000 before tax will comfortably house a 2-child family.

Denny Crane! · Feb 2, 2012

Re: When £35000 a year is not enough.

bushbush said:
what kind of life can you live in UK with 35000 pounds? can someone give me a description? you can be more specific with 35000 living in London or other cities.

I am asking this because I met a US lawyer working for one of the big UK law firms. He makes about 100,000 pounds a year now but he is complaining that life is pretty tough in London with that kind of money actually given how expensive everything is there. I ask myself if 100,000 pounds a year is rough life, is 35000 pounds almost below poverty line?

Well bearing in mind this is for people who do no work at all but in this country you could rent a 3 bed semi and pay all the bills and food shopping, run a car and still be left with enough to save up for a decent holiday every year and still treat yourself to the odd expense like an xbox every few months, I'm assuming this is two adults surviving on this wage by the way.

Pretty high standard of living not many who work can afford. I'm earning about that and I'm doing about 80 hours a week to get it.

Phier said:
If a city is very expensive to live in which London is, does it make sense for the government to pay people to live in that city? All that does is artificially keep expenses high. If you have no work, then you can't complain if you have to move to survive on the dole.

exactly.

bushbush · Feb 2, 2012

Re: When £35000 a year is not enough.

Denny Crane! said:
Well bearing in mind this is for people who do no work at all but in this country you could rent a 3 bed semi and pay all the bills and food shopping, run a car and still be left with enough to save up for a decent holiday every year and still treat yourself to the odd expense like an xbox every few months, I'm assuming this is two adults surviving on this wage by the way.

Pretty high standard of living not many who work can afford. I'm earning about that and I'm doing about 80 hours a week to get it.

Thanks for the clarification.

that US lawyer makes 100,000 pounds while working 80 hours a week too (albeit a lot of international traveling). Remind me to tell him quit whining about his "tough" life next time I see him.

Derbiean · Feb 2, 2012

Re: When £35000 a year is not enough.

Unless you have a local connection to an area (either you have lived in said for a certain of time or you have family in the area) you will end up very low on the housing list, so again simply getting up and moving to another area is far from as simple as some of you would like to believe.

Local councils can only provide housing for people who are eligible. Most people who are living in the UK permanently are eligible, but there are some exceptions.
Being eligible for council housing doesn't mean that you are guaranteed to be offered a place. It means that you are entitled to be considered for a home. In many areas, there is very little housing available, so there is often a very long wait and some people may never get an offer. http://england.shelter.org.uk/get_a...ouncil_waiting_lists/who_is_eligible_to_apply

The number of people joining waiting lists for social housing rose last year, councils in England say. More than 11,000 people joined the lists from July to September last year, 12% more than the previous quarter.
Richard Kemp, vice-chair of the Local Government Association, said there was "no long-term solution to this problem".
The government says it is working to find a solution to what it admits is a housing crisis.http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-12198429

Robin de Bodemloze · Feb 2, 2012

Re: When £35000 a year is not enough.

Derbiean said:
Unless you have a local connection to an area (either you have lived in said for a certain of time or you have family in the area) you will end up very low on the housing list, so again simply getting up and moving to another area is far from as simple as some of you would like to believe.

Thus the government should spend on increasing labour mobility instead of using benefits as a crutch. :whistling

Derbiean · Feb 2, 2012

Re: When £35000 a year is not enough.

robinzx said:
Thus the government should spend on increasing labour mobility instead of using benefits as a crutch.

Or perhaps the governments should have built enough housing to begin with.

Rolling Thunder · Feb 2, 2012

Re: When £35000 a year is not enough.

robinzx said:
Thus the government should spend on increasing labour mobility instead of using benefits as a crutch.

Actually, the problem with our benefit's system is that it becomes stingy the moment people find work. Working at all get your benefits cut. Working past 16 hours a week gets most of them removed, but in reality, you're probably earning less than or equal to what you were on benefits.

Robin de Bodemloze · Feb 2, 2012

Re: When £35000 a year is not enough.

Rolling Thunder said:
Actually, the problem with our benefit's system is that it becomes stingy the moment people find work. Working at all get your benefits cut. Working past 16 hours a week gets most of them removed, but in reality, you're probably earning less than or equal to what you were on benefits.

