To think that after COL change expectations have to change

I think that is unfair and a very broad stereotype.

I'm about to retire.

I've worked for 36 years without a break ( except maternity). Long hours, stressful role. I have the same contract I started out with. I returned to work after each maternity leave, to keep my contract. I was left with £30 per week after paying childcare and travel at that time.

Prior to marriage I saved and saved so that I had money to put into a house. Few holidays, few nights out, careful spending. No new car only what I had saved to buy. No loans.

During my marriage, bought a wreck of a house and around a full time job, baby/toddlers we renovated it fully over a three year period, living standards were awful. 15% mortgage rate too.

DH left for someone else. Divorced and started again. Smaller house. Couldn't move away or make any exciting decisions, like take a career break, as I had three small children to responsible for.

Second hand clothes & Christmas presents for the kids, cheap cars. Low cost holidays, if at all. Saved for everything we needed.

In later life I've met someone else. He too is divorced, sharing the assets of the marriage with his wife. Not enough for either to buy another property.

It isn't always the ‘lucky’ life you portray. Hard work, managing finances, making cuts to buying.

I'm also tired. I'm tired of working really hard at my professional job that I needed two degrees and a professional qualification to get, to pay for extortionate nursery fees, and for my husband to also be working hard at his job, so that we can just about afford a smaller house than I grew up in, whilst my mum was a stay at home mum.

I'm so very very tired but my expectations must be adjusted accordingly.

Problem is housing cost and stagnant salaries.. I’m not sure it’s a case of ‘adjusting expectation’ but making better political choices and being more politically aware as a general nation? I think the UK has voted for people who allow business to keep salaries low and keep lore profit. We’ve chosen less welfare - and by that I mean welfare for everyone - not just ‘benefits’ for the unemployed. We’ve chosen to have a really unequal society for years and this is where it’s led.. I’d like to see the future of the UK being way more to the left; fairer, more distribution of resources and wealth, maybe a citizens assembly or similar. For now I suppose yes people will have to start by spending within their means whatever that looks like for them..

@OxfordInkling you are managing to acknowledge that they can afford less in terms of housing… but not acknowledging how that might make someone feel like they had a different standard of living to what they expected.

That doesn’t make sense.

It’s not ‘demanding it all, immediately’ (first age of buying a house and having a child go up every year) - it’s that one equivalent incomes, you can’t afford the same lifestyle today. And yes - housing is a really key part of that.

If you can’t afford to live in the same area you grew up in, if you can’t afford the house you grew up in - yes you’re going to feel that you can’t attain the same lifestyle.

So true most of the people on these types of threads did not grow up middle they were upper middle. Now I mean seriously talking about multiple foreign holidays in the 80s and a big four bedroom house? That was never "middle".

These people just need to accept they had exceptionally well off childhoods, compared to about 90% of people, and move on

@MidnightPatrol they often can afford plenty on that salary. Yes, housing has got more expensive, but a couple earning the amounts most of the thread are taking about can afford a house, a car, etc. they can’t afford the four bed detached in London, but the normal semi in an affordable area is possible. They can’t buy the car new at this stage in their life - but they can get a perfectly good one second hand. They might have to consider a career break while their kids are young, if childcare costs are too high. Or if they’ve made good choices on the house and car, maybe they can afford the childcare instead. It’s all about choices and living with their consequences.

Im tired of watching people on decent salaries with good lives moan and assert that they are entitled to it all, now, immediately.

I earn well above average and have so little leftover for luxuries. I feel about as well-off as I did 12 years ago when I was earning £20k.

Finances is the only thing I hate about being single, though not enough to ever want to cohabit again. Having another income would make so much difference.

Yes, this is true. Your expectations are shaped a lot by your own childhood. I grew up in a 2 bed terrace that was never painted or wallpapered as my parents couldn’t afford to decorate. We were quite poor so I never thought I’d own anything. I now own a one bed flat but it doesn’t feel like a step down because I never expected to be able to buy - I choose to live in London and if I moved out of the SE I could afford a house, but I don’t want to. 3 and 4 bed semis and detached houses have never been on my radar, they were always for rich people. I never realised the extent of the obsession with them as a status symbol til I started using MN! I’m just grateful for what I’ve got. Plus, small flat means small mortgage and I can afford to travel a lot which is my real priority.

I don't think it's a case of confusing upper middle with middle.

It's that the op talked about a professional couple with above average household income (by a fair amount) which I felt would have put them in the upper middle in the not to distant past. I read this to mean more you got a job on a graduate recruitment scheme in the city roles, but others are reading a teacher married to a policeman.

I associate lower middle class with more clerical type work and middle, middle more teachers, nurse, policeman type things.
So, growing up, i have have expected professionals in london type graduate roles, with above average incomes to afford a coffee and a big house.

@OxfordInkling You’re just describing the past.

You only had one computer… because everyone did.

You went on holiday by car and ferry… because air travel wasn’t accessible for most. Travel in 2025 is vastly more expensive than in 2015.

I don’t actually think most families are eating out or going to the cinema all the time.

Younger people today cannot afford a similar level of housing as their parents, they both need to full time to fund that housing, the cost of having children has skyrocketed and so they are having smaller families etc.

