Roughly when did one salary stop being enough to comfortably sustain an average family?

[keswickgirl]

I realise there won’t be one exact year of course. All I know is that my dad bought a very nice 4 bedroomed house on a headteacher’s salary in the early 90s, my mum didn't work and my sister and I had very comfortable childhoods. UK holiday every year and abroad every few years. Pets, dancing, swimming, piano, tennis lessons.

30 years later, it’s such a different story. Roughly when did things change?

I knew I'd get someone throw some judgement in there :)

Mum was a widow at 23 years old with 2 kids and was not educated and was a SAHM. I think she should of got a job especially as we got older but she wasn't great at holding down a job and got lots of support from family too.

I couldn't be more different to her though but i also didn't have such a big tragedy at 23 years old and have always been financial solvent and independent. It's easy for others to judge her and i still hold firm that she should of got a job but she didn't have the mental capacity to work whilst raising us.

One of the things that the different generations don't seem to understand is how cost of living vs luxury prices have changed. It used to be cheaper for necessities and expensive for luxuries. Now its flipped.

Up to the millennium or there abouts, it was cheaper to live and luxuries cost a lot. For example, rent/mortgage might be 30% of your monthly salary, with bills making it say 50%. A luxury TV or a holiday might cost 1 to 3 months salary, so they were few and far between.

In 2025, let's say someone makes 35k, or 2350ish in pocket a month. Depending on where you live, you will be paying 50% on rent/mortgage (conservative estimate) and then bills on top, so about 65-70% of take home income just goes on living.

However, if you want a new TV you might spend £400, which is less than 20% of your monthly income. Or a long weekend to Spain might be £700 for flights and all inclusive for 2. Again, only about 30% of monthly take home. These are actually reasonable expenses compared to what the would have been 30 years ago.

That's what older generations don't seem to understand. It's not comparing like with like - 'luxury' goods aren't really a splurge any more. Yes someone might have a fancy TV or go on holiday a lot, but what is actually stopping people being able to save etc is the cost of ESSENTIALS. that's where the problem is - salaries haven't risen at the same rate.

To have any extras, dad was a supervisor in a chemical manufacturing plant in 1970s, my mum went back to nursing part time in 1970s.

Frankly, people had less. We didn't go abroad - my uncle who was a pharmacist did but no one else did. We had holidays in Ireland, my friends typically had a week in a caravan.

Social housing g was where most people lived. We were fairly unique as we owned our own home but it wasn't very grand and it was hard for my parents to afford.

"That's what older generations don't seem to understand. It's not comparing like with like - 'luxury' goods aren't really a splurge any more. Yes someone might have a fancy TV or go on holiday a lot, but what is actually stopping people being able to save etc is the cost of ESSENTIALS. that's where the problem is - salaries haven't risen at the same rate."

Yes, but also what is a luxury has changed. A smart phone isn't a luxury now as it's difficult to live without one and a foreign holiday is often (most of the time for singles!) cheaper than a domestic one so people need to be careful using the word 'luxury'.

50 years ago I had no choice of being SAHM. Neither did my friends and we mostly went back to work after having each of my 2 children.

Exactly. When I had a career break and was at home I found that once you'd taken out all the costs of going to work which did save money, and we didn't have things like TV subscriptions then, after checking we were on the cheapest phone and energy tariffs, had a old but reliable car which didn't cost us much to run so no car loan or anything, then the only other place to cut back was on food shopping. I cut about 30% off by going to Aldi for most things instead of Sainsbury's and making sure I cooked as much as possible from scratch and from cheap ingredients- Aldi super six, lentils, less meat, cheap pasta etc but it was only so much and still one salary wasn't enough long term- managed it for a couple of years.

I was born almost 50 years ago and in rural and semi-rural areas there were no nurseries afaik. I guess there might have been some childminders, but not as many as now, so unless the parents did split shifts, many families had no option but to have one parent at home either for the first five years or while the children were at primary. All my friends had mothers at home in the primary school age* (and all/most of them had mothers who worked at least part time by the time they were in secondary).

*except one who let herself in after school around 10-11 because her mother went to work after a divorce

It changed when people had 2 cars per family, ate out a lot more frequently, bought coffees daily, ordered takeaways and stopped cooking from scratch

You don't think those things happened BECAUSE both parents started working?
Although I still know loads of people who only have one car.

A better life cost two salaries. Emphasis on better.

I was was born mid 70s. My Dad was an engineer and my mum didn't work after I was born. We had a 4 bed detached house in the Midlands. We went on UK holidays in a caravan and had second hand clothes, bikes and not many clubs and only ate out if a special occasion. They struggled with high mortgage in late 80s.