Hence why benefits should be lower, and not offer a "good" standard of living. This whole "the unemployed should be entitled to a fair standard of living on par with working individuals" thing is utter and complete bollocks. People who don't work deserve to survive. They also deserve to be poor.

Rolling Thunder · Feb 2, 2012

Re: When £35000 a year is not enough.

robinzx said:
Hence why benefits should be lower, and not offer a "good" standard of living. This whole "the unemployed should be entitled to a fair standard of living on par with working individuals" thing is utter and complete bollocks. People who don't work deserve to survive. They also deserve to be poor.

You know who doesn't deserve a standard of living? Lawyers. Now there's a parasitic class if there ever was one. Get into power, make relative simple concepts (justice, equity, equality) into hideously complex matters of case law requiring hours of reading and learning various concepts, use pretentious latin words and suddenly you're entitled to a heft wedge of money for providing a wholly superfluous service. But since they can afford suits, expensive wine and the dinner-party pontification such things bring, they immediately become a far superior class to the unemployed. I happen to like my unemployed standard of living - being able to eat things like fresh vegetables, and not have my property repossessed, and maybe even have a pint of beer once a week, and electricity and even internet. Much as I would like a job, getting one so far has proven problematic.

Caelifer_1991 · Feb 2, 2012

Re: When £35000 a year is not enough.

The job center will bend over backwards to get you skills training to get you a job hell they will even pay for driving lessons.

Dunno where you heard this Denny but that's either a lie or only applies to some very lucky individuals that are in the extreme minority - I received JSA (albeit for just 10 weeks altogether, 6 weeks then 4 weeks a few months later) and yet there was never any option to get driving lessons funded by the government...

If a city is very expensive to live in which London is, does it make sense for the government to pay people to live in that city? All that does is artificially keep expenses high. If you have no work, then you can't complain if you have to move to survive on the dole.

... and you Phier, this is perhaps one of the first times I agree with you on anything - although only to an extent. While that reasoning is fine in theory, it doesn't quite take housing concerns into consideration - no one can ever rely on getting social-housing, and private housing may simply not be available or be prohibitively expensive for anyone relying on benefits (though anyone single should have that freedom, anyone with a family would be unlikely to find anything they could afford that would also be reasonably suitable). There's also the fact that a person may be more likely to find a job in the area they are already in, which they would need to consider; and somewhat linked to this, the person involved may be in full-time education - half way through A Levels for instance, and would thus need to sacrifice a lot to move.

Aside from all this however, I'd like to say that £26000 benefits is way too much for anyone in my opinion, I'll also say that I've never met anyone, in any circumstances, that have ever received anything even close to that... the most I've seen is about £11000 and that was shared between a family of 3...

Robin de Bodemloze · Feb 2, 2012

Re: When £35000 a year is not enough.

Rolling Thunder said:
Oh get ed.

Thanks for that constructive response :doh:

Rolling Thunder said:
You know who doesn't deserve a standard of living? Lawyers. Now there's a parasitic class if there ever was one. Get into power, make relative simple concepts (justice, equity, equality) into hideously complex matters of case law requiring hours of reading and learning various concepts, use pretentious latin words and suddenly you're entitled to a heft wedge of money for providing a wholly superfluous service. But since they can afford suits, expensive wine and the dinner-party pontification such things bring, they immediately become a far superior class to the unemployed. I happen to like my unemployed standard of living - being able to eat things like fresh vegetables, and not have my property repossessed, and maybe even have a pint of beer once a week, and electricity and even internet. Much as I would like a job, getting one so far has proven problematic.

Lawyers do a job that's valued by society, if not by you. If you are unemployed due to a bad system then my sympathies, and it's one of the perks of living in an advanced economy that the state doesn't let you starve, but in general the unemployed do not deserve to be supported by the state to the same level of living standard as someone who works - "same" being the operative word.

Rolling Thunder · Feb 2, 2012

Re: When £35000 a year is not enough.

robinzx said:
Lawyers do a job that's valued by society, if not by you. If you are unemployed due to a bad system then my sympathies, and it's one of the perks of living in an advanced economy that the state doesn't let you starve, but in general the unemployed do not deserve to be supported by the state to the same level of living standard as someone who works - "same" being the operative word.

