Tom's Economically Illiterate Guide to Poverty 1.0

Spurred on from this recent find whilst reading this LPUK article I feel I should try this tag also. I am married and the general plan each month is to drain one account and then the other; mine tends to empty fastest which is humbling to have to go to your wife for lunch money (but thank you so much sweety! X)


Here is the breakdown of my finances (as with Mutley this is all in English pounds, or lack of them):


My take home pay this month was (after tax) 1172.90


Loan (to pay for our bathroom which literally fell apart) 400.12


Gym £95 (a luxury I cannot stop till March. grrr)


Car insurance 56.23


Telephone/broadband 50 (variable)


Contact Lenses 18.00


Council tax 83.00


Bus/train pass 79.50 (and rising monthly, but it is still twice as cheap to get to work via bus/train than to fill my petrol tank)


Petrol 30 (for small journeys when buses cant be relied upon)


Which gives me on average £360 a month to buy food, drink and entertainment; my wife pays for the mortgage and utilities so between us we have approximately £600 a month. Once you get past the food bills and other outgoings it leaves sparingly little, but we are comfortable, and, more importantly, happy.


Like Mutley I too have to pay credit card bills monthly; these are mainly a result of unforeseen bills creeping up in addition to those that I pay (an example is our bathroom, which was refitted but the tiling materials weren't covered and I had to fit the flooring myself so we weren't walking on floor boards). I also live predominantly in my overdraft which I have never managed to claw my way out of.


I have paid 208.60 in income tax, 114.76 (which is effectively doubled by my employer) in NI contributions and, of course, I'm paying as our many others via many hidden stealth, dual and bastard taxes and VAT as is Mutley.


When I was a considerably younger man (in the interests of personal honesty I'll remove the "er" suffix to "younger" for now) I used to tell myself "I wouldn't mind pay MORE taxes if services covered the essentials". However, it was then that I discovered blogs like this and this that I realised that this was pure. wishful. thinking. (to Wat and Chris I owe a great debt on this matter. Kudos to you two).


Even though I have little money to spare I don't feel unhappy about this particularly, because I have this promised to live by:

For this reason I say to you, do not be worried about your life, as to what you will eat or what you will drink; nor for your body, as to what you will put on. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing?
Look at the birds of the air, that they do not sow, nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not worth much more than they?
And who of you by being worried can add a single hour to his life?
And why are you worried about clothing? Observe how the lilies of the field grow; they do not toil nor do they spin,
yet I say to you that not even Solomon in all his glory clothed himself like one of these.
But if God so clothes the grass of the field, which is alive today and tomorrow is thrown into the furnace, will He not much more clothe you? You of little faith!
Do not worry then, saying, 'What will we eat?' or 'What will we drink?' or 'What will we wear for clothing?'
For the Gentiles eagerly seek all these things; for your heavenly Father knows that you need all these things.
But seek first His kingdom and His righteousness, and all these things will be added to you.
So do not worry about tomorrow; for tomorrow will care for itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.

Matthew 6:25-34

These are comforting words for Christians the world over, undergoing persecution or not. So I try, and fail frequently, not to worry about money.

However, I am not the primary casualty of NuLabour; I have a fairly decent degree and an ok job and some decent experience in many different field.

It is people like this who are its primary casualties, and their children who are collateral. In my spare time I volunteer for my church youth group that deals with children with exactly the same story as this poor girl and exactly the same parents; you pay for people to behave like scum, act subserviently and keep voting red, and you get precisely that.

NuLabour has single-handedly managed to accelerate this rot which is why we see scams like this, why we see feral gangs knifing each other and innocents and why we see no one batting an eyelid at politicians and MEPs fleecing hundreds of thousands in taxpayers money without batting an eyelid.

And I would give every penny I have to change this.