People’s basic expenses around housing, childcare, energy, food etc are taking up a larger and larger share of income - and those who grew up in the 80s/90s won’t be able to achieve a similar standard of living as their parents on the same income.

All the data shows this - yes it might be more feasible to fly to France for your camping holiday in 2025, but the house you grew up in would cost 15x your income.

You see thread after thread on here of relatively well earning people who haven’t got anything left at the end of the month once relatively basic expenses have been covered. Everyone’s not driving a Range Rover on credit.

How sad that those are your optics. People from any background should not be passive about this. We should not have to lower our expectations and be expected to work the same. Also, our pensioners are not responsible for the COL. May be the government is responsible and how they waste money collected on way of taxes. Decide to erode the middle classes and make it impossible to live decently for the majority.

But the ‘middle class’ lifestyle they seem to think existed back then…didn’t.

i didn’t set foot on an airplane until the mid 90s. We didn’t have take out all the time. Meals out were only for special occasions. Cinema was a couple of times in school holidays.

We had one car, possibly a shared family computer, and were told no often when we asked for extras because there wasn’t the money. Vacations in France were by ferry and you camped. It took my uncle 9 years to save enough for a big Florida holiday.

So people are not having to adjust to some ‘lesser’ middle class lifestyle. They are adjusting to an actual middle class lifestyle.

A lot of people seem to be confusing upper middle with middle. Middle is the norm. You can fake upper middle using credit for a while - but you’re in a hiding to nothing and the wheels will come off soon enough.

I'm in that income bracket and have the first lifestyle you describe "3 bed house, run one car, two children in primary, so still need after-school and holiday childcare, have a dog [cat in my case]. I do afford "a few coffees each week, a couple of meals out or takeaways each month, a couple of TV subscriptions, a nice holiday abroad"

However I live in SW, my house is a very small 3 bed worth under £300k so small mortgage. Kids only need wraparound clubs. My retired parents live in a much bigger house, a 4 bed with utility room and conservatory. I also grew up in a 4 bed which they had bought on two teachers salaries

See when I was little it was owning anything was the aspiration and kids sharing rooms was the norm

The 4 bed detached was definitely for the rich not the middle classes

So expectations have changed
I also think expectations are shaped by your own childhood

A 3 bed semi is a step up from my childhood - for others it's a step down

No one likes going backwards

I am now in my 60s and not swanning around on big pensions i have to manage on my state pension so rarely eat out and live simply to afford some good things in life. You have to manage yr money and enjoy simple things that maybe free ..eg walk by river

One of the interesting things for me is the 3 bed semi being synonymous with an aspirational middle class lifestyle for people with above average incomes.

When I was much younger it was all about the 4 bed detached. So people jetting off to the city or earning much more than average, were buying a 4 bed detached houses. Not as a starter home, obviously, but by thier early 30s.

Those same sorts of jobs are now buying 3 bed semis but they used to be for more ordinary jobs on more average wages.

In all fairness the op says "the south" and the south is not just London and the surrounding areas.
There are tons of three bed properties for that price along the south east coast. Don't say the south if you just mean London 🤷🏻‍♀️

Agree to that - trade war, actual war, the fact we can barely afford the public spending we are doing, sluggish growth. Tax raises of some kind widely believed to be coming in Nov budget.

col is going to get worse thanks to trump

I'm the nineties me and my then dh earned about 10k each.We bought a two bed house for 30k no deposit required. A similar job now would be 22k but that house is worth 150k so the house is 5x more expensive but wage has just over doubled. And you would need a 15k deposit. And this is to live in a deprived area inthe north

I am a single parent, only one child at home still. I earn 67k and live in the south currently. My income doesn’t go far at all. Currently renting, £1400 for a 2 bed flat. I am waiting for DD to go off to uni next
sep then i’m moving back to the north and buying a house. I could buy a flat, and considered it, but then decided to head back north as ill never be able to afford more than a flat here. It’s frustrating when you’re a single income household.

Depends on your entire family set up and attitudes of the generation above and their wealth. There is no way my parents would be going on multiple holidays a year and live in a big house if their own DC and grandchildren did not. They just are not constituted that way. Similarly, once it is our turn, we would share the burden. It runs down the generations in our family. It isn’t just a money thing, it’s help and come to us for holidays, go to Uncle so and so in France and drive there or catch train if need be. Same applies to my in-laws. But perhaps more upper middle class values than middle middle.

Both myself and others have shown this is not true. There ARE 2?3 bed houses in theSE for less than that

I think that the changes from that time are sometimes hard to quantify. Childcare was less, but often not what it looks like now. As a 7 year old I walked 20 minutes home from school to eat at a neighbour's house, I went to a different neighbour after school - mainly we played out though until my mum got home. Lots of other kids had mums home all day. So childcare costs looked really different - but many were on one income.

And we did only have one car, and a holiday was a nearby rented cottage or one belonging to a friend or relative, and people did not redecorate their houses often, no electronics, etc.

With education, its true that people who went to university were supported, but what affected more people was that most didn't go at all.

We talk about the loss of productivity if parents were more able to care for their own kids - but what about the productivity we lose putting so many kids through crap university programs, when they could be working.

I just looked it up too and you're right - post tax (income tax, NI and council tax) average household income was £34,500 in 2023. It includes cash benefits.