If you were a child in the 1970s do you remember your parents worrying about money?

[gordonsntonic]

I do. They used to argue about it at night, and I remember asking my mum what "in the red" meant. Then I remember my mum getting a part time job, so I had to go to friends houses or my Nan's after school. I just thought my dad was bad with money, but with hindsight, this would have been around the time that the UK had huge interest rates. We got through it, but there was one key difference to now - back then, mortgage affordability was calculated on the basis of one income, not two, so my mum going out to work would have helped to bridge the gap. Things are obviously different now. 😬

My parents did worry about money, but never to the extent that they could not put a meal on the table for all of us.

Born in 1977.

I remember many "economy drive" meetings round the kitchen table as a kid; this would have been early - mid eighties. And constant power cuts.
Life in South Yorkshire during the miners strikes was really dreadful...and this was the case for most families, not just the very very poorest.

Unfortunately a lot of people under, say, 35 or so have really had quite easy lives so far, at least in material terms. To them, the idea of cardboard in shoes and little to eat and ice on the inside of bedroom windows is not something they've ever thought possible.

So the next ten years or so will be VERY interesting....especially now the Pound is toilet paper.

Born in '76. I remember Mum crying at the winter gas bill ? Maybe 1983 ? Jacket potatos for supper twice a week. Clothes were hand me downs from older cousin and 1 fashionable outfit. Sometimes we had no car and other times no telly. Things improved around 1990.

Unfortunately a lot of people under, say, 35 or so have really had quite easy lives so far, at least in material terms. To them, the idea of cardboard in shoes and little to eat and ice on the inside of bedroom windows is not something they've ever thought possible.

I'm sure you mean it's unfortunate that they don't appreciate their relatively easy lives .

Its interesting reading posts . Makes me realise why I'm still upset (out of proportion to value) when things are broken .
And why my house is furnished with a load of mismatched hand me downs and legacies .
And probably why I can't understand why my son leaves a good few mms uneaten and doesn't lick the glass clean when polishing off an enormously expensive Gu pudding .

My dad worked in the building trade and was made redundant in the early eighties. I remember the worry that the giro wouldn't come on time. I don't think my parents were well off for any of my childhood. Most of our clothes were 2nd hand, we never had days out or holidays, 3 girls in one bedroom, a treat was a 'new' book from the jumble sale and we had no heating upstairs. I didn't feel 'poor' though. It was just normal life. Went I went to university I was amazed at how different other people's lives were.

To be fair to Mrs T (yes, I know, what am I saying) it wasn't that she took away family support. There never had been much. There was Family Allowance (later renamed Child Benefit), which was usually paid in cash to the mother at the Post Office. It was a policy decision to do it that way to ensure that the mother would always have access to some money even if her husband (and I do mean husband) was feckless and drank/smoked/gambled/frittered all his wages away. There were also free school meals. There were benefits paid to people who couldn't work. There was council housing, which was generally cheaper than private rents, but not easy to get.

I don't think there were any benefits paid to people in work to top up their wages so they could make ends meet. That was a new idea under Labour after 1997, coupled with bringing in the National Minimum Wage.

Unfortunately, though, the Tories had pushed through all sorts of changes in the 1980s that made things very hard indeed for people on lower incomes.

No more rent or mortgage controls, no new secure tenancies for private tenants, far less social housing than there had been thanks to people buying council houses and councils not allowed to build more to replace them. Union power a fraction of what it had been, so no real pressure on employers to pay an adequate living wage. Employment rights far worse than they had been - leading to the gig economy, zero hours contracts and so on.

Too early for me, I wasn't born until 1980. Also, my father was a surgeon in a big London hospital and my mother was a District Nurse so had a reasonable standard of living. I didn't start my Nursing training until 1998 and didn't really see that much deprivation or relative poverty but what did shock me was how little some people cared: about their kids, their kids education or the environment where they lived. I remember visiting a young mother on a brand new housing estate and when I went back the following week she called me a "cunt* for being 20 mins late and everything was covered in grafitti.

I rented under rent controls. The rent officer came and assessed your accommodation as suitable and whether the rent was fair. Then after they abolished that I had to move City and unfortunately found myself paying very high rent for horrible places. Renting became really tough.

Yes. Mum was a FT civil servant, dad worked shifts in a factory. Small 2 bed semi (later extended). Both on a good wage but they were worried. 2 kids. Relied on my maternal grandmother a LOT. (Paternal grandma died when I was 2 in 1973).

