Are you better or worse off financially compared to a year ago?

My take home pay hasn't changed, however as a civil servant I'm a year into a payfreeze. In real terms I've taken around a 5% cut. Hasn't changed my lifestyle at all but have been a bit more careful in boring stuff like sorting out home insurance etc, which I should've done anyway.

i'm more careful with my spending, but falling costs also mean i've a little more to spend

#3 and #5

I have a little more to spend, but only because my financial situation was near catastrophic for a couple of years.

(the real answer is I DON'T KNOW LEAVE ME ALONE AAGH *does the ostrich* *shoves bank statements under bed unopened*)

which has served me fine for a decade now so :/

Where can I find some of these falling costs?

I got a tiny raise back in August, but my wife changed jobs in Jan. 2011 and took a pretty substantial pay cut to move into what she hoped would be a better work situation. (It hasn't been, but that's its own story.) More significantly, I let her take over the household budgeting, which I was really making a hash of, and she's done amazing work. We retired nearly $14,000 in credit card debt in the last year, and we've still been able to spend on extras and eat out more than a little.

also public servant, took a nice paycut in 2009 and different taxes/charges since have prob seen takehome pay down about 10% in that time, and expenses/overtime has gone from c. 100 per month to 100 for the year

Much worse off, I'm totally rooked - combination of unforeseen downturn with work, plus everybody stopping paying their bills at once. Completely unanticipated. Tax payment due in a week and a half too, which is based on last year so it's touch and go.

We came *this* close to taking on a huge commitment last year as well, just before all this hit. Thankfully we pulled out, or it'd be catastrophic round here right now.

the 'benefit' of life insurance means that we are a lot better off finacially than we were a year ago.

however, i'd much rather be broke than having to watch my wife die of cancer.

Come the paychecks i'll get this month, i'd have paid off both overdrafts. So I'm in a better situation. That involved getting a second part-time retail job though (as opposed to this time last year when I was doing an unpaid internship that went nowhere but cost me a fortune in travel). I'm not going to have more to spend, as I'm looking at closing one of my accounts and using the money that went in there for a savings account, for when someone wants to hire me for a half-decent job where I want to live and i'll need to move, buy a bed etc. Voted 'i've a little more to spend'.

Holy shit, so sorry mark.

That's awful, I'm sorry mark.

(the real answer is I DON'T KNOW LEAVE ME ALONE AAGH *does the ostrich* *shoves bank statements under bed unopened*)

― irina-camelia begu (lex pretend), Thursday, January 19, 2012 9:26 AM (13 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

which has served me fine for a decade now so :/

― irina-camelia begu (lex pretend), Thursday, January 19, 2012 9:27 AM (13 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

my man

sorry for the mood killer folks.

this aint the thread for that groove at all.

without that nugget of doom then i would be ticking the 'i'm more careful .. ' option given that things are generally a lot tighter ..

i guess i'm prob about the same--got a good raise but then bought a new car so i would guess it just about evens out.

Now my optimism feels misplaced. :(

Sorry for what you're going through, mark. I've watched both my parents fight cancer in the last two years.

I'm sorry, Mark.

Being more careful with my spending. Upgraded my family's health insurance coverage for 2012, so my paychecks are going to be about a hundred dollars smaller. So I've started bringing my own lunch on most days, trying to avoid spending on myself, etc. I still feel fucking horrible about spending though. I was informed last Sept. that I'll be getting a promotion after they hire for a couple of other positions and unfortunately those other positions are taking forever to fill. Maybe in the first half of this year, guys? Please?

I'm currently dreading the upcoming series of gift-giving occasions. I've got valentines, wedding anniv., niece and nephew's birthday, wife's birthday, son's birthday, all in the next couple months.

Sorry Mark E

no sig change

sorry mark.

I unloaded 6'2" worth of uselessness in February and reduced my living expenses CONSIDERABLY so although there are very real checks and balances on my spending, tbh I feel like the queen of quite a lot. Mostly the extra largesse has gone to food, drink, and home decor. Also I have flown home THREE TIMES this year and all on my own dime, which in previous years would have been "0" or "1."

xp to beachville

Had two big weddings and three christenings for close friends/family this year and it meant a year of lurching from one cost to the next.

Gf went from student all last year to employed at christmas but it meant her moving away, which obv brings costs of its own

My own salary actually went up a fair amount last year, but my wife's been out of work for 5 months, so we're actually quite a bit worse off overall. Our rent's gone up 12.5%, public transport etc etc.

