random

Unfortunately this won't really be a poker post, so if thats what you are after reading, stop now and don;t waste your own time. :o)

Life is very tough ATM. With the wife still not working and with two children under school-age we are in a bit of a tough spot. We looked into her going back to work, but the costs of childcare (£35-£40 PER DAY, PER CHILD) would mean we would be looking at the best part of £350+ per week. Unfortunately the wife has always worked in Admin and Call centre jobs, most of which don;t really pay much above the National Min wage and as such she couldn;t even earn enough to get back to work. Sigh.

So we are painted into a corner and a tough one financially. Everything around us is rising in price very quickly, Diesel is flying up, insurance took a huge leap, gas and electric, water bill has risen, food costs are ridiculous etc etc. Most of you know what I am talking about.

Now, to add to all that the company I work for has been trying to lay people off, after lots of Union consultations it's been worked out that to save compulsory redundancies every worker will have to give up 1 paid day of work per month.

Don't get me wrong I want to save jobs, but this is gonna hurt even more.

I have also just found out that they will be taking the working tax credits off us because the threashhold for a household has been lowered from £40k to £26k, so I am now over this. We have no recourse, no chance to appeal this, it's just a case of tough shit.

It's going to be a very very tough financial fight for the forseeable future. Horrible feeling not being able to see an end to it either, especially with all the government options being just as shit as the other IMO.

So, at the moment we are feeling pretty tender and I guess it could be much much worse, but it's my blog and I felt like having a little moan about how all this recent economic shit is affecting me personally.

**poker alert**

if this had all happened a few years ago I reckon I could have put myself into a position where I could have easily subsidised our household income through poker, but these days even that has been squeezed to within an inch of it's life.

ok, sorry for that just wanted to have a little moan about shit.

Cheers

BM