have been slightly on my mind as I looked through Lowfield to find out what Eddie had been up to last year and this. I noted that they seemed to have been living rent-free from 1st March 2015 until 26th September 2016.
This is what I have come up with about their living at Grange Farm and actually having to pay rent for it, so far.
Income
Joe and Eddie pensions total …£615 per 4-week month
Clarrie at min wage £7.50 for five half-days a week at the dairy, call it 20 hours a week, £150 per week …£600
Eddie’s two days a week at £100+ per day at the cattle market …£800
Eddie’s (loss making) scams?
Emma cleaning? on two days a week for Peggy
Emma tea and tat? six days a week with Fallon
Ed? contract work, whatever he can get
George: maintenance from Will
Joe gets a winter fuel payment …£300 pa
He also gets a free TV license, which saves them a bit
They won’t get full housing benefit but they would get a proportion?
(6 bedrooms; five adults, two children)
Outgoings
Rent (£1000 per month, someone said, but that sounded way too little for what they are getting; Keeper’s Cottage was £500 per month in 2000)
Food
Clothing, particularly for the children
Electricity
Heating
Water rates
Local tax on the house/inhabitants
Fuel for the various vehicles
Repayment of loan for Ed’s tractor
Food for the Texels
Vet bills for the Texels, possibly.
I have a ridiculously low figure of £800 pcm in rent in mind. Whether this is another barwick mondegreen, I dunno - they are certainly paying less than market rate.
Emma won’t be full time on the tea & tat, I presume but more full time than Clarrie. Doubt it pays well.
There’s the B&B income
There’s tax & NI on wages (even if it comes back in the form of tax credits)
The huge variables in there are Ed and Eddie’s incomes and the tractor loan, which can be made to be cost however much is needed to keep them on the brink.
They are Grundys and must struggle and be potless; therefore they are. Don’t expend too many brane cells on the problem.
I am not at all sure they use a landline: they all seem to use only mobiles. But yes, I agree that they probably have some sort of phone/telly/internet deal.
The rest comes under “toys, for adults and children”, I feel.
Eddie is probably making £2K-£3K a year from seasonal things Firewood, Turkeys, Mistletoe.
Maybe another £1K-£2K for the odd day, half day or whatever he does for David and Tony etc.
Over a year the income from those must surely equal out to at least another £80 a week.
Of course Eddie may never have paid NI contributions, it’s the sort of idiotic thing he might do. So no retirement pension for him, then.
Eddie got his state pension last year when he reached 65 years of age; Clarrie, because she is younger, won’t get hers until she is 65 years, 7 months, 25 days old, on 6th January 2020. (This figure may continue to change upwards: it has done so at least once.) He was born before 6th April 1953 so the new flat rate pension won’t apply to him; she was born in 1954 so it will apply to her.
I agree that Eddie must make something from the turkeys, but they also cost money to rear; I doubt the profit is high. In 2015 they sold for £1,200, and Eddie made a small loss on them. Selling stolen holly, mistletoe and Christmas trees as he has done in previous years is pure profit, though, you’re right.
He had been doing one milking shift a day for Brookfield for a longish time, but we don’t know how much they paid him for it and it may no longer apply with the shiny new cows which look after themselves…
There are two tabs, income and expenses and the difference between the two is shown at the bottom of the income tab, the blue one. If I change or add to the figures, the totals and difference will change too.
It’s viewable only as there are formulae in some of the cells. I’ve put in what Fanta mentioned above then made up some figures of my own, just guesses, so I’d appreciate some input, especially as I don’t live in the UK. Have I over-estimated their income and underestimated their expenses? Because as things stand there’s quite a bit left over and it’s hard to see why they’re struggling. Of course I didn’t allow for income tax. Let’s assume all of the income is post-tax income. I doubt they pay all that much anyway.
I haven’t included Emma’s factory work as she hasn’t started yet and in any case, it’s spent already (Rob said that to her rather nastily when he paid her for babysitting, turns out he was not far wrong).
The B&B is recent but I’ve included it as Eddie wants it to continue though I doubt it will! I don’t suppose they’ll get more than an average of two guests per month over the year though they may be getting more right now and I think they’re only charging £60 per night per couple. But I might be wrong about that.
So, let me know what you think, chaps, happy to add and subtract now that I’ve got the template sorted.
It’s too late at night here for me to feel competent to start tinkering, but – do we think that £125 per week maintenance for George is right? I am not sure. It’s more than we run the house for two on, after keeping records of everything spent on anything other than frivol-fun (board-games, hyacinth bulbs and suchlike) for three years to see how much we actually did spend (and having serious discussion about whether books were Necessary or Frivolous, I would add). The records go back to 2010, and the housekeeping seems to be right at £100.
That doesn’t include electricity or shoes, though. Those and the council tax under whatever name it is at the moment, and the water bill and the gas bill and the phone bill, come out of a different box, and anything to do with the cars comes out of a different one again, and so does house-and-contents insurance. But I don’t think those would be counted as part of George’s maintenance either. Apart from the shoes. Which in our case we have bought about three pairs of each since the accounts were started, and one of those was slippers at £7 in a sale at Sainsbury’s: George’s would be a lot more expensive, but I got the distinct impression that Will and Nic deal with that side of George’s upkeep anyhow.
I went to the government site and looks like the £500 per month was wildly wrong. Given the number of other children living with Will and given Georgie spends 3 nights a week at Greenwood cottage, I got Will assessed as the basic £29 per week. Quite a difference! I bet you’re right that Will buys shoes and expensive things for school.
Nightie night, I shouldn’t keep you all up with my new toy.
I was wrong about the shoes; I bought I think it was four pairs because they were comfortable and fitted, all at the same time, in I think it must have been 2013; but they seem to have been left out of the housekeeping record, so they must have been deemed frivolous, as opposed to the wellies (£10.99) in 2011, and the deck shoes (£37.50) in 2014 that I wear almost all the time and which were both thought to be in the Necessaries category.
I think the food bill will be higher - five adults and two children I would have thought £150 a week or £600 every 4 weeks. That allows for Joe, Eddie and Ed to have a few pints down The Bull.
I would have though the rent would be closer to £1200 - and even then, be cheap.
Higher than what, Useders? I’m not arguing with the figure that you offer, but I don’t think anyone else has offered one for food yet. The £100 here covers all the household expenses including washing powder and lightbulbs, not just food.
I have a feeling that the grain for the bird-feeder comes out of it, which is faintly absurd…
Beer at the Bull does not count as food, I reckon. It is recreation. No working household in the Grim Old Days would have included beer-and-baccy in the housekeeping: it came out of the pocket-money a wife gave to her husband when he handed over his wage-packet to her. One pint beer = food for five if you make a stew.