Miracle Mom of 8: British Woman’s Jaw-Dropping Journey to Raising a Large Family and Receiving a Life-Changing £500,000 in Benefits
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British woman gave birth to 8 children in a row and received 500,000 pounds in relief by “living off the children”
Source: BackChina (backchina.com)
Mary Buchan, 42, is a single mother of eight children living in Selly Oak, Birmingham, England. Her family of nine lives in a four-bedroom house.
When she was young, Mary worked as a stripper and cleaner for a meager salary, but after giving birth to her first child at the age of 19 and enjoying the welfare system, she rarely worked…
She found that as long as she had a child, she could receive welfare, and with welfare, she could stop working. After she gave birth to eight children with the same man, she chose to continue to receive welfare and concentrate on raising the children…
In 2016, 33-year-old Mary appeared on a reality show. At that time, she received 2,227 pounds per month, a total of 26,724 pounds per year in welfare, including municipal tax, child benefit, child tax, income support and housing subsidy. Because she showed off on the show how to easily take advantage of the system to get money, netizens called her “Octopus” and “British Welfare Queen”… But Mary was in debt mode that year. She owed the housing association 600 pounds of monthly rent for a four-bedroom house. She went to court and was almost kicked out of the house…
Mary’s excuse was that she was too busy to look for a job. She worked 21 hours a day, from 6am to 3am, looking after eight children day and night. She also had to find time to search for bargains on eBay, car boot sales and charity shops to make a living. Her income was not enough to cover her expenses, and she could only afford to eat and pay the rent…
At that time, Mary also had an agent, Barry, who helped her get into the news. He also helped to testify that Mary was taking a mechanical training course to find a job, so she was in arrears with the rent.
However, everyone later discovered that Mary’s life was not tight at all, but even luxurious. She had been enjoying life with her welfare benefits, living more comfortably than the middle class… She quit her 16-hour-a-week job and went to Turkey for a £1,500 breast augmentation surgery, increasing her cup size from 34A to 34D.
The year after her breast augmentation, she flew to Türkiye again for laser treatment and vaginal surgery…
In addition, everyone noticed that she was wearing designer brand clothes…
She even bought a horse while on welfare…
What is the cost of raising a horse? First of all, a horse itself is worth 600 pounds, which is the rent of their family for one month. They have to pay an additional 100 pounds for the stable every month, and the feed cost of the horse is about 25 pounds per month… So Mary had to give the horse away after taking some photos with it, because she found that she could not afford to raise a horse at all, and she also admitted that she bought the horse purely for showing off…”
This was a big mistake. I thought of it as showing off, and I really regret it. “The public was already angry at that time. Some media calculated that she had received about 500,000 pounds in relief benefits from the government in the past 23 years. She never worked and used the money to live a carefree life… Although Mary explained that the money was earned from the “car trunk sale market”, everyone thought that the things she sold at the event were also bought with government money, which was equivalent to squandering taxpayers’ money…
In 2021, Mary was in the news again… Because her two eldest children were over 16, their child benefits and tax credits were cut by about £160 per week, and she complained about her difficult life… Now nearly three years later, four of Mary’s eight children – Tia, 23, Leah, 22, Latoya, 19, and Joshua, 18, are no longer eligible for child benefits because they are too old, so she can now only receive half of the original amount, which is £253 a week.
“We’re really struggling,” Mary, now 42, told Fabulous exclusively. “I’ve had to go to food banks and even sold my horse eight months ago because I couldn’t afford it.” (“Even”?)
“I’ve sold everything I could on eBay and Vinted.” “We have to restrict our diet, we only eat baked beans a few nights a week and only turn on the heating for an hour a day, the rest of the time we wrap ourselves in duvets.” “Even buying enough chicken for all of us costs about 20 pounds, but fortunately the younger children can have free hot meals at school.” And 18 months ago, Mary became a grandmother. Her eldest daughter Tia gave birth to a little boy. Now there are ten people, three generations of grandparents and grandchildren, squeezed into a four-bedroom house…”We really need a bigger house. All my children still live at home, and the three youngest have to sleep with me.”
What’s even more outrageous is that Mary’s four grown-up children have also followed Mary’s footsteps, living at home and not working. It is said that they could not find a job after graduating from school because they had no work experience, so they are now applying for universal credit, and it is estimated that each of them can earn 292.11 pounds…
Although Mary said, “I might have to go back to work. I want to be a mechanic and I have some training in this area. I feel like I’m wasting my life and I need to do something.” She also said, “However, I find that garages are very sexist and I don’t think they want to hire women, so I need to open my own garage, which will cost at least £5,000.”
And Mary knew that once she went back to work and had an income, she could no longer blatantly default on her rent…
Due to the excessive pressure, her hair started to fall out and she gained 12 kilograms. So she said that now she opened an account and made small online videos to earn extra money, but no one wanted to watch them…
“I’m different now, I save money, I go to Primark and I don’t buy snacks anymore, I can’t afford them.”
But anyone with a discerning eye can see that Mary will never work again in her lifetime…even her children may become the next generation of “Mary 2.0” who live on welfare…