Early on in my challenge, someone asked me if I was going to give the money I’d saved living on £35 a week to charity. A short debate followed, about whether the point of the exercise was to raise money or awareness. In the end it concluded when I admitted that I didn’t know how much I usually spent (and therefore how much I would be saving), and asked whether the commenter would make a donation if I did.
But a rainy afternoon this weekend gave me time to consider how my £5 a day budget compares to the amount I usually spend. In the end I worked out, based on three of my not-entirely-randomly-selected bank statements from the last year, that I usually spend about £16.50 per day. This, like my £5 a day challenge, does not include rent and associated housing costs (council tax and utility bills) or regular donations to charity, nor the fees I’ve been paying to do my masters degree. It does include pretty much everything else: food, mobile phone, travel, clothes, going out, holidays, presents. In other words, for the last six weeks my basic disposable income has been less than a third of what it usually is. I think I do a pretty good job of living on the cheap normally – I don’t own a car or go on exotic holidays, I hate shopping and get most of my clothes from charity shops, and being someone who is vegetarian and mostly cooks from scratch, I probably spend less than average on food. So I imagine that I’ve found this challenge easier that many, if not most, British adults. (I’m basing this on the fact that, if I compare myself with averages for the UK population, based on the recent Hills’ Review of economic inequality, my weekly earnings come in at roughly the 45th percentile, i.e. 45% of the population have weekly earnings less than me; 55% have more (but bear in mind that I only work three days a week), while my individual income (net pay plus any benefits) comes in at the 65th percentile. Incidently, the Hills’ Review makes a pretty damning evaluation of the economic situation for refugees and asylum seekers – see p.248 of the report.)
What all this number crunching says to me is that asylum support is a pretty pathetically small amount of money to have to live off, even more so for any length of time. In case that wasn’t already pretty evident.
