AIBU to think lifestyle expectations and spending habits have risen enormously?

Having your own caravan isn’t cheap! 😆

Agree with this. But dull is in the eye of the beholder, I think.

We got a secondhand real wood solid kitchen for £250 and re painted it. It's done our kitchen and a utility room. We got our tiles for £7 reduced in B&Q Everyone assumes it's a kitchen worth thousands. We get asked is it a wren/Howdens etc
A friend was recently quoted 25k for a kitchen ended up spending 15k.
It blows my mind.
I would actually say our secondhand kitchen is
Better quality because it isn't cheap melamine carcass but solid wood.

If it’s affordable to them they can do what they like IMO. It’s when people start complaining that money is tight while shopping at Waitrose, driving a RR and going off to Ikos that I get a bit narky at why their priorities are, to me, skewiff.

I live in a vv wealthy area where people tend to buy the ££££ houses to access the excellent schools. And it’s fascinating to see how what OP describes is just not a thing. The wealthiest family I know - dad invented some high-tech gizmo 10 years ago then sold the company - holiday in ordinary parts of the UK and spend some holidays at home like the rest of us, drive a second hand Skoda having run the previous one into the ground and are lovely and well-adjusted people with children who are a pleasure to have around. And there are many more in comparable situations. Very few people here are chucking money around for the sake of it and no one would ask about the origins of coffee, wine or cheese!

These threads never chime with my experience. Many of my friends despite high incomes drive 2nd hand cars, people with new cars tend to get them through work schemes.

Housing was far more affordable for my parents whereas younger generations struggle to afford it as oppose to spending 200k renovating.

Gadgets & tech are cheaper, eating out more common but again cheaper and pubs are far less common.

Flying was very affordable in the 90s due to all those £10 flights.

I agree it’s a choice to an extent. I certainly chose to buy a small house, I choose not to buy expensive designer clothes, not to get my nails done, and to take a water bottle and my own lunch to work.

But I think for a lot of people advertising has worked so well that they really can’t see beyond it all. It’s become normal to live well beyond their means on credit. So some people aren’t making informed choices.

That’s an issue that compounds the fact that a decent house used to cost 3 x 1 annual wage, and now costs a lot more than that.

My granddad was a high school teacher, and he bought a 4 bed detached house for 3 times his annual income. For 3 times my annual income (I make 70k) you can buy a 2 bed terrace here now.

Add that to the fact that people hold in their hands an endless advertising and instant purchase machine (a phone!) and you’ve got a really big problem!

I'm older than you OP and this is a real bugbear of mine too.
I am sick of hearing about how marvellous everything was in the past when mothers could 'afford" to stay at home when it's like comparing apples and pears when it comes to lifestyles and expectations.
The school holiday threads are an annual eye-opener for me. When i was a child in the 70s with a SAHM we literally did nothing apart from the two weeks we were on holiday im our caravan. No trips out, no eating out. Sometimes a friend might come over but that was it
There was a thread on here recently moaning about how they had still spent a fortune even though they were trying to be frugal by just having one big trip and a smaller one every week and 'obviously the weekends'. Picnics were ruled out because the child did not like them. It was as if the poster was a passive victim of spending and it didn't occur to her she could just ... stop?
One poster on that thread pointed out that the op was doing nothing wrong, it was housing costs that made this umaffordable in a way it would not have been in the past.
When did this happen? If my.mum had expected to spend that much money just on school holidays to say nothing of running her own car, new clothes and other luxuries considered basic now, she wouldn't have been able to SAH either.
Yes housing is more expensive now, but chikdcare is subsidised and just about everything else is relatively cheaper. Taxes and VAT are lower too.
Lifestyle expectations are the main issue in the 'cost of living' crisis imho. But raise it and it inevitably leads to accusations of being a boomer who has never known hardship (negative equity, soaring interest rates, 12 weeks maternity pay, no childcare subsidies) by people who are utterly convinced no generation has ever had to struggle the way they do.

People give the apppearance of having a wealthy lifestyle, but so many are in debt. I couldn’t live like that. Call me old fashioned, but that is not how I want to be!

Is that car debt or other stuff? It’s anonymous, but still interesting.

Living standards for most have gone up massively as well as prices on travel and large ticket items coming down. And all the tat, so some people update their decor by season. The price of Humans per hour has gone up every where but robots are coming in.
Teenage girls queue to get into the popular shops in Soho. The increase in cost of living has been absorbed by many it seems.

We pick up free (vintage well made) furniture that people no longer want. It can take a bit longer if you need it to be close to your house for transport but if you have transport then there's so much free stuff about.

@menopausalmare what an amazing piece of television social history. She was so articulate and reasonable, the opposite of entitled.

I'm 43 and grew up poor, on a council estate within a low income family, but surrounded by middle class people. Those people always went on holiday every summer, they had new/newish cars, they ate out weekly. So many of these things were normal when I was a teenager among the middle class kids I attended grammar school with.

I know people who take multiple holidays a year etc now. However I know more people who don't. Who have reduced working hours to spend time with going kids, who go on holidays in the UK or an annual eurocamp or whatever.

