Tag Archives: unemployment

Why Is It So Hard To Get Benefits In The UK?

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It was back in the early 80′s when a colleague said to me “there is only one way to get anywhere in this world, and that’s to be a one legged black Jewish lesbian!“.

He was right of course! It’s the minorities that are eligible for benefits in the UK, not the ordinary people like you and me, who do everything the ethical way, but qualify for nothing.

Two weeks ago, having waited eight weeks to find out that I wasn’t eligible to receive job seekers allowance (unemployment benefit) since I hadn’t worked in the UK since I moved to the USA 15 years ago, I was advised to apply for Income Based Benefits instead. Well, since Debbie works full time, we don’t qualify for that either as I found out today! It doesn’t matter that she doesn’t earn enough to support us both, and barely managed to support herself on her own, the fact that she has a full time job pretty much nullifies our request. The online form did say that we might qualify for £103 ($150) between now and the beginning of April!  That’s about £4/week which is ridiculous.

It just seems really wrong, when on Debbie’s income we are forced to shop for the lowest prices and to live very frugally just to not run out of money at the end of the month, when there are so many thousands of people in this country who haven’t done a day’s work in their lives.   There are whole families now where the kids have no interest in studying for their exams at school.  Why?  Because nobody in their family works or has ever worked.  Their brother and sisters don’t work, neither do their parents, grandparents, uncles aunts or cousins.  They all live off benefits, and are doing much better financially than those who do in lower paid jobs, so why study at school if you have no intention of working either.

This country was no different 20 or more years ago when satellite television first came out.  Who were the first people to get the service?  The ones that were living in council houses, property owned for by the government and with their rents paid for by the government.  So, living for free, with unemployment benefits and free this and that, you could see the proliferation of satellite dishes growing weekly, whereas if you looked at other properties that were owned or rented by people that actually worked, it took years before they could justify buying the service.

The same is true now as well, who do you think buys most of the large high definition televisions in this country and a lot of other expensive items?

The UK benefits system is also geared up to provide support for immigrants and refugees.  If you come to this country with nothing, that’s ok, the government will provide you with a new house or apartment, money for food and other benefits, but the citizens and tax payers of the country qualify for pretty much nothing at all.   It’s downright disgusting, and while I don’t like the idea of having to claim benefits, both Debbie and I have worked hard all our lives, and when it comes to whether we qualify or not, I think we deserve something at least!

I know it’s a lot different in the USA, you get paid more in benefits, but it stops after 6 months (or 12 at the moment under some conditions).

I think the people over here who don’t do a day’s work ought to at least do something to earn the right to get benefits.  Maybe then some of them would want to find a job.  I don’t see why they can’t be made to do a number of hours of community service, cleaning the parks, trimming bushes, stopping cemeteries from getting overgrown, removing graffiti etc, all things that need doing and that the local authorities don’t have the money for.

Well over to you, what is your opinion on the benefits situation in the UK?  We would both be interested to hear other opinions.

Eight Weeks, No Job, No Benefits

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Well after six weeks of extreme frustration of waiting for my job seekers allowance (unemployment benefit in the UK) and in particular the last three weeks when my case was supposed to be sped up, the news isn’t good…

Thursday I heard that at least I passed the Habitual Residency Test, meaning they agree I am a valid resident of the UK,  however I had a call this morning to say that because I hadn’t paid in any contributions while I was in the USA, I don’t qualify for any contribution based benefits.   Damn!   I might however qualify for income based benefits, based on Debbie’s income, but I am sure that’s not going to go in our favour either.   Her earnings are not great, but they are borderline when it comes to receiving benefits.

I have an appointment tomorrow morning, where I have to fill out another set of forms and no doubt do another lot of waiting to see if I qualify.  It’s not good…

Unlike many of these people who are claiming for anything and everything, I just want a JOB!  I need money to survive as well as to cover my commitments.

Yet again, my life turns out to be more than a little complicated…

Wish me luck for the interview tomorrow…

Of course when it comes to job hunting, so far I haven’t seen a single job that I am well suited for, despite my years of experience in IT.  So not a single interview or solid bite so far over the last eight weeks.  After so many years in a successful career, it brings you down when you feel that nobody wants you.  I just keep hoping that any day the perfect opportunity will come along, with the right location, hours of work, and also the right benefits…

Five Weeks Back In The UK And No Work

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Well it’s been five weeks ago today since I left the sunshine of hot and sticky South Florida and returned to the UK to be with Debbie.

