Friday 17 July 2015

"Half of your income now goes on rent"

From The Metro:

Young workers unable to afford their own homes are spending almost half their take-home pay on rent, a report reveals. The private tenants typically shell out £704 a month – 43 per cent of their wages...

Landlords put up prices by 8.2 per cent on average last year, the government’s English Housing Survey report shows.

Taking into account wage rises, the percentage of earnings spent on rent rose six per cent. Nearly half of 25- to 34-year-olds – 48 per cent – are now tenants, up from 21 per cent a decade ago.

The proportion of privately renting families has increased from nine per cent to 24 per cent.


It's worse than that.

Nearly half your earned income is taken in tax. The amount of Employer's NIC and VAT is nearly as much again as the PAYE you see deducted from your wages. Of the half that's left, nearly half goes in rent.

So broadly speaking about two-thirds of what you earn goes in publicly and privately collected tax (rent).

4 comments:

Random said...

From Flip Chart Fairy Tales blog:
"Does something about that sound familiar? It should do.

The financial product that such banks as Baring Brothers were selling to investors in London, Hamburg, Amsterdam, Paris, Philadelphia, Boston, and New York was remarkably similar to the securitized bonds, backed by mortgages on US homes, that attracted investors from around the globe to US financial markets from the 1980s until the economic collapse of 2008.

[M]ortgage-backed securities shifted risk away from the immediate originators of loans onto financial markets while promising to spread out and thus minimize the consequences of individual debtors’ failures. Investors who purchased latter-day mortgage-backed securities planned to share in streams of income generated by homebuyers’ mortgage payments.

Likewise, the faith bonds of the 1830s generated revenue for investors from enslavers’ repayments of mortgages on enslaved people. This meant that investors around the world would share in revenues made by hands in the field. Thus, in effect, even as Britain was liberating the slaves of its empire, a British bank could now sell an investor a completely commodified slave: not a particular individual who could die or run away, but a bond that was the right to a one-slave-sized slice of a pie made from the income of thousands of slaves.

The slave-backed securities of the early 19th century worked in the same way as the mortgage-backed securities of the early 21st."

Random said...

https://flipchartfairytales.wordpress.com/2015/07/14/the-financialisation-of-slavery/
Good blog (add to MW blogslist?). See latest post on gender pay gap and property addiction posts.

Derek said...

Agree with Random. I've followed that blog for a while and its author posts some interesting stuff.

Mark Wadsworth said...

R, D, yes, Flipchart is top blogger, I have added to main blog list (don't know why I didn't do that years ago).