Back in the days before we had double glazing, central heating, a landline, a rental TV with only 3 channels.

I can remember her topping up the gas meter with 50ps

no
but my dad had a steady job, must have been hard though as mum was very ill and he had 2 teens.
I do think Life was cheaper back then though, no mobile phones or tvs in your room and so on.

Yes. My mum used to frequently cry about being in the red. She used to beg to be allowed to work but my dad wouldn't let her as he thought that would show he was not a true provider.

We used to get parents on "economy drive" which basically meant no heating on except for a short period of time and lights off until absolutely dark, no making phone calls out and not new things. I remember one Christmas when our main present was a handmade hot water bottle cover. I was rather pleased, but my rather savvier older sister remembers thinking that times must be really tough.

True but I think people forget what life was like before lots of credit cards, MLMs, influencers, women had less power still to leave a family home/work.

I heard of a few women (mothers of school friends) who'd left their husbands when DC were kids or teenagers but this was almost a turning point for them, before they'd have been tied to the kids at home to care for them and being a single parent still carried a stigma. Shops were open and closed on certain days and things a lot of people take for granted now like mobile phones, central heating and so on weren't around then. There was no Primark etc but there were cheaper shops of course and markets. Lots of hand me downs and jumble sales.

We camped for years as it was cheaper - not luxury camping either. Things like ice creams from a van especially in London were a big treat. My DM had lots of extra jobs (luckily for her it was drama teaching at weekends or private tutoring after school) to make extra money to pay bills/mortgage. Luckily she had the time/energy to do this. Even DM's DM (nana) who was considered well off, rented out rooms in one of her London houses as bedsits. If I spoke to DPs or my aunt about life in 1970s they probably play it down a bit but we also had heavy snow, black outs (no electricity) at times too.

I understand now that things were pretty tight, probably until the middle of the 80's. Then a combination of my father's work situation improving and an inheritance changed things for the better.

I wasnt aware as a child but looking back and speaking to my mum we did struggle, I remember getting clothes from jumble sales and I used to go to the scrap yard with my dad to get parts for our old car!. Dad worked away a lot and mum had numerous part time jobs, cleaning houses and offices and then did some strange home working jobs (paid on piece work). We always had a holiday on at a Haven site near home but it was at the beach and I loved it. No central heating. But I didnt know anything different and had a lovely childhood 😊

Lots of families were like this though. I recall knowing friends of DBs. They had 4 children, all boys, and the youngest was with the second husband, first husband had long left/divorced. Parents were both paramedics. I recall going round to their house after school and being given bread and butter pudding as dessert which was a novelty to me. Their teenage son would babysit for us (absolutely fine, nothing happened!) but as far as I recall no one had TVs in bedrooms, we might have had them as teenagers. They all went on camping/hiking holidays as cheaper. People who were really poor, there was one boy at junior school who always looked dirty, arrived at school late and had torn clothes and was always teased. You'd sometimes see his DM come to the school but you did wonder if he got fed much.

Same here - almost exactly the same, with DM's work situation improving and substantial inheritance for her too. Both happened sometime in late 1970s/early 1980s.

Dad's frame of reference was the 1930s and mum's was the misery of an Irish convent boarding school at the end of WW2 so the 70s and 80s in Ireland may have felt familiar to both of them. We had home grown fruit and veg - tonnes of every conceivable thing you could grow in a garden, and they bought a deep freezer to accommodate it all.

Mum made all our clothes, and knitted. She cooked and baked from scratch. At one point she had a job at home doing sewing for a wedding dress designer.

My parents never saw the need for central heating (both grew up in woolly clothes in freezing houses and dad had been at a boarding school where the daily regimen included a swim in an unheated pool) and felt vindicated when the oil crisis of the mid 70s hit. However, even when that crisis was long gone they still didn't get central heating. Dad would cut up fallen trees from an aunt's farm and haul back big boles which would then be split into logs by me aged about ten. I can still wield an axe with reasonable accuracy. We would stack the log pile neatly and cover it over with a tarp. One year dad secured a little patch of bog in the Wicklow mountains with a friend and the two families had a good deal of fun cutting turf. We still used to have a fire that burned 'slack' though.

I honestly felt warmer outdoors splitting logs than I ever did inside the house. I have vivid memories of wearing fingerless gloves, sitting in a sleeping bag and wearing chunky, hand knitted wool jumpers (plural) trying to keep from freezing solid while doing homework or studying in secondary school in the late 70s, early 80s.