On the plus side we won a tenner on the lottery yesterday.

Your rent went up with 12,5%?! Is that even allowed?

It certainly isn't allowed here in Holland, I mean

Hahahahahaha

you rent went up at all is that even possible?

I'm significantly better off, because I went from being in school to having a good job. On the other hand, we're having a baby and my wife is not going to work for a while. So, somewhere in between the last two options I guess.

My MIL, a saint, paid off my $10K in debt and is letting me pay it back to her slowly without the ~20% interest I was suffering from hanging over my head. Bless. In addition to the payments to her, I started an automatic withdrawal to save $100 off every paycheque. Grand total savings thus far about $300, but it feels soooooooo good.
Also, our friends were pretty generous at our wedding so we have a few thousand tucked away in our joint savings account. It feels nice to be able to breathe again.

Got off lightly, looked online when he put it up and similar place round the corner is £300 a month than we pay, after the price increase. Rents have gone mental.

Got a life insurance cheque here too when my wife was diagnosed with MS a few months back, but Mark E's situation certainly puts that into perspective :(

That sucks, Colonel. Thankfully in Ontario there are rules that you can't really increase rent by more than 3% on a pre-existing tenant.

^^ which is what I meant, same here, same percentage even

You can increase the rent 3,000,000% here if you want. LOL capitalism.

Nobody can afford to buy, so there's a big market for renting, shortage of housing = landlords' party time. Which means landlords are rich and can buy up what's left of cheap property which keeps prices high which means nobody can afford to buy, so there's a big market for renting, and so on and so on

I hate this country

well, the factor we're free of here is a shortage of housing, meaning rents have dropped maybe 15% in my local area this year- don't get benefit off this as i rent the family home from my struggling dad lol

did u try to negotiate the rent increase? 12.5 is a lot outside of holland park & the like

i'll be able to answer this question on monday. but the answer's pretty much gonna be "worse off" i think.

all pales into insignificance compared to mark's situation tho. very sorry to hear it, mark.

What are we gonna do? Move out oh wait then we'd have to pay even more rent

xpost

I've moved in with my dad, not paying rent, increased my rates in August so I'm a deal better off. Not spending it on Veuve Cliquot though; saving like crazy against the next period of unemployment / return to the fertility clinic / mad house purchase.

counter-offer? they'd rather not have to pay comission on a new tenant

Significantly worse off. Mainly the last few months. Taxi hit my bike and travelling around London is ridiculous ££ at the moment. Also our rent went up £1200 so we've had to build more bedrooms to cover that :'(

New York rents are increasing to an insane degree due to supply constraints exacerbated by the mortgage situation.

well new york rents are inherently absurd due to supply constraints

I'm doing a little better thanks to more teaching jobs and a slight raise.

Now I've read the thread and I feel heartless for posting so blithely. Sorry for what you're going through mark and NickB, those are both really shitty scenarios.

We're paying $100 more than the prior tenants (which we negotiated down from $200 more, because I think we're generally more creditworthy and have more stable jobs) and what we pay for where we are makes most friends who haven't been in the market recently gasp, but I check listings regularly and it seems to be pretty standard right now.

My income and my basic living expenses haven't changed much in the past year, but I probably have less in the bank, thanks to wedding/honeymoon expenses.

I'm more careful with my spending, though now I'm an employee rather than contracting or consulting so at least the cash flow is steady and predictable but considerably less. Mr. Jaq is employed part-time on a grant funded program that ends next Friday, making exactly as much as he would on unemployment, which makes things tight but manageable. We go out much less, I take my lunch to work, I work from home as often as I can to keep the commute costs down (and my employer pays me extra to work from home!). I utilize the public library e-book checkout and use all those Amazon gift cards to buy groceries (they deliver here) instead of books.

I also got a loan through Prosper (I paid my first Prosper loan off several years ago now) and paid down an extremely high interest credit card. All told, I've dropped my debt by $20k in the past two years but still have a long long way to go.

