Sorry, hijack question, WTF is this…“Not paid his TV license fee so paid £1000 before paying his rent.”
Do you have to have a license to watch TV in the UK?
n/m googled it. Looks like that 1000 was a penalty for watching without a license. Wow. that’s something.
My sister has been in jail and rehab about a dozen times in as many years. Just about a month ago, she was found with no pulse or respiration and was successfully resuscitated. She turned down free rehab, tried to scam Mom about it, and tried to implicate my brother in regards to her legal and financial issues.
Seriously, she basically died and came back, and is turning to the same crap again. Enable or don’t, with some people it just won’t matter.
If you want to help him, you could pay his rent – directly to his landlord – not to him. At least you’ll know where the money actually went.
What difference does it make if he’s lying? If the truth is so bad that claiming you owe a drug dealer 2 grand and he’s going to break your legs if you don’t pay is a cover story, what do you think is really going on?
He isn’t “terrible at budgeting”–he’s a serious drug addict and you and your mum should respond accordingly. Try to get him into rehab and cut him off if he isn’t on board with getting clean.
Of course he’s lying. “26.06” isn’t even a date.
It’s a tax. It’s pays for the BBC, which is why the BBC doesn’t carry any advertising. You can get away with not paying it if you can prove you don’t watch broadcast TV, but good luck with that. The license fee isn’t much, from memory it’s about £14 per month. It isn’t collected as part of normal taxation to keep the BBC independent of political influence, but the fee does carry the same weight as paying income tax.
You would have to have a long run in with the license collecting agency to warrant a £1000 fine, so the OP’s brother has obviously been ignoring them for ages.
It is in the U.K. They typically put the date before the month, so 26.06 is the 26th of June, while we in the U.S. say June 26.
Yet another person with addict relatives chiming in:
Of course he’s lying. Words are free and easy to do, and sometimes they make people give you money. Writing an email is not any different than going through the couch for lost change.
Your (and your mom’s) money will make him happy for a few hours or days, then he’ll be just as miserable and looking for more.
…and you’d be nuts to pay the fine before paying your rent. Keep the roof over your head first and foremost.
I knew a guy who told his family and friends stories like this. Turned out he had a gambling addiction.
It’s a lot easier and faster to rack up a few grand in gambling debts, without anyone noticing you’ve got a problem, than it is to spend that much on drugs.
Do they have Whooshes in the UK?
They were deported in the Time of Troubles.
He’s horrible with handling bills responsibly, can’t keep to a budget, and keeps digging himself further into debt with a disregard for finance that almost seems to imply that some sort of magical thinking will solve his problems.
Everyone else is saying drugs (and they may well be right) but no one so far has mentioned that he may have a gambling problem*.
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*** If you think you or someone you care about has a gambling problem call 1-800-GAMBLER.**
Psst…post 31.
Knowing some of the Dopers here, sometimes they go over about as well as a lead Zeppelin. If someone can be mystified that England has a telly tax, I can believe someone else can be ignorant of DD/MM date formatting.
I was equally mystified as to why the King sent troops, in bright red coats, out to hunt rebelling colonist hiding in the woods. Not everything England does makes sense to Americans.
I’m not putting you down. I believe your question was sincere. That’s why I took gigi’s post seriously, and not as a whoosh, if it was intended to be one.
Which is why we both think he’s lying. He kept putting Facebook statuses about how he was struggling until my Mum told him not too because it was embarrassing.
That in his weird logic, he’s too embarrassed to say what the money is really for, so concocted a story like this to justify his actions.
As far as we know he doesn’t do any hard drugs, just Marijuana. I thought that stuff was as addictive as cigarettes.
Why on earth would you cover up a gambling addiction with a story about doing drugs? God, I’d way rather people think I had a problem with gambling than that I was a junkie.