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This week it was reported that there are more working households than non-working households living in poverty in the UK. I'm sure many people like me have found this to be true and that it is quite possibly a knock-on effect of how we have been living our lives since the recession began. This is my story.
After buying our first flat in April 2008, the same week that the housing market crashed and and started to send everything into negative equity, things were a little harder but we managed: we budgeted, we paid our bills on time and life was not too much of a struggle.
When we decided to have our second child, we were aware that this would mean a shortened maternity leave and continued high childcare costs, but we were desperate for our four-year-old daughter not to be an only child. Sadly, that decision was the start of our real money troubles. As much as we love our gorgeous son, we have been struggling ever since he was born.
Maternity leave took its toll. Even though I promised myself I would go back to work at six months, I felt I needed a little more time with my son and lived off credit cards for three months. My husband paid the mortgage but could not cover everything on his wages. Of course, living on credit is not a wise move, but ask any mother how she feels about leaving her six-month-old child to go back to work.
But the necessity to do so is now a common reality. Many new mothers I know are not taking the full year's maternity leave because they just cannot afford it. This really puts an added strain on families and is an emotional burden for many women. I can completely understand why many want to wait until they are in a good financial position before they have children, but the last few years have made that extremely difficult.
We soon needed a bigger home, but we could not afford to buy one, so we leased our property and rented a bigger house. This meant higher rent to pay and huge deposits. With continued high living costs and no chance of paying everything off, I eventually had to agree to a voluntary IVA (individual voluntary arrangement) to help insolvents deal with their debt. No more credit meant reality struck home hard, costs spiralled, food was more expensive, childcare payments continued and I had no access to any financial help. With child tax credits or working family credits, many earn just over the threshold and are entitled to no help whatsoever.
In my role as a legal assistant, my salary has hardly changed. My husband is a self-employed builder, one of the worst trades affected by the recession. If he doesn't work, he doesn't get paid. In one particularly bleak winter, there was absolutely no work for him. He tried to claim some form of government help and was made to jump through hoops, only to be told that he wasn't entitled to anything.
So now we find ourselves with a flat we cannot sell (it is tied into my IVA). Even if we could sell it, we couldn't afford to buy another place. Until last month we were at a point where we had nothing left after paying our bills; we were struggling to pay childminders and worrying about affording the weekly food shop. My family have found themselves dealing with me in a depressed state because I can see no light at the end of the tunnel. I tell myself to be patient, that in three years I will have no debt, but it seems so far away. We have now moved in with one set of parents in the hope we can eventually start to save some money or, more realistically, just to have some money to live on.
We have both worked hard over the last decade and a half and now feel we didn't get anything back for the work we put in. Maybe we have been used to a relatively nice lifestyle, where we could give our children a holiday each year and buy ourselves new clothes, and maybe we should just accept that things have changed and we shall have to work solely to pay the bills, solely to survive. If this really is the case then is it any wonder I have fallen in a black hole, feeling there is no hope? I can imagine some people will be critical that I allowed myself to get into this position, that I relied on credit to help me through a difficult period but, had things been different, had the credit crunch not hit when it did, might things have been a whole lot better?
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