Vincent's mother doesn't know what to do.

Hi there, I am going to do a short piece in reply to a question I have received from a reader in Singapore. Her son (whom we shall refer to as Vincent, not his real name) has just started university in London and she has given him an allowance of £500 a month for his all daily living allowances to cover expenses like food, transport, clothing, entertainment etc but this doesn't include his rent and associated utility bills. Now Vincent claims that this isn't enough and thus he is pleading with her to increase it substantially - I have thus been asked to judge if £500 a month is a reasonable allowance for an international student to get by on in a city like London. So here's some vital background information: Vincent's parents in Singapore are not poor - after all they can afford to send their son to London for his further education, however his father doesn't want to give Vincent a bottomless pit of money to spend as a university student and wishes Vincent to learn the value of money in the process. His mother however, just wants to make sure Vincent is not going to freeze or starve to death this winter! Well, this isn't a straightforward question by any means and I can give you a really short answer: yes, £500 a month is enough. But if I left it at that, then this would be a rather short post. So allow me to cover some different angles to shed more light on this issue, to help this mother figure out what she could do next about this difficult situation.  

London is a city with a lot of inequality. 

Perhaps I am stating the obvious here: there are a lot of rich people in London but there are even more poor people in London. So my regular readers will know that I work in investment banking where people earn a lot of money - I remember there was a dinner where we took some clients out and the bill came up to about £1,500 for a dinner for 5 people. On the opposite end of the spectrum, recently on the 6th October 2021, the government ended the "£20 a week universal credit uplift". Allow me to explain, universal credit is a kind of welfare benefit that the very poorest in society receive from the government to help them with their daily needs. The standard allowance for a person under 25 has been cut from £79 to £59 - this 'uplift' was introduced at the start of the pandemic to help the poorest in society get through the pandemic but this has been since removed as practically all restrictions have been lifted. So the government is essentially saying to these people, "there are no more lockdowns, you can get vaccinated - what's your excuse for not getting a job now?" But let's put things in perspective: someone on universal credit is getting about £260 a month and that's nearly half of what Vincent is getting as his mother is offering him £500 a month. So yes, there are people in London trying to get by on as little as £260 in comparison and obviously the kind of life they are leading is very basic: they are forced to make difficult choices about how they spend that very limited amount of money and have to be very careful not to run out of money before the end of the month. Obviously, I don't think it would be fair to expect Vincent to live like that - that would be quite extreme. But if Vincent is claiming that he is being forced to live in abject poverty with his £500 a month, that is just not true either - it is more than the bare minimum has been determined by the government. 

London: loads of places to spend money, but can you afford it all?

There is plenty of wealth in London - I left my office early this afternoon because I had a meeting at 6 pm but by 4:30 pm I was already alone in the office so I decided to go for a long walk before meeting my client. I walked through Mayfair, up Regent Street and then I crossed Oxford Street before going to meet my client. I did pop into a few shops along the way and gosh, I was killing time before my meeting but the amount of nice things I saw that I wanted to buy. There are plenty of places to spend money if I hadn't been on a rather tight schedule to see my client, I might have been tempted to buy quite a few items I saw. As a student, no doubt Vincent would have enough time to wander through the streets of London and he must have been tempted by all these shops in retail heaven. How many people in London can actually afford to buy anything and everything they see in such shops? Very few indeed, most people in London simply don't earn enough to buy all these expensive items in the shops and they have to be very careful with their money. However in Vincent's case, he's not spending his money, no he is spending his parents' money so I am suspecting he is watching all his rich classmates going shopping and spending an insane amount of money on these shopping sprees: thus he is probably thinking, hey it's not fair. Why can my classmates buy all these nice things whilst I simply can't afford to buy these lovely things with my paltry £500 a month allowance? Tell me: why don't I deserve to have nice things like my classmates? I demand to have all these things that they have as well so my parents have to give me more money to make things right.

Whose money are you spending? 

