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Archive for the ‘Work & careers’ Category
Friday, August 19th, 2011
Fortunate fortysomethings can handle the recession; the price is being paid by people in their twenties
Are you in your twenties? Then you’re paying a colossally high price so that people in my age bracket – 40-plus – can enjoy a rather pleasant recession, thank you very much.
If you were born between 1980 and 1990, bad luck. You probably can’t find a job, as graduate unemployment heads to 20%, and school leaver joblessness approaches 50%. If you do land a job, your wages won’t get you far. Your train fare to work is going up 8%. Need somewhere to live? Rents are hitting one new record high after the next, up 7% in London over the past year. Any spare cash? Save it for the gas bill, up another 15%.
How about buying your own place? Forget it. As Britain’s biggest firm of valuation surveyors revealed this week, mortgage approvals for those on low incomes are becoming virtually impossible to obtain. The idea is that once you’ve been clobbered by stupid rents, train fares and bills, you’re supposed to save up for a 30% deposit if you are going to qualify for a loan. Oh, and pay off a £20,000 debt (soon to be £60,000) from university. Fat chance.
Now let’s look at it from the standpoint of someone in his forties. The generation who didn’t pay to go to university. Who were able to buy a home at bargain-basement prices in the mid-1990s. Who have, for the most part, kept their jobs through the recession. And who now are basking in ultra-low interest rates on their tracker mortgages. For many, it’s been the same as a £500 a month pay rise. Even better, those rates are going to stay low. Thank you, Ben Bernanke at the Federal Reserve for telling us that rates in the US will stay at virtually zero through to mid 2013. The Bank of England will follow suit. It’s why mortgage rates this week hit a record low. But even those record-low five-year fixes won’t tempt me, not when I and many others can joyfully carry on with our juicy sub-2% tracker deals.
The truth is that if you’ve kept your job and have a tracker mortgage, this recession has barely touched the sides. It was like this in the 1930s, too. Yes, there was Jarrow, but if you kept your job, many people never had it so good.
The generation in retirement today don’t quite see it that way, complaining about paltry returns on savings, steep council taxes and soaring household bills. But at least many of them are still on final-salary pensions. The idea that today’s young will retire on a guaranteed two-thirds salary is fanciful in the extreme.
What do we do about this lost generation? Nothing, it seems is the answer. The chancellor, George Osborne, thinks that lopping the 50% tax rate for the rich is the way forward, his ideal society one of the have-yachts and the have-nots. Meanwhile, the likes of my generation and income are snapping up house alarms and window bars as our cities become ever more fearful places.
I would be the last person to condone the hateful criminals responsible for the mindless destruction I witnessed in my part of south-east London. But if we step back a few paces, and consider how we are abandoning that far larger, law-abiding, younger generation, we should be ashamed of ourselves.
Posted in Consumer affairs, Editorial, Family finances, Graduate, Guardian careers, House News, Money, Property, Recession, The Guardian, UK news, Work & careers | Comments Closed
Monday, July 18th, 2011
A jobcentre worker hit the wrong button, bank charges sent me over my overdraft limit and more trouble from the landlord
Part three Diary of a tenant: enter the landlord
A red-letter day looms. Finally I am due to be paid some jobseeker’s allowance, and so I set off to buy some food (the cupboards are actually bare). First I check my balance. Some money was credited, but more was taken out. It’s bank charges.
I then realise that what has been credited is not jobseeker’s allowance but a portion of housing benefit – or local housing allowance, as it is now known, and the reason defies belief. Frantic phone calls ascertain that “Somebody forgot to press a key,” when I signed on, and so my payment did not go through. At the jobcentre, stoic staff do what they can. I mention the bank charges, and one adviser suggests moving my account and complaining. Inwardly, I consider offering staff lessons on pressing the right button, but hold my silence.
The surrealism continues. Another letter, this time from the housing benefit office arrives, stating that they have stopped my claim after one week without explaining why.
I visit the office, and queue. Nonchalantly, the desk attendant produces a handwritten letter, which arrived a while ago. It is from “Bill”, my landlord, who makes inflated claims about the rent he insists I owe. He says it’s 12 weeks. I say it’s seven.
At the end of my tether, I patiently point out that the dates in the letter are not covered by my claim, and that I was not even eligible to claim at that time because I was a student. They agree it’s not their concern. Nevertheless they are “investigating”, and have put my claim on hold.
Why has Bill assumed I was signing on for all that time? If a tenant is more than eight weeks in arrears with rent, then benefits are stopped. I am not in that position, but in this topsy-turvy world, if they don’t pay me, I soon will be.
Next I visit the bank, to inquire about the charges (I’ve been waiting to be paid for some work for ages, and couldn’t cancel a direct debit in time). They are rude, and when I ask politely for a refund, they restate that I was given notice of the charges. They have charged me for going overdrawn when the overdraft was caused by their own charges.
Eventually the counter clerk repeats: “That’s all I have to say. That’s us done now.” .
I have no money, no food and no phone credit. Fortunately, a friend calls later and learning of my plight buys me pizza.
One week later my missing jobseeker’s allowance is paid, but I don’t know what to do about Bill’s housing benefit letter. Another notice of inspection arrives: he’s due next week, and I decide, reluctantly, to tackle him in person.
Meanwhile, I calculate exactly what I can afford to buy in the way of food. I make excuses to avoid meeting people for coffee or drinks. Walking between the various offices, I realise that the heavy rain is now flooding into my last pair of weather-proof shoes.
Posted in Borrowing & debt, Communities, Editorial, Family finances, guardian.co.uk, House News, Housing, Housing benefit, Job hunting, Money, Property, Renting property, Society, Work & careers | Comments Closed
Friday, July 15th, 2011
Location, Location, Location presenter, Kirstie Allsopp, made the most of an early lesson to build a successful career
I worked for Country Living magazine as an editorial assistant, the lowest of the low, earning about £12,000 a year. I had a mortgage at a time when interest rates were 15% so I could only afford to buy a pizza and a lipstick once a month when I got paid. They were my treats.
At the end of my four years at NatMags, which published Country Living, I discovered I had made a major mistake with my finances. I had already handed back my annual season ticket for London public transport, so I was paying for the bus in cash one day. The driver asked me where I wanted to go and I said Chelsea Bridge.
He asked me which side of the roundabout I wanted and when I asked why it mattered, he said because one side was zone one and the other was zone two. It was then I realised I’d been paying for two zones to get to work for four years when I only needed to pay for one zone. That’s a round-trip to India. I could have walked a bit further, not paid the extra and gone to India instead.
Another mistake turned out better. It was after the NatMags chairman noticed me when I entered a go-karting competition that was meant for advertising staff only, even though I was in editorial. I came second out of the whole company and the chairman said to me that anyone who could drive like that shouldn’t be in editorial, so he parachuted me into classified advertising.
I moved into classified sales just as the entire advertising market was crashing, I think this was 1994, and it was so tough. I had to make a certain number of calls every day, I couldn’t have long lunches, I had to come in on time – it was a totally different world to editorial. On the surface, it seemed as though I had made a massive mistake. But, actually, I learned more than I ever thought I would. In the first week, although I was unhappy, I told myself I had to stick with it for a year – and the toughness of the job taught me about how to work hard and not give up. This lesson has helped me throughout my career.
So my thing is to say that sometimes your biggest mistakes can lead to your greatest successes. It is totally true that you learn from your mistakes.
Posted in Channel 4, House News, Interviews, Media, Money, Property, Television industry, The Guardian, Work & careers | Comments Closed
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