youthmoney

…the skills needed to balance a budget on an inadequate income – when there are no spare resources to cope with unexpected emergencies, such as household repairs, particularly without the benefits of credit cards or a bank account – are rarely considered. Frequently, reports suggest that families in poverty are bad at budgeting. The evidence [...]

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Good article by Ruth Smith in Children and Young People Now. It looks at the financial realities of five young women from a YWCA project in Kent. Good to see their stories, their voices and their weekly budgets.
Eighteen-year-old Cherelea simply says about her budget, “I still haven’t got the hang of it”. She probably speaks [...]

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The following incident from a new report on poverty and the media rings true. A woman points out how the media often know exactly what they want before they arrive:
Somebody came to the house. We had just had prawns. I had got them cheap. They [television crew] said that we needed to see us eat [...]

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It’s nearly a week since the Joseph Rowntree Foundation tried to start a debate about minimum incomes. It published focus group findings – the views of the general public who thought in detail about what was needed for a basic but acceptable standard of living. The best place for the detail is the Minimum Income [...]

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More than a fifth of young people in the UK live in poverty. Figures from a new study suggest that 22.7 per cent of 16 to 19 year olds and 20.3 per cent of 20 to 24 year olds are in poverty. The rates are on the high side, compared with 13 other pre-enlargement EU [...]

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People on low incomes tend to eat a diet which is….pretty much the same as the general population.
It used to be assumed that people on low incomes had appalling diets. A major survey carried out for the Food Standards Agency has found this not to be so. Their diet is slightly less healthy – but [...]

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….and another thing. What is it with journalists, poverty and Dickens? Purves makes self-mocking references to Gradgrind education. “Facts alone are wanted in life”, is the mantra of a joke school-teacher in Hard Times. She also, yawn, fails to resist the pull of the Micawber adage.
It’s a serious problem. Mention poverty and journalists’ minds fill instantly [...]

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