Don't get me wrong, I work with people who spend an insane amount of money. On Thursday evening, my CEO went shopping and I looked at some of the things he bought and let's just say every single item he bought that afternoon easily cost more than the £500 Vincent would have received from his parents. But my CEO is spending his own hard earned cash - he just happens to be a rich man who earns a lot of money so I don't have a problem with rich people like that spending their own money. It's his money, he's earned it and he has the right to spend it whichever way he likes. In the case of Vincent however, it's a different story. He's not spending his own money but that's his parents' money he is demanding: so this raises two issues here. How rich are Vincent's parents? If they are extremely wealthy, then I don't actually have a problem with them giving him more money every month because that's not really going to affect them - they can afford it and if they want to indulge their son by offering him a more comfortable lifestyle in London, then that's fine by me. So for the record, Vincent's parents happen to be quite rich actually. In that case, I would say to Vincent, "so you want more money, you need to go get a part time job and earn that money. Don't feel like you have to beg your parents for money when you're old enough to earn your own money as an adult! You've enough time on your hands as a student to work about 10 to 20 hours a week. Not only would that give you some valuable work experience for your CV but it'll give you perspective about how hard it is to earn money - it might even change your relationship with money." 

What kind of lifestyle would £500 buy Vincent in London?

There are many poor people in London, they are barely receiving the minimum wage and people would typically imagine cleaners, security guards, receptionists and catering staff when we talk about lowly paid jobs. But did you know that the poorest paid jobs in the UK also include teaching assistants working in schools, care home staff, hairdressers/barbers and shop assistants (this would include any kind of retail job from supermarkets to pharmacies to clothing stores). Let me focus on one of these jobs: the teaching assistant. Class sizes can be very big in some schools, so instead of splitting the class up into two and hiring two teachers, the shortage of qualified teachers means that the government has used the alternative solution of pairing up a fully qualified teacher with an unqualified teaching assistant. So the teaching assistant is paid a lot less than the teacher but hasn't gone through all the requisite training yet to become a teacher - in these big classes, the teaching assistant plays a vital role to make sure the weaker students get enough attention and together with the teacher, they have a great partnership. Yet teaching assistants are barely paid the minimum wage and yeah, they're typically the kind of 'poor' people who survive on £500 a month in London. They do have their three meals a day, they have a roof over their heads, they have shoes on their feet etc - they are surviving but there's just no spare cash for luxuries or treats. There are no nice holidays to exotic places, they cannot walk into a shop, see something nice and simply buy it to treat themselves. If they want to make a big purchase (like a new phone or laptop), then they have to plan and budget for it very carefully to make sure they don't run out of money for all their basic necessities before the end of the month. Needless to say, it is not pleasant but many poorer people like teaching assistants in London live like that! 

What was Vincent used to growing up in Singapore? 

This is my theory about why Vincent is finding this adjustment so tough: being a male Singaporean, he would have gone through two periods when his parents probably indulged him financially. Firstly, he must have studied very hard for his A level exams (in order to gain entry into one of the UK's top universities here in London). His parents probably gave him a huge wad of cash to reward him each time he got through a difficult exam just to encourage him to keep on studying, enabling him to walk down Orchard Road and buy anything he desired and dine at all the finest restaurants there. Then as a male Singaporean, Vincent had to serve NS (national service), that's when most parents would recognize just how tough life must be for him in NS and thus they would probably feel sorry for him having to endure all that suffering - many parents would react by giving their sons a big wad of cash to treat himself to something nice during the weekends. Therefore Vincent must have had a period of at least four if not more years of his parents giving him huge wads of cash in Singapore, allowing him to live like a very rich person in Singapore. I don't know for sure if that was exactly what Vincent had enjoyed in Singapore in the last few years, but if that was indeed the case, then it is rather obvious why adjusting to a more modest lifestyle living like a poorer, working class person would surely be a massive shock to the system for Vincent (on top of adjusting to life in another country halfway around the world, away from his parents). Thus my theory is not so much that £500 is not enough for Vincent to survive on but rather he is craving the kind of lifestyle he enjoyed back in Singapore when his parents were often giving him huge wads of money to spend on luxuries and treats. 

Is it wise for Vincent's father to use this method to teach him how to manage his finances? 

