Poor and hopeless

My wife doesn't much like the UK. There are a lot of things she doesn't like:

• The food. Pub food is generally overpriced and of quite low quality, restaurants are generally expensive, and we don't have lots of money to go out.
• The people. She is Japanese, and can't get used to the laissez faire attitude of Britons. There is just not enough care given where there should be, and the attitude of people is generally not what she would consider 'majime', or serious enough.
  
• The weather. Actually, I disagree with her there, which is quite incredible considering some of the weather-related disasters that have really disrupted my life here, but she doesn't like the rain, and cold, cloudy weather. Fair enough, but I grew up in Oregon, which is pretty much the same.

I remember suggesting some good things about Britain to her:

• The motorways are free and generally quite fast.
• The Indian food is good.
• There are many free museums in London.
• There are some really beautiful villages and countryside.
• Our son can learn English.

Alas, my arguments in favour of our adopted home, while she agreed with most, failed to change her mind. Her comment was something like "if the food, weather, and people are bad, what could you possibly say to change my mind?" Nothing, apparently.

To be honest, I have a significantly less judgemental, and more nuanced view of both the people and the food of Britain. I have lived in four different countries for significant periods, now, and if one went around saying 'everything sucks in this place', you would definitely be miserable. Exhibit 1: My wife.

My own feeling is that there are good things and bad things about this place, like anywhere else. I am not willing, for my own happiness and sanity, to come down on the side of "the bad outweigh the good in this place." However, there is one thing that I truly do not like about living here: Being poor. The taxes are applied in such a way that, if you were a married couple, and both working, earning £30,000 each per year, you would be about £6,000 per year better off than if just one were working and earning £60,000. That is £500 per month!

Even earning a good salary here, I feel really poor. Well, not only feel poor, but am poor: At the moment, I am £2 overdrawn, with 17 days to go to pay day. This is not the result of profligate spending, though of course I did spend some money on Christmas. It is the result of rising gas and electricity prices, as well as some weird timing: Our company pays out our December salary on the 22nd of December, which was almost 3 weeks ago.

I reduced my combined television, internet, and phone bill from £68 per month to £22. I sold back 9 annual leave days to my company for an after-tax monthly salary increase of about £90 (which is no problem, if you saw my blog post from Monday--I have already earned most of those days back as time off in lieu, and last year and the year before I barely used any paid holidays). I have done economising where it could be done. But I am still £2 overdrawn. Ok, sure, I am putting the maximum amount into company savings plans every month, about £350, which will hopefully increase in value, but are pretty safe to maintain value, and also avoid some of my income tax bill. By later next year, some of this money will be available, and I will hopefully be a little richer than I am now. Hopefully.

However, in this area, the area of hope, Britain does a woefully poor job of increasing the hope of people. It is interesting, people are pathologically afraid to utter positive or hopeful words in this country, and if such words should, by some miracle, pass their lips, they hurry to "knock on wood," that the utterance won't cause the thing they hope for to disappear. Talk about expecting the worst! I got a dose of, perhaps, why people may have this attitude last week:
I did my taxes several months ago, and calculated that the government owed me some money. The calculations were done quite carefully, and using formulae that the accounting firm hired by my company to do my taxes for the last two years had used. I received the incredible news, however, that they believed that I owed £2,000. They ignored an important aspect of my return, and one that I did in exactly the prescribed legal way, and sent me a bill saying that I owe this amount by January 31st, even though they can't give me a formal accounting of why I owe it by that time, because they are busy! I am still liable to a £100 fine if I don't pay it by then.
I won't say the U.S. is better, because I don't think it is. Japan is, though. Their tax authorities don't see it as their job to grab every last penny for the government, only to take what is absolutely necessary to provide essential services. It is much easier to hope there that if I do well it won't all be taken from me. It is also much easier (and cheaper) to not feel poor. There isn't the same sense that anything good that I might have, or that might happen, will be taken by a cynical government.

My wife wants to return to Japan this year. I have opposed that, at least until there is some payout on the savings that I have been doing in my company's plans this summer. I am not particularly money-oriented, but I have to admit that, the day after I finished working a 70-hour week, being overdrawn by £2 really sucks. This constant struggle is beginning to weigh on me, though. Maybe it is time to go back...