Living the High Life

Well supposedly unemployed people are living the high life while hard working tax payers are struggling to make ends meet. If only this were so....

A bit of my history

Until September 2012 I had been in constant employment since I left school at 16 in 1997. After school I spent 3 years in the British Army, unfortunately I had to leave due to an injury. So I started working in the IT Industry, first as a technician, then as a software consultant. In 2007 after the messy end of a relationship, which left me without any mortgage payments I decided that this was my chance to further my education (at this point I only had GCSEs) and go to university. In September 2008 I start a degree (BSc Hons Environmental Science) at Bath Spa University. During my degree I had two part time jobs at the university. After leaving university in 2011 it took me a couple of months to find a job, this was my first taste of unemployment, but I had saved money and enjoyed the break. The job I found was a low paid 1 year fixed term contract graduate internship at Bath Spa University. In September 2012 this contract ended and despite having spend the 2-3 months before the end of the contract trying to find a new job found myself broke and unemployed.

I tell you all of this just to ensure that you know that I am not a lazy, self-serving, scum bag like the press and government try to portray all unemployed people to be.

How much money do you get on the dole?

Well currently both myself and my husband are unemployed (I wont be talking about his job search etc as that is his story not mine), we are between the ages of 28 and 32, and have no children or dependants, we are both able bodied and searching for full time employment, and we both have degrees.

We get Job Seekers Allowance (JSA) which is roughly £110 per week, this is the money we have to live on, we also get Housing Benefit (HB) which covers our £500 per month rent and Council Tax Benefit which covers our Council Tax payments.

So to pay all of our other bills and cover living expenses we have £110 per week.
We need to pay for:
- water
- electricity (our heating is electric so there is no gas to worry about)
- internet and telephone (we need this to find work)
- mobile phone (again necessary for finding work)
- food
- credit cards/catalogues (debts from before we lost out jobs)

We don't own a car or TV, or any other fancy shit like that. All the nice things we have were purchased and paid for when we were working, when they break, we wont be able to replace them.

Do you think you could cover all of this for two people on £110 per week? You'd struggle.

So if you think we are living the high life, think again and maybe read this blog.