No, this is the equivalent of pushing Vincent into the deep end of the pool and telling him, "if you don't know how to swim, then this is a good time to figure it out or else you will drown." If it was Vincent's father's intention to make him live on a modest budget in London, then Vincent's father should have sat him down months ago and had that talk with him that would go like, "son, I know we're a rich family but I intend to give you a modest allowance for your living expenses in London. It's not much but it'll cover your basics. Feel free to seek a part time job there to top that up if you feel you need more money but I'm here to support you and teach you how to plan your budget, so you will know how to cope." It seems like even if his father did have that conversation with him, Vincent wasn't listening and all that advice had fallen on deaf ears. Vincent is struggling to survive till the end of the month without running out of money so at this stage, his parents have two choices: give in to emotional blackmail and offer him more money or try to force him to plan his budget more carefully, so he can indeed learn how to make that £500 a month last till the end of the month. Learning to plan a budget isn't rocket science really, it is one of those basic skills that poorer working class people simply have to develop out of plain necessity because they don't have anyone to turn to if they do run out of money before the end of the month, they simply must have that discipline to be very careful and keep track of what they spend their money on. Thus we need to put things in perspective: what Vincent's father is trying to achieve here isn't mission impossible, it's actually a very reasonable request, this is a reality of survival that so many poorer working class people in London have to endure daily. 

Would Vincent realistically be able to top up his income through part time work? 

A lot of that actually depends on what kind of skills Vincent actually has to enable him to find lucrative part time work, but let's look at the basics and do some calculations. The current minimum wage in the UK for a young person aged 21 to 22 is £8.36 - that's the worst case scenario for Vincent and so if he worked 20 hours a week at that minimum wage, he could make £167.20 a week and over a period of four weeks in a month, that figure becomes £668.80, which is actually more than what his parents are already giving him. Even if he worked just 10 hours a week on minimum wage, he could still make £334.40 a week, thus significantly increasing his monthly budget. However, some university students would do a variety of jobs that could potentially earn them significantly more like £20 or £30 an hour and such better paid jobs. So for example, my friend Megan gave private yoga lessons whilst my friend John taught piano lessons - neither of them have any formal teaching qualifications. Megan has a huge online following on her Instagram for her yoga-related content. Likewise, John isn't a qualified music teacher per se but he is supremely talented when it comes to the piano thus he gave the lessons to family friends and these were all private arrangements. Thus both John and Megan were earning quite a decent amount of money at like £30 an hour, so they only worked about 10 hours a week: this earned them £300 a week or £1,200 a month, so not only was this more than enough to cover their living expenses but it also gave them some valuable work experience too. Working 10 hours a week isn't going to affect Vincent's studies and I feel very strongly that the work experience will give him a much more valuable perspective, to prepare him for the working world! 

Is there any point to this experiment of 'enforced poverty'? What can it achieve? 

Allow me to play devil's advocate for a moment: what can Vincent realistically learn from this experience if he is indeed forced to live like a poor working class person in London? Learning how to organize a budget isn't exactly the most difficult piece of administrative skill and Vincent is dealing with far more complex concepts at his university. If you simply want to send Vincent the message that being poor sucks, then again, that's hardly anything new that we don't already know, is it? I have worked with a lot of very rich and successful people over the years and they come from a range of backgrounds: some had come from poor, working class families just like me whilst others had fabulously rich parents. Quite frankly, the amount of money they were given by their parents didn't make that much of a difference - the most important factor was actually how talented and intelligent they were. What a lot of rich parents do in fact is to send their children to expensive courses to enrich their brains and nurture their various skills so as to give them a massive advantage over their peers who don't have access to such privileges. Is making Vincent live through a period of "enforced poverty" on par with such courses? Of course not, when you pay a lot of money to a professional to teach you how to do something well, you're in good hands. And if Vincent's father really wants him to learn about the value of money, the best way to do it is to place Vincent in a business environment such as working part time in a shop, so he could see personally how the business owners actually plan their business strategies and make money in the real world. 

Why Vincent's father is wrong in doing this. 

