cost of living - then and now

[EmmaGrundyForPM]

I'm really conscious of how expensive houses are now compared to when my parents bought their first home (in 1963). However, I'd not realised how expensive other things were back then.

I've just found a copy of "Good Housekeeping" magazine from 1955 in a box of stuff in our loft. There's an article about refrigerators and it says they start from 66Guineas. I Googled wages for that year and the average manual worker earned £10 per week. So a basic fridge would cost about 7 weeks salary. Now, a basic fridge is about £120 so maybe 13 hours work for a manual worker?

I also read an article online about Christmas food through the ages. Apparently in the 1930s, a turkey cost the equivalent of a weeks wages for the average family. Now, a turkey costs maybe 3 or 4 hours of work.

I think we concentrate on house price rises without thinking about how other costs have dropped.

@GnomeOrMistAndIceGuy
I thought the same about smoking. A couple that are friends with my PIL, smoke fairly heavily. We worked out they spent around the same on cigarettes per month, as our mortgage payment!!

@SMabbutt I earned £2.20 an hour in 1992 just working at Gregg's, in an extremely deprived northern town (so no SW/London uplift!)

UK average salary is £26k, average house price £264k. Saving your entire take home pay (haha, don't eat, or travel to work, or pay rent/lodging to your parents) would take 8.5 years to save enough for a deposit by which time the house prices would have increased again
My parents house in 1990 (2up-2down terrace in an area that would make most people wince) would have taken me 3 years full take home pay to put the deposit on, for comparison.
Yes interest rates were high, but you got tax relief on that.

Clothing prices were eye-watering in the 1970s and 80s though. Most people I knew had one pair of jeans, a jumper, one set of school uniform, maybe two school shirts.

Clothes and all household goods were proportionately that much more expensive because they were made in the U.K., not in China or anywhere else with very low labour costs. I’m old enough to remember when there were signs in M&S, saying, ‘Over 99% of our goods are British made.’
And they did last longer.

The sort of ‘throwaway’ fashion you hear of now was unheard of. And I know it’s not just young people. I used to have a colleague in her 60s who’d buy stacks of cheap tops etc., and say, ‘Well, even if I only wear it once…’

Eating out and takeaways were a rare thing some decades ago, at least with anyone I knew. Still are with some people, and not necessarily because they can’t afford it.

@Dinosaurwoman

My first mortgage had an interest rate of 15%. It meant an entire salary from a couple was taken up with the payments. When interest rates went so high thousands of people lost their homes because they couldn’t afford the mortgage. House prices tumbled because people couldn’t afford to pay the interest rates. Many people found themselves in negative equity , where the house they’d bought was worth less than the mortgage . It caused a lot of misery and homelessness. I’ve had to delay having family because the mortgage was such a huge portion of household income. Just imagine this happening again if the interest rates increase from 5% to 10% and your mortgage payments double. This was in the early 90’s. There were some winners who bought a cheap house but a lot of losers s as well who were made homeless or trapped in a home worth less than they paid for it.

This is true. Many, many houses were repossessed. A good friend of mine bought her house in 1988 and within a year it was in negative equity. Took 15 years to regain it's value.

The cost of housing is skewed by London prices, I can't remember if this was always the case or whether the gap was so huge as it is now.

Where I live you can still buy a 3 bed semi for £150k.
My DS25 has a mortgage of £360 a month for such a house. He pays less than I did in 1990 when my mortgage interest was 15%.

Also childcare costs. There was no free childcare or subsidised nurseries when my DC were born in the 90s.

Yes exactly. Dad said back in 70s and 80s normal people often couldn’t afford to eat mains and starters in the same meal. But as this was how Indians ate at the time Indian restaurants were the first to begin to offer it which is where a lot of the stereotypes for ‘rich Indians’ began - as they tended to live in extended families (so more people to pay the bill) and eating out was budgeted as an important family activity they would eat out at least once a week.

How cheap and available music is is amazing to me! I guess that's why gig tickets have rocketed in process, to make up for the shortfall that artists make from streaming services.

20 cigarettes in 1996 were £2.48. I remember because my pocket money was £2.50!
We used to sell them at school break for 50p a cigarette to the younger years. I've been told that the going rate now is £1
Clearly kids these days aren't so entrepreneurial

I'm not sure it's really helpful to compare a fridge though, fridges were pretty new technology at that time and new things are always expensive because the costs of developing the technology are wrapped into the selling cost (which they aren't once it's well known how to make the basic item) and also economy of scale - these days everyone has a fridge and we consider it an essential, whereas in 1955 most people didn't.

But I think you're right in general, consumer item costs have fallen so much, people used to expect to spend months saving for things, now we want them straight away.

How cheap and available music is is amazing to me! I guess that's why gig tickets have rocketed in process, to make up for the shortfall that artists make from streaming services.

I'd never really thought about that aspect of why concert tickets are so expensive. (But seems obvious now you point it out)

One of the things that bugs me about the whole 'buying takeaway coffee is why young people can't afford houses' issue is that it presumes domestic life is still set up the way it was in the 70s/80s. If you're two working parents leaving the house at 7 or 8 am, which is lots of us, making x number of packed lunches and thermoses of coffee isn't necessarily a sensible use of time. It might be, I'm not knocking it, but it might actually be more efficient to buy a sandwich.