They do a job - provide a service - created by legislative fiat, as the legal system is so densely incomprehensible, so liable to change and interpretation and principle that they are needed by the citizenry. You might as well argue that any other form of racket provides a service - one you have little choice in agreeing to or not!

I would agree, but the vast majority of people on benefits do not experience the kind of lifestyle employed people do. I know I don't. I know most unemployed people don't. These people in Wales have their tabs, and their booze, and the like, but that's because they've gimped the system to maximize economies of scale and return. Those are the only people who live better than those working (with the exception of people who are working between 16-20 hours, and receive exactly as much as they would on benefits.

Robin de Bodemloze · Feb 2, 2012

Re: When £35000 a year is not enough.

Rolling Thunder said:
They do a job - provide a service - created by legislative fiat, as the legal system is so densely incomprehensible, so liable to change and interpretation and principle that they are needed by the citizenry. You might as well argue that any other form of racket provides a service - one you have little choice in agreeing to or not!

I would agree, but the vast majority of people on benefits do not experience the kind of lifestyle employed people do. I know I don't. I know most unemployed people don't. These people in Wales have their tabs, and their booze, and the like, but that's because they've gimped the system to maximize economies of scale and return. Those are the only people who live better than those working (with the exception of people who are working between 16-20 hours, and receive exactly as much as they would on benefits.

A common language of contract and legality sounds pretty necessary to me - the fact that legislature is complicated and case law is onerously long is mostly due to natural accumulation over time, not because a small group of people decided it would be smart to say stuff in ways nobody else understood. There's a lot more to lawyers than just interpreting difficult language in any case.

Regarding your second point, I'm glad we do agree - yet, and I quote the OP - the British government does not.

Denny Crane! said:
3. The Government has announced that in order to promote fairness between those in work and those receiving benefits, from 2013, benefit payments for individual households will be capped at around the average earned income after tax and National Insurance for working households. We estimate that the cap will be set at £350 a week for households of a single adult with no children; and at £500 a week for couple and lone parent households.

Regarding the bit in bold, no such fairness should exist.

Astaroth · Feb 2, 2012

Re: When £35000 a year is not enough.

Rolling Thunder said:
They do a job - provide a service - created by legislative fiat, as the legal system is so densely incomprehensible, so liable to change and interpretation and principle that they are needed by the citizenry. You might as well argue that any other form of racket provides a service - one you have little choice in agreeing to or not!

Lawyers are just as much needed in Civil Law systems, despite there being a lot more codified laws/less case law. And legal specialists are needed to know, understand and interpret the huge system of laws -- which btw doesn't exist because the legislative is bored or wants to annoy people.

A modern state requires all areas of life to be organized and regulated to a degree, otherwise there would be chaos (heck, people already complain when someone else's apples end up on their property -- humans just love quarreling). A country of many million people with countless possible situations necessarily needs a complicated and large legal system, hence lawyers, judges and the likes aren't just some sort of "parasites".

Kanaric · Feb 2, 2012

A modern state does not need every aspect of life regulated. That is Orwellian Triad logic.

Rolling Thunder · Feb 2, 2012

Re: When £35000 a year is not enough.

Astaroth said:
A country of many million people with countless possible situations necessarily needs a complicated and large legal system.

Considering the splendidly perverse outcomes that legal system seems to produce, I am strongly inclined to disagree.

Shaun · Feb 2, 2012

Re: When £35000 a year is not enough.

Astaroth said:
understand and interpret the huge system of laws -- which btw doesn't exist because the legislative is bored or wants to annoy people.

No, those are just side effects. A lot of laws/rules/bureaucracy exist merely so that people will have jobs. The Labour government helped turn rule making into one of the most rapidly expanding businesses in the country for a while.

Astaroth · Feb 2, 2012

Re: When £35000 a year is not enough.

Rolling Thunder said:
Considering the splendidly perverse outcomes that legal system seems to produce, I am strongly inclined to disagree.

Those are the cases that one reads in papers like the Sun about. No newspaper is going to write about the 99.9% of boring, regular, unproblematic cases that courts solve all year long. And of course humans aren't perfect.

