You can find it here: Help Us Stay In Our Home. If you can't donate (which I totally 100% understand), please could we ask you to share the campaign as widely as possible, in hopes it will l the inbox of someone who can help a little? Thank you.
Some additional background to this is recounted below. Please don't feel obliged to read it if you don't want to, but I wanted to share some more detail in case people wanted to know why we're asking strangers on the internet for help.
We rent our home from private landlords and historically they've increased the rent at this time of year (right around Christmas) by £50 a month. This year in December they hiked it by £100/month.
I work in local government and have barely had a 1% pay increase in many of the past 15 years, ever since the government introduced austerity measures. Teachers and the police have received more, but my salary has been far behind the cost of inflation all these years. I have explained this to our landlords, but their verbal response was, and I quote: "We will start eviction proceedings against you, then."
My spouse hasn't worked in approximately 10 years due to chronic major depressive disorder, anxiety and agoraphobia. The welfare state deems my salary to be "too high" for my spouse to be entitled to any welfare benefits, so all these years we've been managing on a single income. (They're also isn't entitled, therefore, to any help towards health costs, like prescription charges.)
We actually both have chronic ill-health, as I was diagnosed with hypothyroidism some 17 or so years ago (with long-standing generalised anxiety disorder and then secondary depression, too). However, neither of us can get any disability benefits because we're not deemed "disabled enough" (again, this is due to decades of austerity measures resulting in severe restriction of the eligibility criteria for disability benefits).
Due to illness in the extended family I latterly have increased travel costs due to additional caring responsibilities, as I'm now needing to spend approximately £200/month extra visiting my elderly parents each week, instead of being able to go monthly just after pay day. Despite our NHS, there's no healthcare available for ensuring that their medications are administered in a timely and accurate fashion, and they've lost the ability to have oversight of this independently. Under the rules of the power of attorney which my parents donated a couple of years ago, I'm not allowed to accept any financial help from them for the cost of this travel, despite them selflessly wanting to help (and despite them currently still having the mental capacity to make the offer).
Because of both my chronic ill-health and increased caring responsibilities, I've no time or energy left in which to get a 2nd job. Whilst my spouse has begun trying to look for work, they're -as you might imagine-they're finding it difficult to present as a desirable candidate, especially given the competition in the current job market.
Being able to raise some funds in the short term might not seem like much, but it'll most certainly take much of the added stress out of the situation, and hopefully may even enable us to start saving toward a deposit & 1st month's rent to move to a new place in the next year or so. I'll probably need to take out a loan to cover the entire deposit and 1st month, but having a bit of breathing room will also allow me time in which to improve my credit score, making it more likely I can get a loan approved (it's not a bad score right now, but it just isn't the best it could be).
Thank you again if you read the above bit of our story. My sincere apologies for the mutual awkwardness of needing to ask for money.
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