To ask your parent's or grandparent's attitudes to money??

[BayLeafLaurelTree]

I have 'issues' with money. Like anxieties over not having enough or not having savings. I am a low earner and for health reasons probably always will be. Single mum.

I'm 33. My grandmother says that her father was always proud although they had a hard life at times poor.

I am under the impression that there wasn't as much aspiring to a 'lifestyle' in the past as there is now. That rents were cheaper, mortgages easier to get, but food and basic clothes more expensive. Foreign holidays very rare, did working class people go on one or two 'staycations' a year??. Most 'gadgets' didn't exist, well maybe the radio or telephone or tv when they came out.

I'm talking the period 1880s - 1980s. I realise there are huge differences in the different eras.

It really interests me. People seemed to be content with less. Or were they??

when i was at school, there were trips during easter break, usually to a place of pilgrimage in europe. about 10 days, coach and ferry.
i never went, nor even asked my parent whether i could go. i never told them about these trips. i wouldn't have wanted to put that burden on my parent, extra unnecessary expense.
looking back on it none of my form teachers, or the headmistress who led these trips, asked if i was going. it was a small school, about 150.

I presume you mean parent singular and grandparent singular, not 'couples'.

My mother was widowed when I was 23 so 'parent' is appropriate. She had enough and a bit more for enjoying but was very good at managing her money and not wasteful.

Her mother too was on her own for a long time and lived with my aunt and her family. I have no idea how she managed at that stage but was told she had a difficult life when younger and couldn't afford much. However she got by and was quite proud, she lived to 92.

My father's parents lived to be very old and were OK in later life but like many of their generation, not extravagant because they had been poor when younger. My dad said there were frequent rows about money when he was growing up which must have been horrible.

My paternal GPs were born 1890’s in rural Ireland. My dad was born 1940’s and went to school until the mid 1950’s. He describes the abstract poverty of many of his classmates who couldn’t afford shoes and wore cut up rubber tires on their feet and had no coats. This was common. They suffered terrible abuse at school and home too in some cases. Dads family were working class but always had money for essentials and small treats as both parents had good jobs/skills in demand, but of course lived frugally. The house he was born and grew up in didn’t have electricity until he moved in the early 50’s. GM was a seamstress for wealthy people in the town. Once a wool suit had become shiny with age, she was skilled to unstitch it, turn inside out and restitch like new, so wealthy people were also frugal.

My DM grew up in a working class family same era in the UK. When there was no money for food they’d go to the shop to have food on credit. The shopkeeper would say what they could and couldn’t have and remembers they weren’t allowed meat or anything considered a treat at the shop and it being humiliating.

Both parents now ‘young’ late 70’s and have embraced all modern tech, have luxuries (like a holiday) and nice things through sheer hard graft when they were younger. They can’t believe how easy life is now comparatively but also recognise life isnt as simple and that brings other issues.

Different worlds.