No significant change. We spent a large chunk on the New Orleans trip, but had that money available in savings. I did get hit with NOLA, Christmas bills and quarterly estimated taxes all at once, which was kind of alarming.

better! first time in my life (including growing up) that i haven't constantly worried about money. i got a v v small raise, my husband got a decent-ish raise, and about 18 months ago, my husband got a settlement (only took 8 years!!) from a terrible accident he was in (where a lot of other ppl died), so we used that to pay off huge CC debt and new car. still have to budget, obviously, and still can't afford to buy a house or have kids, but it's nice to not be living hand-to-mouth, and be able to travel.

no sig change

Amazingly, I am significantly better off, though I really got lucky and I have this feeling that it could all end at any moment. But I'm also still spending less, biking instead of driving, doing a lot of cooking/eating in and Ebaying stuff. I spent so long as a broke grad student that it is in my nature, I guess. The upside is that I have paid off half of my $8k credit card debt in just the last 2-3 months.

a little worse but due to changes that have vastly improved quality of life so it's ok

a lot better off, which is one of the mainly positive things in life these days. this time last year i had no real security in my job, i started a new job in august that is pretty much there for me as long as i want it, and earning about 8k more a year. it does make a diff i guess, just nice to be able to make more plans and indulge interests a bit more.

public servant, so no pay increase in years. I did have a bump for three months last year, as I was covering two peoples' jobs, but ended up actually covering a third who didn't bother doing anything extra for his bump in the same period. Also, I spent all that money on gigs and cocktails. rent went up but I've efficiently cut down on meals eaten per week.

sorted three years of tax returns out (in a shambolic fashion that made one agent shake her head and get someone else to deal with me) though, so now have far more money than I've ever had in my life before, but I put it in a ne interest-bearing account and am ignoring it in case I get to take a holiday, or made redundant, this year

very sorry for mark's siutation.

More to spend. Also worked more in the past year than in previous and for more money. '11 was the year when I finally got smart and began charging clients what I was worth. Was able to save like an adult for once as well. Also, being pretty much debt-free after years of the opposite helped!

We've just had our phone disconnected for lack of payment, and our satellite will probably be turned off this month, too. We're hoping that my Mechanical Turk money comes in soon so that we can buy enough gas to get to the scrap metal place so that we can sell some of the copper that we've been hacking off of our mobile home. We've been feeding our dogs rice and leftovers because we can't afford dog food most of the time.

Still, it's better than what Mark and his wife are going through.

I don't know really. It is rather strange. We shouldn't complain, but still I worry terribly. Climate is very strange. But I would say worse off though that's not entirely true. But that's not it, I think some re-adjustments had to be made.

Mark, I really feel sad about reading your wife's cancer. I feel really sorry for you guys.
My grandfather is terminally ill - probably a couple more weeks. But then had a long (though very tough) life.
Cancer is horrible.

Having a tough financial year is nothing compared to cancer; Nothing.

better off, the weird thing about working in a start-up pre revenue is how completely decoupled from the economy at large you are (as long as you have no difficulty raising money). I've had two above inflation pay rises and pittsburgh being pittsburgh my landlord seems to be uninterested in raising the rent even though rents are going up in the neighborhood.

The nice thing about this bubble is I've hired 4 people for my team in the last 12 months and will probably hire 8 or so over the next 12 and this is only my team.

Of course this all goes away if we fuck this up and don't start selling stuff within a year or so. Trying to keep my debt down and savings up to guard against this eventuality.

I consider myself pretty lucky, a number of those I went to grad school with are un- or under-employed.

A fair bit better off I think - combination of payrise, decent bonuses and more holiday. I'm paying more in rent than a year ago but it's for a bigger and nicer place so that doesn't really count. I've been pretty lucky I think.

Also Mark E I'm really sorry to hear about your wife. Fuck cancer.

yes, sorry Mark E and NickB.

I can't say I'm actually being more careful with my spending but I am definitely feeling more guilty about not being careful. We're lucky in that we still have jobs and things aren't that tight but our pay has stayed the same and all our bills etc have gone up, and with an expensive Christmas and last payday on 20 Dec and the next one on 30 Jan I've been getting kind of afraid to look at my bank balance.

But, still feeling like one of the lucky ones given how many people I know lost their jobs and are either still out of work or took a lower-paid job at the end of the year when the big project I was on ended.

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

I'd be a bit better off if we hadn't put a new roof on the house a couple months back. With that, it's about a wash.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

I inherited a bunch of money from my dad but most of it is gone. I'm doing okay though, could be better. Home ownership is expensive! I spent all of that money, though, and am embarrassed about it. I am not in the habit of complaining about money, dad always backed me up when I was broke!