This is something my mum really doesn't get. She tries, but I think she forgets that our generation are often much more time-poor than hers was.

We’ve just managed to get on the housing market, albeit in a shared ownership home. Im 40 and my DH is 43. We couldn’t have managed to do so any sooner (or better) because for the last 12 years we’ve been beholden to either a) high childcare costs or b) one salary due to childcare costs.

It’s taken the time since my 9yr old started school until now to save the deposit. Maybe we could have done it 3 months earlier if we had never had a coffee out, who knows?!

We have the cheapest model smart phones, a family computer and one basic TV, no sky or virgin. We shop in Aldi or Lidl and only have UK holidays once a year maximum.

I don’t believe we’ve been frivolously spending money that could have been going towards a deposit. It doesn’t help that in my town a 3 bed semi is at least 300k and you wouldn’t get a 2 bed terrace for under 250k

If we lived elsewhere we could be doing so much better, which is a bit depre

I remember my mum saying how hard it was for her and Dad to get a mortgage (late 1960s) so as soon as they got one they bought the first house they saw, a pretty run down place but with a big garden which they needed to grow their own veg, because buying veg was so expensive. They had an allotment as well! Of course later they had a few extensions and the house and garden are now worth probably 20x.

When my nan and grandad got their first mortgage in 1950s they were able to use their rent payment history to secure a mortgage. They rented from a family member for 2 years and then the bank would allow a mortgage up to the same value. Brilliant idea and should be in place now.

We paid rent for 15 years and couldn’t get a mortgage which was less monthly.

@SarahAndQuack

One of the things that bugs me about the whole 'buying takeaway coffee is why young people can't afford houses' issue is that it presumes domestic life is still set up the way it was in the 70s/80s. If you're two working parents leaving the house at 7 or 8 am, which is lots of us, making x number of packed lunches and thermoses of coffee isn't necessarily a sensible use of time. It might be, I'm not knocking it, but it might actually be more efficient to buy a sandwich.

This is something my mum really doesn't get. She tries, but I think she forgets that our generation are often much more time-poor than hers was.

How hard is it to make a sandwich the night before? Takes less time than going to a shop and waiting in a queue!

@Whattochoosenow

The whole takeaway culture is interesting. As children in the 70s we weren’t allowed to eat or drink in the street as it was considered “vulgar” by my mum. We had to take it home and have it there. 😁

Yes, so true!

The whole takeaway culture is interesting. As children in the 70s we weren’t allowed to eat or drink in the street as it was considered “vulgar” by my mum. We had to take it home and have it there.

I remember my mum buying us ice lollies and we had to take them home and put them in a bowl to eat!🤣 I'm not sure whether this was because it was vulgar to eat in the street or whether she just thought they were too messy. We ocassionally had an ice-cream but we always had to sit down on a bench to eat it, not walking along.

@LookslovelyinSpringtime, that's what my mum would say. How long does making one sandwich make?! No time at all! She doesn't seem to realise that actually, making packed lunch plus thermoses of coffee for the whole family is going to take longer - it's like she blanks that bit out!

I do quite like the idea of being that mum who has time to bake lovely fresh bread, and make interesting, nutritiously-balanced sandwich fillings or pasta salads for my whole family every day, but when I factor in the actual time it takes to do the whole job, rather than a small part of it, I realise my time is probably better spent doing something else!

fridges were pretty new technology at that time
They'd been around since at least the 30s.

We just had less stuff. I'm in my 50s and I can remember my summer wardrobe one year consisting of a couple of hand-me-down skirts, a pair of shorts and a couple of pairs of hand-me-down trousers, plus assorted t-shirts, one of which I was still squeezing into though I'd had it about 5 years (and it had been second hand then). Loads of the kids I played out with spent the summer in cut-off jeans shorts, t-shirts and plimsolls. It was very normal to patch or adapt things, and for a long time most of my clothes were passed on from my cousin or family friends, or were bought secondhand.

What for home use? I thought home fridges didn't get popular until the 70s.

Home fridges got popular in the 50s and esp the 60s in the UK. When I was a kid in the 70s the fridge was a fact of life, but a colour telly, on the other hand....!

She doesn't seem to realise that actually, making packed lunch plus thermoses of coffee for the whole family is going to take longer

Why do you need to make thermoses of coffee? I've never worked anywhere that didn't suppy tea and coffee, hot water and milk.

@gofg

She doesn't seem to realise that actually, making packed lunch plus thermoses of coffee for the whole family is going to take longer

Why do you need to make thermoses of coffee? I've never worked anywhere that didn't suppy tea and coffee, hot water and milk.

Sure, and some workplaces have a subsidised canteen. Not really the point?

Well you are lucky gofg. The public sector doesn't provide it. I do have my own coffee at work though which is fine if I remember the milk. After nearly two years wfh in lockdown, it's as much as I can do to to get ready and out by 7.25am tbh, let alone making lunch as well.

Sure, and some workplaces have a subsidised canteen. Not really the point?

The point is there is no need to make thermoses of coffee, so why moan about the time it takes?????