I am going to start this by going back and giving you a brief history. It may well come across as arrogant and me showing off but I am simply looking back with fond memories and pride, something I have very little of these days.
I moved out of the family home at 19 and into my first flat. Less than a year later I was working 3 jobs and I bought my first house (with a mortgage of course). I moved around a lot making healthy profits on homes I lived in and found it was a good way to make money and only have 1 job. Soon enough at the age of 26 I owned almost outright a 5 bedroom town house. Big and impressive but unfortunately I had not researched this one well enough, it was in the biggest hell hole of Milton Keynes. I lost a LOT of money selling it to escape, quite frankly, with my life.
I found myself in a small 1 bed maisonette in I quote "the nicest place to live in Milton Keynes". Somehow my motorcycle still got stolen there and police cars were a regular sight.
It was sometime in 2007, a year after moving to "the nicest place in Milton Keynes" that I started to fall asleep at work. This progressively got worse and worse and I honestly just thought I had worked myself into a slump and needed to rest for a while, especially to stop moving house (11 times in 6 years).
Fast forward to 2010 and I was diagnosed with M.E/C.F.S which at that point was pretty debilitating and getting rapidly worse.
I lost my job in 2011 and could not find a job as I quite literally couldn't get out of bed. Stupidly I had no sickness protection on my mortgage so things started to go bad.
I eventually sold my flat in January 2012 and moved to Dorset for a quieter life for some R&R. I had booked myself into a B&B as I couldn't manage to secure a place to live due to not being able to travel, I was going to rent as I had used up most of my savings by not getting onto the benefit system as I thought this was a short term thing. I thought it would be easy....
I very quickly (if reluctantly) got onto the benefit system and was told to pop back for housing and council tax benefit when I had found somewhere to rent.
At least 50 estate agents and private landlords refused to rent to me because I did not work, even though I was offering 6 months rent in advance, happy to sign a 1 month rolling contract and give a hefty deposit.
I went to the Council for help with getting on the council house register... apparently there is none "for someone like me", I felt like an illegal alien. I had moved voluntarily so was entitled to nothing particularly because I had no local connection to the area. I was then told that even if I found a house to rent I would not receive housing benefit!!! WHAT?!! I am under 35 years old, that is the age someone, somewhere thought up to have as a cut off point. A cut off point for what? If you are under 35 years old you are only entitled to rent a room in someone elses house and thus will only be paid a very small amount of housing benefit for being a lodger. A quick note on this, you get £58 a week for a room to rent. That's roughly £230 a month. Rooms to rent are anywhere from £325 - £500 a month. Eating was clearly not going to be a priority then!
I had no option, I was forced to be a lodger.
Back to the first problem now... no-one wants a benefit scrounging scumbag avoiding work (this is how the government, Daily Mail, a LOT of people and Jeremy Kyle view 'people like me'). With my smart suit on, references, a CRB check in hand and a clear criminal record I clearly was either dealing in drugs or about to commit a murder, I have to say the latter did cross my mind on several occasions over the way I was spoken to.
I eventually found someone to rent me a room. He was weird with a capital W and lived in what I thought was perhaps a housed branch of the local rubbish tip. Apparently he was an ex ghurka, he was a live in landlord, single and in his 50's so I (a single 31 year old woman) would be sharing a house with some weirdo I had never met before that had no legal requirement to be checked out before renting a room to someone. Scared... MUCH!! With no-where else to go and a massive B&B bill I had to take it and hope something else came along, preferably a woman looking for a lodger. So I moved in on a snowy day in January 2012.
To be continued...
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