But allow me to point out a massive flaw in Vincent's father's logic: his theory is that if Vincent has to endure this period of "enforced poverty" then he will learn the true value of money. But in a city like London, there are still so many poor people either unemployed or doing very lowly paid working class jobs - they have endured years of poverty yet they are still so freaking poor. Simply suffering many years of poverty has done absolutely nothing to help lift them out of poverty - no, what they need if they want to access social mobility, then they need the right skills to access better paid work. Suffering and poverty may be a motivation for someone to want to get rich, but without the right skills to make that happen, all that motivation simply isn't enough. If there's an issue with Vincent's relationship with his father, like if his father feels taken for granted by Vincent, then the sensible thing to do would be for Vincent's father to spend more time talking with his son, rather than using money as a tool of emotion blackmail. "You ungrateful brat, you think money grows on trees? Do you have any idea how hard I worked to provide for this family? I'll teach you a lesson you'll never forget - I will make you live like a poor person, then you'll learn to be grateful for all the money I give you." No, that's an awful idea because that idea is rooted in spite, anger and bitterness. That's such a toxic formula for any kind of parenting! It does seem to me that Vincent's father's parenting skills leave much to be desired and given that he is a Singaporean Chinese father of a certain age, I can only sigh and roll my eyes. I'm not surprised at all. This "enforced poverty" just isn't the right way for him to mend his relationship with his son, Vincent is only going to be even more resentful rather than magically turn around and lavish his father with much love and respect; this will only drive father and son further and further apart. 

Vincent's father needs to come up with a better solution.

Simply limiting Vincent's living expenses to £500 is a bad idea because we don't know if Vincent would make sensible choices. If he had been a sensible young man, then his parents wouldn't be doing this in the first place - but let's imagine if Vincent had £200 left in his bank account and he has two choices: he can either spend that money to attend an event in Manchester that his tutor at university suggested would be very educational or he can go partying with his friends that weekend and blow that money on a wild night out. Would 'enforced poverty' guarantee that Vincent would make the right choice in this case? Of course not. Oh please, being poor doesn't make you sensible - it requires good parenting and a lifetime of having that sensibility and maturity moulded into your personality. If Vincent's parents have failed to delivered thus far, then guess what? This 'enforced poverty' isn't going to make the slightest bit of difference and if Vincent's father thinks that this would put right all the mistakes he has made as a father for failing to raise his son with the right values, then clearly he is delusional. Loads of poor people make terrible decisions that trap them in poverty, being poor doesn't automatically make you more sensible or careful with money! If Vincent's father is sincere about being a good father who wants to offer his son guidance and teach him about managing his finances, then he needs a far more intelligent approach to this challenge. Vincent's father reminds me of those lazy, fucking awful Singaporean parents who have neglected for sons for years but they think, "it's okay, my son(s) have to do NS - the NS experience will fix everything and he'll be fine." Yeah right. Just watch my roll my eyes as I think, "so where do I even begin with how utterly fucked up you are as a parent? This is clearly not the purpose of NS and you are refusing to take responsibility for your own fuck ups." 

So what do other responsible rich parents do in this case then? 

We have clearly established one fact: this 'enforced poverty' will teach Vincent absolutely nothing, it will not achieve the goals that Vincent's father foolishly believes it will. Thus other rich parents tend to be quite generous with their children in this aspect but there's a method to their madness. If you have access to activities that cost a lot of money (such as winter sports), then you will make friends with other people who have equally privileged backgrounds. If you only have access to activities that are low-cost or free, then the kind of friends you meet there are likely to be poor, working class folks and they're far less useful to you if you're trying to build a professional network of contacts. In funding their children's expensive party lifestyle of skiing in Aspen, cruising in luxury yachts in Dubrovnik and buying too many bottles of overpriced champagne in some of London's most exclusive night clubs, they are then ensuring that their children mix in the right circles and will have friends who are equally privileged. Some might see this as a hedonistic lifestyle funded by their parents' wealth, whilst I think that there's definitely some value in networking with the right people doing such activities because you're not going to meet the next person who is going to give your dream job or invest ten million dollars in your start up by playing football in the park on a Saturday afternoon. This is why I make such an effort with my networking as I come from a poor, working class family - I didn't grow up with the right people and I'm now having to make a huge effort to compensate for that. Thus there is no point in working very hard to become rich and then not using that money to give your children all the massive advantages your wealth can buy, so this is why this situation is a mess!