We went to a private primary school and had private dental treatment, plus treatment at Dublin's dental hospital thanks to dad's dentist brother. Holidays were at my grandmother's house or in an aunt's caravan. Mum used to pack two weeks worth of food for us to take to the caravan, which was supplemented by the huge treat of bought sliced turkey or ham and shop bread. I remember a good deal of tutting at people going abroad to spend their money instead of shivering in a B&B in some rainswept beachfront in Ireland. My sisters and I would have loved a holiday where we would feel warm even after getting out of the water. There are photos of skinny little me on a beach in my swimming togs with blue lips.

My poor sister got awful chilblains for years, and she had serious asthma. Still no attempt made to warm up the house. One of my DCs came across chilblains in a book and I had to explain what they were.

Part of what motivated my parents to be so self sufficient was the need to save money. We had enough to keep us ticking over, certainly more than the ragged children we saw on the doorsteps of tenements on the north Dublin street where we went to get measured for our tailored school uniforms. More than most, maybe. But mum grew up on a farm with a fear of The Bankman, and dad had seen the crash of 1929 and the horrors of 1930s Britain (albeit from the comfortable distance of the RAF) and I think they considered life to be precarious and everything we had could disappear overnight. Deep down though, they would have been very happy living on some self sufficient commune, the colder the better, and the fewer domestic appliances the better too.

We had a black and white TV that dad bought from a pub which was switching to colour. You had to sit on the floor beside it and hold one of the knobs to tune it to BBC1 and 2. Mum had a big washing machine with a wringer and a tiny, ancient fridge that was actually superfluous thanks to the chill of the house. Buying a hoover was a purchase that had to be deliberated over for months. Same for a hand mixer that had to be replaced when it died when I was making a sponge.

For days out we went to the nearby hill and walked in the forest there, or to walk along a local pier. Or the national art gallery, which was free iirc. A neighbour used to take her kids and me to Djouce mountain in Wicklow and let us loose in the forestry and the heather for hours.

I was aware that Not Spending Money was the name of the game, and frankly it annoyed me. It certainly made me value basic necessities like a warm home and appreciate that it does children no harm to have stuff that everyone else has.

I don't remember much because I was a small child. Dp remembers a lot more, his family firm folded (hardly uncommon) so a very comfortable lifestyle changed a lot, parents hid most of it from him but you pick up even as a 10 year old. They were lucky as had investments and savings to cushion whereas I know my dad walked from shop to shop picking up jobs fixing things or cleaning windows

I was born in the late 60's. My dad had two jobs. I never realised we were poor. Once my grandparents came for tea and they had ham sandwiches. I remember kicking off because l had Banana sandwich and wanted ham. I now realise it what because there wasn't enough money for ham for everyone.
My parents shielded us well from having no money. My mum made our party dresses out of old curtains😂. By the time l was teenager they were quite well off . It wasn't until l spoke to them recently that l realised how much they struggled

I grew up in NZ, but can remember having chilblains. Really sore and itchy. We had one day a week we couldn't drive our car in '70s, due to oil crisis.
No central heating or double glazing. Can remember being very cold

Child of the 60s / 70s - No, Dad was a hater of debt, Mum had a full time office manager role and they both worked very hard, but then most people we knew did. We lived in council housing and all of our neighbours went to work, so we knew that money did not grow on trees! We never felt we missed out on anything and knew others that had more, but we never felt hard done by. I never heard them argue about money, ever. We knew the value of money, knew if we asked for an extra few pence that if there was nothing in Mum's purse then we couldn't have it. We also got Saturday jobs as soon as able and loved being able to have our own money. A different time and world, but one where we felt less pressured to have stuff! The examples they set me paid off in my adult life, as I always approached money and debt with caution and I lived through the 15% mortgage era, with a mortgage on my own, so that gave me a resilience I've appreciated to this day.

I was a young adult in the 70s (and a teen bride). With two of us working pre kids, we were pretty well off. We were able to save a deposit to buy a flat and go on 2 week foreign holidays every year, despite paying huge interest rates once we got a mortgage. I haven't been able to save or go abroad for years.
On the other hand, we did not have a lot of the things we take for granted now - no phone, central heating or freezer for the first few years. We had less clothes than most do now, one TV, no mobile or broadband to pay for.

Yes, we lost out house and my dad was made bankrupt. Still haunts me to this day.