The people I know who do the multiple holidays always new car thing fend to be very very well off. They would always have done that I believe if they were very well off in the nineties for example. I never had a holiday as a child, maybe 2 or 3 family days out in the summer holidays and those days involves taking a picnic to a beach or park.

I think I wonder if what's changed is the circle of people you spend time with.

@Hiredgun I do think it also depends hugely on what life stage you are at. I am late 40s with teenagers.

Pre DC I did travel more. 1 big abroad holiday a year and then multiple breaks which could have been UK or European.
We now go abroad every other year due to big expenditures over the last 13 years - buying and moving house twice and renovating them.

Cars - so many are part of their employment packages or on finance. I buy my cars second hand outright and keep them for about 8 years. I always feel smug about this as I know financing brand new cars is financially one of the worst deals you can get due to the devaluation.

Hens /stags - these seem out of control nowadays. Thank god that me and my mates got married pre insta. Most were weekends away in the UK. A few were just a meal out which were lovely.

I probably do go out more for family meals than when we were younger but it's once a month Vs a few times a year.

When your mate asked:
'Is this single origin coffee?'
I hope you replied:
'Yeah. It's from Tesco'
He's just pretentious and needs to get over himself.

I too am a late thirties millennial. Grew up in a comfortable but no luxuries house. One foreign holiday in my childhood and a few hand me downs (I was the only girl so got most new but unisex things were passed on). Parents always drove oldish 5-8 years old plus cars. But the bills were paid and we were fed etc.

until last year when a large and gratefully received but not life changing inheritance (ie not like I could pay off my mortgage and give up work) of around 50k coincided with a big promotion and good salary increase, I always drove a brand new car. Granted it was never a luxury one- think Toyota, Renault etc. it’s worth remembering that whilst a brand new car is more expensive, it’s often more affordable. I was always in a position to pay ~£200 a month for car finance but not 10-20k on buying a car outright. I think many people are the same but I agree that the luxury cars on finance are madness. My bil used to have a Range Rover on finance for £700 a month! Which, living in the north, was more than my mortgage on a modest three bed house. Madness given he was renting at the time.

thanks to the inheritance, I escaped what I called the car finance trap and bought a sensible three year old but bigger (and still not luxury- it’s a Kia) car outright and I am so grateful to not make a monthly repayment.

as for people’s spending habits, I do wonder if a lot of people feel home ownership is so wildly unobtainable that they feel they might as well spend on nice things. In the past houses were cheaper and things like cars and holidays were out of reach. I think it’s flipped these days.

Also, I think it’s probably a good example of how this kind of thing spreads. As the kids who were going to a caravan park for a few days weren’t boasting about it and it’s like a negative - you can’t talk about something you don’t do so it’s just silence, those with the flashy stuff are the ones talking about it so it’s perceived as normal as they’re taking most of the oxygen I think.

I think we’re coming into an era where late millennials like you are starting to inherit off their boomer parents who are now wealthy (in relative terms to previous generations). Houses bought for £50k now worth a million, plus cash savings etc. My nephews, late 30’s/early 40’s inherited from their grandparents and their (boomer London) parents downsized to elsewhere freeing up a lot of money that meant they could all put down deposits of £200K each on London properties with plenty left over for renovations and holidays. They all work too.

The kitchen refurbs are astounding. To my mind if the cupboard is able to hold food then it doesn't need replacing.

Nope state! And whilst we’re not a deprived area, we’re not core south east either. It wasn’t the whole class but just happened to be the girls in her friendship group. She’s actually moved schools now and it’s more normal. We had to have a sharp word when she claimed we never went abroad and we’d been camping in France 😂😂

Does your daughter go to private school?

if not, that is not a normal primary school bubble she is in

I have noticed this as well OP and am utterly fascinated by it. Average amount on beauty treatments is something I’m bamboozled by - I am beginning to go gray and know a lot of people who colour their hair. Thought I might try that too but it’s literally hundreds a year at the hairdresser. So I don’t. A lot of the same people are then also getting nails once a fortnight at least, eyelashes, brows, sometimes Botox. It’s a big outlay a month.

My daughter was at one stage getting genuinely upset we weren’t going on ‘exciting’ holidays - and by this she meant going outside of Europe. Literally in her friendship group some were going to Spain for weekends then Thailand at Easter and another foreign holiday in Summer holidays. US for Disney and all sorts. Our occasional trips to Greece and regular UK trips were paltry in comparison and yet I think we are quite lucky 😂 It’s hard to convince a 9 year old that actually there are a lot of people who have no holiday although obviously did remind her repeatedly!

I’m in my 60’s and as the saying ‘the past is a foreign country’ really is true.
Take for example buying a coffee out which is considered normal now several times a week and you are deprived if you can’t do so. I can honestly say I never went into a cafe to buy a coffee until I was well into my 20’s, it just wasn’t a done thing near where I lived.

I agree with this, but I think what is depressing is there is no ‘no logo’ type anti capitalism message at all really now. It was quite uncool in certain circles in the 90s to wear labels and I don’t think that is really a thing anymore. Though I do know quite a few younger people who do think similarly.

We have a pretty high income, as do quite a few people around us, and I don’t recognise this at all. The only thing we do is eat out once a month maybe.