It’s true that we have had some nice days where the sun has shone, there have been blue skies, and it’s been a pleasant 70 degrees, but there have also been quite a few days where the temperature has barely climbed above 65 degrees all day.   Sunday was grey and gloomy all day, from the time we got up until the time we went to bed.  You can’t really say until the time it got dark, because it never really got light!   Monday started off the same, but it turned out nice in the afternoon, and we were able to have a BBQ and sit outside in the sunshine.   Tuesday was mixed and also breezy.  We went to Calshot, which is across the other side of Southampton water, and had a good walk along the beach (well pebbles).   But today has been another one of those grey gloomy days, most of the afternoon it’s been spitting with rain, and the last two hours it’s been blowing a gale and pouring down.

The schools go back at the end of this week, and Debbie heads back to work tomorrow after six weeks off.  We wonder where summer went to, but although we haven’t had the money to go anywhere and spent anything, we have had some wonderful local walks and done some good exploring of the local countryside.  That’s something we both enjoy a lot, and I have a lot of posting to catch up on, with plenty of photographs to add as well.

As soon as I came back here I signed on at the job centre to claim unemployment benefit, but so far I haven’t received anything.  With so many people out of work over here, the offices are backed up, and with my having just come back from the USA it hasn’t made things easier either.  I hope to hear back with a positive result within a week, as my money is almost gone, what bit I had left over here, and Debbie only earns enough to barely cover the bills and food.

Of course I have registered with all the internet job search sites, but they all pretty much return the same jobs, and nothing has really matched my skill set yet.   I would like to add a commendation for the one recruiter who I found through Linked-In, and who took the time to call me while I was still in Florida, as well as to check up on me at least once a week here, providing tips on potential job openings in companies where he didn’t have a contact, as well as working hard to find a place for me within his clients.    If you are looking for an IT job in the south of England, particularly if you are working with IBM Midrange systems, I highly recommend Adam Langley-Smith of Required-IT to handle your job search.

Meantime, I am trying to decide what to do, trying to figure out how I can earn enough money online to keep us afloat, and there are so many ideas, but the hard part is to know what to do and in which direction to turn.   I thought of looking at ghostwriting (writing articles for other people – they get published without your name on them), but I would really love to be able to write under my own name.   I would love to write a book, but I can’t think where to begin, I need a plot, and the worst thing is that this could take a year or more before I got published, and then the book might never be successful anyhow.

I keep trying to be realistic, since my IT skills are in need of some re-tuning, but still I am hoping that something will come along.

Tomorrow will I hope bring some good ideas, since Debbie goes back to work, and I have more time to myself, time to devote to writing, promoting, and to trying to earn a penny or two.    I would really love to have some good money coming in soon, as we had planned to spend Christmas in Florida so I can see my two daughters, but if I don’t get a job, that isn’t going to happen.   There is always the Lottery of course, or the million to one chance of a benefactor leaving a donation in the Tip jar on the blog, but I don’t realistically expect either of those to happen.  Just have to get lucky and get a good paying job.

So farewell summer, welcome to my new working life, trying to make it by writing and blogging.   Wish me luck…

Adam Langley-Smith

Adjusting To Being Unemployed

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I have to admit that it was a huge shock when I found out that I had lost my job in mid February, not only because I needed to be employed to ensure I had enough money to cover my living expenses, but because this was without a doubt the worst time in my working career to be looking for a job.   The recession in the USA was starting to hit hard, few companies were (and still are) hiring new people in the IT field, and so for the first week or so I was pretty much in panic mode.

For those of you who are new to my blog, I hope that you enjoy the articles that Debbie and I write and will subscribe to them, either via RSS feed or email.  We are also both on Twitter (Tony / Debbie) and you can follow us there.   Our lives are complicated, with me living in South Florida while Debbie lives in the South of England.  I am divorced with 2 young girls who live 30 miles from me, and child support for them takes a good proportion of my income every month, so obviously losing my job came as a great shock.

For the first few weeks at least, despite my alarm having been turned off, I would still wake up at 6:30am automatically, which really frustrated me as I didn’t need to.  I also wasn’t sleeping too well, waking frequently during the night, and with working to update web sites, my resume and to get my affairs in order until late every night, I was exhausted.  Finally I managed to get into a better sleeping pattern as things settled down.