Do you want to force poor Vincent to have poor friends?

Allow me to contrast this with an unpleasant incident I had at my local supermarket recently - this supermarket would do special discounts and these items would have special bar codes that the staff stick onto the product which we can then scan at the self-checkout. That evening, I had picked up an item that was on discount but when I tried to scan it, the bar code told the machine that it was for a chicken meal but I was holding a packet of fish fillets in my hands - clearly, someone had made a mistake. I asked this young black man who was the sales assistant to help me and so he reluctantly said, "just scan it, what's your problem?" I pointed out what the problem was, he looked very confused and asked me, "do you know what you're talking about?" I said to him, "can you tell the difference between chicken and fish?" When I pointed out that the discount sticker had been affixed onto the wrong product, he said, "well that's not my fault, I didn't do that." I could have done the whole thing and demanded, "I demand to speak to your manager now, you are so rude, you have such a terrible attitude!" But then I thought, at least this black guy is working in a supermarket, he's trying to hold down a job (even if he sucks at it), would you rather people like him end up unemployed, living off the state or worse, indulging in petty crime? I could have said something caustic but I decided not to. So if Vincent's father insists on forcing Vincent to undergo this period of 'enforced poverty', Vincent might be forced to take on a poorly paid part time job in a supermarket and spend a lot of time with other poor people like that black guy from the supermarket with the bad attitude. No, that's the completely wrong kind of company for someone like Vincent - that black guy would simply be a terrible influence, so this is why it is worth using your wealth funding your children to have a much better class of friends. 

So what should Vincent's mother do? 

Well, at least she's off to a good start by seeking third party advice. There is a famous saying in Chinese, 当局者迷, 旁观者清 - it means that those who are in the midst of a situation don't have as clear a perspective as an independent third party looking in from the outside. She is after all caught between her son and her husband! If her husband feels that Vincent is taking them for granted, then she can kick start the reconciliation process by taking more interest in what Vincent is doing at university. She can also offer more money but conditionally. "If I give you more money, you must speak to your father more often and you show genuine interest in what he is doing. Even if you don't feel like speaking to him, tough shit, treat it like a job to earn money otherwise he's going to threaten to slash your allowance again. Do you know how many times I have had to pretend to be interested when talking to my clients at work? Welcome to the adult world." Personally, I believe she should offer her son a bit more money especially if the family can afford it (remember, they're quite rich) but she shouldn't give in to any kind of emotional blackmail - she should do it on her terms, not Vincent's. It's a terribly messy situation and I wish her good luck trying to make things right. I see the root of the problem to be something that's all too familiar: poor social skills. To be a good parent, you need good social skills to communicate effectively with your children and it seems that Vincent's father is fucking retarded when it comes to social skills, even if he is evidently good at what he does to earn plenty of money. In essence, this entire episode has stemmed from Vincent's very poor relationship with his father and really - this is not about money and it shouldn't be about money at all. 

So my conclusion is that Vincent's mother should offer more money but she needs to offer more than money - she needs to speak to her son a lot more and repair that relationship. Even if Vincent is a spoilt brat who takes his parents for granted, then imagining this 'enforced poverty' solution will somehow fix everything is simply delusional. This is my problem with Asian parents - they are always making the assumption that punishment is the same as rehabilitation. No, that's a dumb mistake: I'm not saying Vincent is faultless here but whether or not Vincent needs punishment (or not) is another matter, he needs someone to teach him what he ought to be doing with his money. So that's my take on the situation, what do you think? Should Vincent's mother offer him more money, how much more and on what terms? Should she force Vincent to get a part time job? Have you ever had similar issues with money with your parents before? What do you think of Vincent's father's awful attitude? Please leave a comment below, many thanks for reading.