Living on the minimum wage

Following on from my earlier post where I mentioned how long I have to work in my minimum wage job each month, I thought I'd do a nice diagram rendering the same information.

This takes minimum wage to be £5.73, its gone up to £5.80 now. Also, the tax and NI that I pay seems to work out to be 15%, not sure why.

Again, I've run out of days to work by a large margin. Working more than a six day week is killing me.

So, what I need to do is somehow move somewhere where the rent is cheaper than where I am now, and also find somewhere to shift my debt to where the interest rate is a little more like the base rate.

Surely there ought to be huge competition between banks right now as to who can offer the lowest borrowing rates. There's this huge gap between the saver's rates and the borrower's rated as the banks recapitalise and maximise their profits, but someone could take a huge swath of the market by offering a rate just a little better than the rest.

Hmm, there probably are banks like that out there. I'd better look.

The other glaringly obvious thing is that I claim no benefits from the state. This would immensely ease my financial woes. The fact that I don't shows I'm either stupid, stubborn, or trying desperately to keep my integrity as a human being.

I like to think that the state takes money off me to defend the borders, maintain law and order, pick up the rubbish and fix the roads, that sort of thing, to beg them to return money to me is uncomely. Surely they should just be taking less of it from my earnings to begin with.