With the prospect of getting another job in the field that I work in (I am a Senior Analyst/Programmer specialising in JDE World Software – an integrated system now owned by Oracle that is used by larger corporations) being slim, I decided that one thing I ought to do while unemployed is to try and do my best to make a living online.   I figured that if I can earn more money online than I have been doing, and ideally earn enough to make a living, then the future would look a lot brighter.   IT used to be a great field to work in, but in the last 10-15 years the rate of pay has actually decreased, and most companies don’t offer good benefits and definitely no job security these days.  Anything I can do, especially as I am getting older, to get out of this dying field, is a good thing.

Well after a few weeks I managed to sleep better, and right now I can guarantee to more or less wake up between 7:30am and 8am most days, sometimes even later.  The problem now of course for me is how to be productive.  I am unemployed right!  So I have all day to do what I need to do.  Well it’s really not as easy as it sounds.   Let me give you a run down of a typical day for me…

7:30am-8am – Wake up.

8am – Check email, web stats, minor web updates, shower, breakfast.

9:30am – Get some work done.

11am – Debbie comes home from work (4pm in England).  Chat on webcam for a while, work on web tasks together.

12:30pm – Feeling peckish, grab a bite to eat.

1:30pm – Take a sauna/steam and have a swim.

2:30pm – Chat with Debbie.

3pm – Get some work done.

5pm: Goodnight chat with Debbie (10pm in England).

6pm – Grab dinner.

6:30pm – Get some work done.

8pm – Take a walk.

9pm – Watch tv / get work done.

11pm – Off to bed.

As you can see, I get some work done, but in short bursts, and in reality I barely have more than an hour for each burst before I am distracted by something else, like the phone ringing, or new emails coming in.   I am determined to try to get fit and lose weight, so my daily sauna/swim is very important to me, especially as I am living in a community in South Florida where we have a nice pool and sauna, plus the weather is on my side most of the time.  So I don’t want to give that up.  I also need to chat with Debbie, as it’s important to us both, and it’s really hard to be so far apart for months at a time.

The solution is to try and do something to reorganize my days so that I can make better use of them.  I started today, not too successfully, but this is my new plan…

7am – Get up early, quick look at email etc.

7:30am – Take a walk.  I live in a community built around a golf course with several lakes, and walking around the block is 2 1/4 miles.  I also live on the 7th floor of a condo block, and walking down the stairs, around the lake, back up the stairs took 36 minutes this morning, one of my fastest times.

8:30am – Shower and breakfast.  A nice cool shower to clean off, then a healthy breakfast, either something like Raisin Bran or Oatmeal with a Banana, and Orange or Grapefruit Juice.

9am – Get some work done.

12am – Chat with Debbie.  Both of us waiting until 5pm over there in England to chat, so we both get more done.

1:30pm – Lunch, Sauna and Swim.

2:30pm – Back to work.

5pm – Goodnight chat with Debbie.

The evening I can’t do much about, since I want to take my evening walk, and I go with Tim, who I rent from.  It’s a lot nicer walking with someone, and I time the walk to fit in with his schedule.  Fortunately we now have the ability to record television shows automatically, which is wonderful as it allows me to still watch my favorite shows, but frees me from having to worry about when they are on.

The best thing about getting up early and taking a walk is that I feel really energised afterwards.  Doing this early is best in Florida as it soon warms up down here, but it also means that I have worked out by 8:30am and an ready to go and get stuck into my tasks for the day, instead of feeling sluggish having just got up and not done anything.

As far as looking for a job, these days jobs in IT are mostly advertised on the internet, and so I have various searches activated on sites like Monster.com and Careerbuilder.com which send me emails of any new jobs.  Also having my resume active on these sites, the headhunters come to me when they have any openings, but inlike other times when I have been looking for work, this time there are precious few jobs going for people with my qualifications.  In the last week I have found 3 jobs – one in Pennsylvania, one in Texas, and today one in Los Angeles, today’s being the only one that I would say I am well qualified for, and none in any location that I am happy to relocate to.   I don’t see things improving any time soon.

My working day consists of writing articles on here, The Laughline and Squidoo, plus promoting the same on Tagfoot and Stumbleupon, as well as other sites.   As well as posting links, I am actively researching for new ways to promote and cross link my sites, to improve traffic and also affiliate earnings.   Some days it’s good, but the last week traffic has really slowed down unfortunately, and I don’t know why.