But the fact that the vast majority of court cases work perfectly without any stupid outcomes (same goes for trade, treaties between countries, taxes and all the other areas of life that are regulated by laws) shows the important of a legal system. Laws don't just exist "for the lulz".

Shaun said:
No, those are just side effects. A lot of laws/rules/bureaucracy exist merely so that people will have jobs. The Labour government helped turn rule making into one of the most rapidly expanding businesses in the country for a while.

It's a conspiracy! Of course it must apply to the whole world because the Labour government supposedly did it for a few years.

Shaun · Feb 2, 2012

Re: When £35000 a year is not enough.

I never said it applies to the whole world. But it certainly applies to the UK, the country that this thread is about.

Kanaric · Feb 2, 2012

Here in the US it works that way in the local city level. Entire city jobs exist solely to employ people. Like having traffic coordinators.at blocks with working lights.

Or putting cameras on every street corner.

Rolling Thunder · Feb 2, 2012

Re: When £35000 a year is not enough.

Kanaric said:
Here in the US it works that way in the local city level. Entire city jobs exist solely to employ people. Like having traffic coordinators.at blocks with working lights.

Or putting cameras on every street corner.

Much the same here. And then I get taxed for that - irregardlless of whether, y'know, I'm employed or not.

bushbush · Feb 2, 2012

Re: When £35000 a year is not enough.

Rolling Thunder said:
You know who doesn't deserve a standard of living? Lawyers. Now there's a parasitic class if there ever was one. Get into power, make relative simple concepts (justice, equity, equality) into hideously complex matters of case law requiring hours of reading and learning various concepts, use pretentious latin words and suddenly you're entitled to a heft wedge of money for providing a wholly superfluous service. But since they can afford suits, expensive wine and the dinner-party pontification such things bring, they immediately become a far superior class to the unemployed. I happen to like my unemployed standard of living - being able to eat things like fresh vegetables, and not have my property repossessed, and maybe even have a pint of beer once a week, and electricity and even internet. Much as I would like a job, getting one so far has proven problematic.

hey don't hate on us with our 6 digit salaries

.

In all seriousness, it is not lawyers' fault that laws are complex and require expert advice. Society is complex so government has to make laws to govern them. With society moving forward, you expect more and more complex rules governing society. That's why you need full time professionals to figure out how to apply those rules to everyday activities. Lawyers don't make the laws. They help people follow the laws.

Tell me now, for example, how should I do an IPO in the New York stock exchange for a British company in compliance with the SEC acts and regulations?

Is that an easy question? No. Billions of dollars and millions of people's pensions (pension funds being biggest investors these days) are at stake. Of course you need rules to regulate stocks to make sure people don't get cheated. You need experts in that narrow area. They can charge you 1000$ a hour for this because you can't find many people on earth who can give you advice on this and make sure you don't get sued in the future. That's why lawyers get paid this much:

http://www.stblaw.com/sitecontent.cfm?contentID=24&itemID=256

Simpson Thacher believes it has the finest legal team of any global law firm and is committed to providing top compensation and benefits to its attorneys. First year associates presently earn a salary of $160,000. In recent years, all associates in good standing have also received a bonus at year end. To enable you to get settled comfortably, the Firm will advance up to $9,000 of your annual salary when you first join as an associate.

They get paid because others are willing to pay for the advice.

bushbush · Feb 2, 2012

Re: When £35000 a year is not enough.

Phier said:
If a city is very expensive to live in which London is, does it make sense for the government to pay people to live in that city? All that does is artificially keep expenses high. If you have no work, then you can't complain if you have to move to survive on the dole.

To an extent I agree with that. Perhaps the government should tie welfare to the ability to find work in the near future. That will give people more incentive to perhaps move to places where jobs are more abundant rather than staying in one place and wait for government money.

However, there might be a lot of reasons this person can't move due to physical or social or medical limitations. Perhaps this person can't find job elsewhere because of some unique circumstances. It is very hard to generalize these situations.

Kanaric · Feb 2, 2012

Unique circumstances should be what welfare applies to. Disability for example. Most do not have unique circumstances.

When £35000 a year is not enough.

When £35000 a year is not enough.

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