Because you more or less have to be, otherwise you face so many problems you’re going to feel bludgeoned into going back into the corporate slammer.
We all sorta kind need to live somewhere. Now, my sister is a professional musician. As tends to happen, she married a fellow-musician she’d met on the circuit. For a while they lived on the outskirts of London, because that’s where a lot of the work is, freelancing (which amounts to living by one’s own efforts, not like a battery chicken). As rents rocketed, they tried to buy a flat. Of course that wouldn’t have been cheap either, but the point was they couldn’t get a mortgage. Supported yourself freelance for three years? Doesn’t count. Haven’t got a “steady” job with a proper employer? Sorry, no mortgage. In the end my brother-in-law felt forced to jack in the double-bass and go and train as a computer bod, and has been a proper wage slave ever since. Abracadabra, here’s the money. He’s changed jobs three or four times since then, and could of course have been sacked at any moment, but he’d showed willing, and thus is allowed a roof over his head by the banking dictatorship.
I have been up against the same sort of thing. (To recapitulate: I live on regular drawdowns from a redundo payment I landed eighteen months ago, and have thus neither salary, pension or benefits. That’s freedom, and nice non-work if you can get it.) I don’t even think about getting a mortgage, as it’s a foregone conclusion that no-one will lend me a bent penny. So I have to rent. This process is slowed by the need to take a joint decision with someone who couldn’t take a decision if you stuck lighted matches between her toes, but we got there, at least I thought we had until I discovered that she’d pulled out of it while I was in London last week. So we found another place, and I went along to do the paperwork.
“Who is your employer?”
“Don’t have one. I’m retired.”
“Do you have a letter detailing your pension entitlements?”
“No. My income is paid regularly from a bank in Germany.” (In order to fool my bank into thinking I have a regular income, I pay a regular monthly amount in.) “Here are three months of bank statements, as requested, showing the regular monthly payments.”
“Can you produce a letter saying where this money is coming from?”
“No. I transfer it myself. But if you like I can show a bank statement proving I have enough money to pay the rent for ten years.”
“That’s no good. You might spend all that money on something else.”
“Well, yes. But if I had a regular income I could spend all that on beer as well, couldn’t I? And if I had a regular job I could get sacked tomorrow.”
Blah, blah, blah.
“So do you mean that if you don’t have a regular income from some corporate entity you cannot rent a house? My present rental contract runs out in three weeks. Should I go to the council and proclaim myself homeless?”
More jobsworth blah. So I simply went across the road to the other agent whose house the Iron Buddha had decided against on flimsy grounds, checked that they weren’t going to be so bloody silly, and signed up with them again.
In the meantime, I remember deciding in 1981, to the horror of various acquaintances, that a regular job is a pointless waste of life and is for arseholes only, and I wasn’t wrong, not in the slightest. Three cheers for job insecurity, and in the meantime tax the buggers to fuck.
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2 comments:
The big mistake you made was taking the lump sum instead of the monthly payments option - had you taken the latter it would have looked nice as a legitimate pension.
OK, now just listen to you old mate for once. Get your arse off to the local joke shop and tell them that you are unemployed. The dole is now only paid for six months but it is still not means tested. You will get X amount per week AND your National Insurance stamp paid.
After six months you will not get any money, but you will get your stamp - and that you will need when you want your pension, OK?
Now then, get that CELTA that you have been talking about so at least you can earn money and don't have to use all your capital to live on.
By the time you have done all that the house prices should have tanked - buy a fucking house for cash.
Finally, just do all this and ignore your wife. Tell her to lump it.
Thanks. I didn't know that about the dole. Better wait till I've done the CELTA, I suppose - I'm doing it in July.
I didn't have a monthly payments option: that was only offered to over-50s. I was only 46, so it was assumed, ha-ha, that I'd want another job. So lump sum was the only gain in town, and it looked good enough to me, and would have done better if investments hadn't tanked somewhat.
Planning to buy a house next year if I still have the cash.
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