If you have any comments on how to better organise my time, or on how you organise your time I would be pleased to hear from you.  Also if you have any suggestions for better marketing my blogs to get better traffic I would like to hear.  I am always open to cross linking to other related sites, and there are many other blogs out there that I would be pleased to swap links with.  Don’t forget that you can use the Share button at the end of this article to subscribe to our feed, and if you can Stumble, Digg or Twitter this I would be grateful.

The Unemployed In The USA Suffer

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It’s tough losing your job at any time, but as you get older and your skills maybe are older it gets harder to get another job, harder to retrain, and like so many others you could be in a position where the cost of being unemployed could affect the future of your family, not just yourself.

Take someone like myself, who has been unemployed for just over two weeks.  I have two months of severance pay coming, but with the economy in the state that it is in, chances of finding another job are slim.  Not only that, every time I look for another job, there are fewer positions open for my skills.  Companies don’t want to train you, they want to hire someone who has all the knowledge to do the job required.  So, unless you can gain those new skills, you can’t get one of those positions.

Problem is that this is a Catch-22 situation.  You could take a course and learn something new, but before taking the course you should really know something about the system.  Having taken the course, you need to work with the system to put your learning to use and to fully understand what you learned.  Without a job you can’t do either, and few employers will take on someone who has taken a class and nothing more.  Classes are expensive too!

Unemployment benefit would be enough to pay my rent and for me to scrape by, however I have two young daughters who are in Catholic school because the local middle schools are awful.  Literally the reputation of every single middle and high school in the area is really bad, so the last thing I want to do is to take them out of private school, since that would affect their future.  This is just one example of the way being unemployed affects the whole family.

Health care is another factor.   Most white collar workers get health care provided through the company that they work for, with the company paying 80% of the cost.  However, once you lose your job, your health care is only paid up to the end of the month, and after that you have the option of paying COBRA, basically retaining the same health care plan, but covering the full cost yourself.  With the company I was working for, I would now have to pay 102% of the total cost per month, which would be in excess of $500.  That’s just for ME!  If I had to pay for the whole family, it would be just under $1,000 a month to provide health insurance.

Now isn’t this just crazy?  At the time you really need cheap health care, because you have no money coming in, you have to either pay more than the total unemployment benefit ofr the month, or go without any medical coverage at all.  Doesn’t this seem just backwards?

In the UK at least there is the National Health Service (known as the NHS), which is funded through National Insurance payments (the equivalent of Social Security).  Health care (apart from Dental Care) is completely FREE, so you can go see a doctor, get surgery etc, without having to pay a penny.   Of course this does come at a price, since the NHS is under funded, and so if you need treatment and it’s not deemed to be urgent, you could be on the waiting list for a year before anything is done, but at least it’s FREE.   Many companies in the UK do offer a subsidised health care plan similar to the USA (BUPA), but when you need to fall back in hard times, the NHS is there at least.

This past two weeks I have had to catch up on all the things that I did not do while I was employer, getting my eyesight checked, a full checkup, and having a dental checkup too.

Although my vision exam was free and covered by my medical plan, there was a deductible and of course they only pay so much towards frames, so that set me back over $100 for a pair of glasses (my first – not bad to get to 54 without having glasses, although I did really need these 5 years ago!).

Then the doctor.  My exam was free, but other things I would have liked to get done would have cost, so I had to fore-go those.

Finally the dentist.  Well my exam was free, however my dental plan only pays 80% of the cost of fillings, and only 50% of the cost of crowns, so again having to get a tooth I broke two years ago crowned cost me close to $400.   Then I had a cleaning, which is supposed to be covered but not fully.  The hygienist  found two pockets of decay, and recommended I have this antibiotic injected to help treat them.  Of course the dental insurance doesn’t cover this (surprise), so there I am for the cleaning and treatment another $180 out of pocket.    I get home and look up information about the product, Arestin, and find all over the Internet articles where dentist have recommended this unnecessarily just to get extra money, and supposedly the effect it has is possibly not worth the money.  Oh great!  I could have saved myself $150 of what I have left to help see me through until I can earn again.

Well one thing you have to do when you are unemployed is to tighten your belt and to budget hard to make the money last.  I have been doing this for a while now as it is, and this I think I will leave to another article.

So what is your opinion of the health care industry in the USA?  I know President Obama is trying to change things, but I would be interested to know your opinion on what should and could be done, and also I would be interested to hear about your experiences with the health care industry.