When did you experience that in the UK? It’s something I have seen in TV programmes/advertising but not in real life. Admittedly haven’t lived there in a long time, but seemed to me that people don ‘t know their neighbours - let alone trying to keep up with them.
However your post made me try to decide which was my worst job. And I think it was being a fry cook on the early shift at the meat pie factory - I lost a lot of weight as 5.00am frying curdles the stomach.
Technically that is “per person” but AIUI a couple won’t be assessed as needing 32k€ a year, it seems about 20k€ is OK (but I can’t find an official reference).
I think we all should! 
I gather French vineyard owners are in financial difficulty, and being compensated by the government, because of a vast decline in wine drinking, mainly red. Partly because of less meat eating and partly because the young are not necking it as we used to.
Nothing quite beats a good bottle of aged red wine and a little choice of marvellous French cheeses with a fresh baguette.
Clearly, a reason my MT has just put me on 10mg Avorstatin
Oui! Oui!
Sorry, I didn’t make the point clearly enough above
each application is considered on an individual basis, and the combined pensions of a married couple, owning a home in France, and other savings and investments will also be taken into account
I shall have a look to see where it clarifies your important point about a couple….
Never noticed anyone, myself included, doing that. 
France operates with household income, so SMIC and a bit is seen as acceptable.
Quite, I haven’t found anything official as to how large the “and a bit” needs to be though.
Voilà!
The French Embassy in London have advised us that they will accept €2,000 as the minimum income figure for a couple.
Per month, obviously - 24k€ a year, so a little higher than I thought, but certainly a bit easier that Spain who want €27,792.96 plus €6,948.24 for each additional person.
But nobody is doing that, I think/hope they’d be put right sharpish if they were.
I doubt any of us do, and you’ve had a huge range of experiences that most don’t manage, so no reason to be worried about that.
Not having had a TV for more than 40 years makes the things I see on screen occasionally seem like they belong on a different planet, never mind a slightly shifted culture. But it doesn’t represent real life for real people, and perhaps that’s a part of the reason why the distant UK looks like it will implode
Ooh, I can provide some info on this as I spent 10 years working for a well known financial organisation 
Prior to the pandemic, over a third (35%) of households in the UK were living beyond their means and spending more than their income. Of those, roughly half had insufficient savings or some other buffer that would cover them for a period of a year. Currently there are approx 28 million households in the UK, each with an average of 2.4 residents… So we can say somewhere in the region of 23.5 million people in the UK are living beyond their means.
Now, not all of those will be living on credit. Some will have savings they can fall back on. But, there again, the figures don’t look good when you drill into them. The headline figure is that in the UK the average person has £17,365 in savings. However the UK is pretty bad when it comes to wealth inequality compared to its European neighbours (on a par with Italy, but at least it’s not as bad as Serbia). Of course the wealthiest in the UK have a lot more than that in savings, but 35% of the population have no savings whatsoever.
Talking of inequality, the wealthiest 10% of households in the UK hold over 43% of all the wealth. In comparison, the bottom 50% of households hold just 9% of the wealth. Let me repeat that - half of the country possess less than 10% of the total wealth in the UK!
Perhaps surprisingly, pensions now play a bigger part in people’s wealth than property… 42% of total wealth is in pensions versus 36% in property. This has been attributed to the increasingly lower levels of home ownership amongst younger people. Interestingly, 18 years is the time required for youngsters to save for a first-time buyer house deposit, saving at the average rate out of average UK income (at July to September 2022 rate of household saving). So I expect the value of pensions to people’s wealth to increase further.
Anyway, I digress… Back to living beyond one’s means. Total household debt in Great Britain was £1.28 trillion back in 2018, of which £119 billion, or approx 9%, was financial debt and £1.16 trillion, or 91%, was property debt, i.e. mortgages and equity release. By November 2022, the total household debt figure had risen to a whopping £1.83 trillion! That was an increase of £73.6 billion compared to November 2021. When the ONS’s figures are updated I expect things to be considerably worse due to the energy and cost of living crises facing many Brits today.
However, that figure is total household debt so let’s exclude property debt because it can be seen as an investment, and it’s not really relevant to this topic (although I do have plenty of opinions on the UK housing market). So let’s instead focus just on consumer credit.
At the end of November 2022, outstanding consumer credit lending was £207 billion, rising by £1.1 billion for the previous month alone. Within that, outstanding credit card debt came to £63.6 billion, which was an increase of 7.82% in the year to November 2022. Credit card debt averaged £2,290 per household and £1,203 per adult. Just to put things in perspective, the outstanding consumer credit lending in 2014 was £107 billion… it’s increased by £100 billion in less than 10 years!