This is the marriage bar that is being cited. Single women needed a guarantor up till c. 1975 to get a mortgage, married women's income was not considered as part of a couple's income for mortgages as when she had children that income would disappear, meaning the wife was not on the mortgage. Women were routinely not on the deeds of the family home - I remember a magzine short story where a woman does not know which house her husband is buying and being pleasantly surprised it's the one she wanted, this is c. 1970 - and there was a campaign to get women to make sure they were included, even if they were not on the mortgage. Certainly I insisted my name go on the deeds - I had put down the bloody deposit, saved from my salary.
Women forget how recent our disabilities are but in the 30s to 60s it was routine for women to give up their job when they married, and some were forced to e.g. civil servants, teachers, university lecturers (I researched the campaign of one woman to keep her university post after marriage c. 1932-4). Women could not get a divorce on the same grounds as men (adultery) they had to prove another marital crime as well e.g. violence towards them. Many women who left their husbands to live with a woman lost their children as Lesbians were not considered fit to bring up children, this went on into the 70s and 80s. Women were paid less for the same job and if they happened to be an immigrant as well they were doubly disadvantaged - the Grunwick strike, which lasted 2 years, was of Asian women who not ony were paid less than men doing the same job but were subject to unreasonable overtime demands and treated with monstrous disrespect. Margaret Thatcher helped defeat their cause - voting in women to parliament doesn't necessarily mean pro-women legislation.
Women are routinely not included in medical research, which risks our lives since our bodies work differently from men's (the 'default'). We are more at risk in car accidents than men since safety measures are based on male physique, not female. Women are also not included in research about transport use nor considered in town planning, leading to lack of transport for women and also unsafe spaces that women cannot negotiate at night and which are often dangerous in the day as well.
Well into the twentieth century most professions were barred to women e.g. the law, though 'lady doctors' had existed since the late nineteenth century. Meanwhile, jury service had three requirements: ownership of property, residence, and being on the electoral roll. Before 1928 that excluded all women under thirty and many women over thirty, as well - women over 30 and owning (or being married to the owner of) property was the qualification for a woman to vote in 1918.
The fight continues.
NB Presumably your grandmother bought the properties before she married? Otherwise it would have been very difficult to make such a purchase in her own right. She probably needed a male guarantor, as well. However, that your grandmother owned property does not mean that it was easy for women to do so - most had not got the money or the freedom to do this.

Sorry for my miserable post. It became unaffordable whenever the banks began to inflate house prices by lending money on 2 salaries to increase their profit, something very much supported by the government.

Inflated house prices /people being unable to afford to buy are a lever to get us all to work harder and for longer to service debt/rent. The country is getting poorer
(nobody say the b-word!) Plus in our service- based economy, if we all stop borrowing money, the economy looks like it's failing so it's in the government's interest for house prices to be high so the banks make more profit from us/there to be relaxation of lending rules so it becomes near impossible for most people to afford to support a family on one salary. If 40 year/intergenerational mortgages come in, they are not to make it 'easier to afford a house', it will be to inflate house prices so the banks can milk you for longer.

Plus (mostly) boomers -as their generation have done very well for building wealth- buying up houses decreases available housing stock and inflated prices still further, putting housing out of reach for their children's generation.

Have the boomers pinched their children's futures? With Lord David Willetts
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• I'm not anti-boomer - the video above is eloquently put and Lord Willetts has written a great book on the subject.

Gary's economics: why labour are crushing your living standards?
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*Above video discusses historic wealth trends over time and is quite interesting. Wish the title was was 'why the government are crushing your living standards?' as it's not a labour specific issue.

In the late 50s/early 60s my parents were able to buy a fair sized 4 bed house in a nice London-commute area, on one very ordinary salary. And pay a couple of lots of school fees, which were relatively a
lot cheaper then.
But they were permanently skint. I never had new clothes, all hand me downs, largely from much better off cousins - even orange squash and chocolate biscuits (any biscuits!) were for birthday parties only.

I was aware from a very young age of money always being very tight - when e.g. out shopping we knew it was no use ever asking for anything. Any toys were strictly limited to birthdays and Christmas, and nothing expensive at all.

My DM only returned to work when I was 14, and considered sensible enough to mind younger siblings after school. She couldn’t have worked before then - the sort of nurseries that exist now simply weren’t available, and we had no family anywhere near.

I agree, we lived in a nice house on just my father's salary and my mother was a sahm from when they married.

But a meal in a restaurant would have been for a birthday, if then. No takeaways, meals stretched out with extra vegetables and dumplings.

A holiday would have been going to see relatives. And not a huge choice of clothes and shoes. A lot of make do and mend going on.

No tumble dryer, no snacks. You could get a p/t job at 13 though to keep you in fags and cider because it was very boring 🤣