Citizens’ Advice in England and Wales alone dealt with 2,120 debt issues every day in the year to December 2022. On average 8 properties were repossessed every day in July to September 2022 in the UK, or to put it another way, one home was repossessed every 3 hours and 9 minutes.
So, in summary, I agree with @Shiba that there is a significant part of the UK who is indeed reliant upon the easy credit facilities that are offered in the UK, and that this already huge problem is only going to get worse.
Thanks for the comment Gareth. My point - which I managed not to make clear 
- was about keeping up with others. I’d agree there’s massive living beyond ones means, but credit has been a part of the financial landscape in the UK that it’s seen as normal.
I’ve no doubt indebtedness is growing, and house prices are utterly crazy. It was always necessary to borrow more than you could afford to buy your first home, at least around London, but the lenders kept moving the borrowing limits which fuelled the boom & bust cycles for housing. But that’s all another story.
Ah, oops, I thought you were saying there’s not people racking up huge credit card bills. My bad!
Not me. Borrowing has always been risky.
Just to add that I was gobsmacked to see family members only paying the min repayment monthly on their credit cards and then immediately going out and spending that payment again, they still have huge outstanding payments to clear even now! That and store credit cards were also in abundance and I asked my niece why she needed them and the reply was that she wanted the latest names inthe fashion world plus updating her gadgets every few months so if that is not keeping up with the neighbours I don’t know what is and that phrase do not always mean the next door ones but others in the same social circle. My sister and BIL went bankrupt through people not paying their invoices and inturn they couldn’t pay the VAT bill for their business. They lost everything and now rent the house they once owned via a housing association but luckily they all have jobs and have dragged themselves back up, but it was the mantra of spend today, pay tomorrow that seemed to be the thing everyone was doing.
I think a lot of ‘keeping up with the Jones’s’ was the result of social climbing but ultimately the need to show wealth or success through physical possession. Certainly in the UK my husband and myself did the same, on the station platform at
Leamington Spa at 06:45 to catch a train for him to Wokingham in Berkshire and for me the train to Canary Wharf. Our normal return was 20:00 and then we would then zombie round the 24hr Tesco to buy a ready meal, eat it, watch an hour of TV and then do it all again. It was live to work, not work to live - the hamster wheel of stress and often unfulfilled existence. This awful lifestyle enabled us to buy ‘stuff’ as a way of trying to feel better about our lives, in reality it just meant things we didn’t need.
Thankfully now we are not on that cycle of misery and stress and consequently my husband’s mental state is much better (years of depression and extreme OCD, taken care of by dished out tablets and zero support).
You have reminded me of the Michel Delpech song Ce lundi là.
But I am sure you can choose your lifestyle wherever you live, it does not come with the country and it is not necessary to change country to change your lifestyle that although psychologically it may help you to make the break. I know people in the UK who lead stress free pretty idyllic lives and I know people in France who live the metro boulot dodo lifestyle.
Quand il est descendu pour acheter des cigarettes
Jean-pierre savait déjà qu’il ne reviendrait plus jamais
Il a pensé encore à toute sa vie avec Michelle
Et puis il a tourné enfin le coin d’la rue
Michelle aurait voulu le voir grandir dans l’entreprise
Mais lui n’se voyait pas finir ses jours au marketing
Avec dans son café les cours de la livre sterling
Et des enfants qui lui ressembleraient de plus en plus
Voilà pourquoi ce lundi-là
Il s’en allait
Voilà pourquoi ce lundi-là
Il s’en allait
Il savait qu’à huit heures la table serait mise
À côté de son assiette il y aurait ses tranquillisants
S’il fallait toutes ces saloperies pour arriver à s’endormir
Ce n’était pas la peine d’avoir trente ans
Et puis il verrait bien ce qu’il allait devenir
Mais il n’en pouvait plus de vivre déjà comme un vieux
Le but de sa vie n’était pas d’avoir un jour un compte en Suisse
Ce n’était pas l’argent qui lui manquait pour être heureux
Voilà pourquoi ce lundi-là
Il s’en allait
Voilà pourquoi ce lundi-là
Il s’en allait
Talking to my French friends (and having, in the UK, dismally failed to keep up with the Joneses!), it seems the French will happily allow the outsides of their houses not to reflect the affluence of the owner.
