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 agree with the 1980’s I had my first children then and 1 salary wouldn’t be enoug

People were more careful with money. They didn’t have fancy cars or numerous holidays. There wasn’t sky, or mobile phone bills or Netflix or takeaway coffee twice a day which all adds up. People only ate out on special occasions and made do and mend. it wasn’t a throwaway society then.
Then in the 80’s with the rise of the yuppies people wanted it all. Women wanted to work after childbirth as it was starting to become socially acceptable for mothers to work.

This is just rubbish. Women have always worked outside the home.

@LongLiveTheLego Mothers worked when I was at school and that was in the 1980s

Did you talk to your mum and dad? Had they run up debt ? During 1980s interest rates were massive, a lot of people got into housing debt, home reprocessing and negative equity.
it wasn’t unusual back in 1980s for people to have mortgages containing negative equity on previous property they sold at a loss on becuase they had to sell.
during 1970s there was also, strangely, unemployment for teachers. My parents were teachers. Mum was unemployed twice. Don’t know why it was, but was certainly an issue.

salaries of headteachers were proportional no where near as high as they are now.

my parents were teachers, and by 1980 dad was an education advisor. No foreign holidays, no luxury lifestyle. House was fixer upper. Always being told money was tight even back then.

I don't think it is as simple as trying to pin-point a year, or even a short range of years. Lots of things contributed to it, but before the mid-80's I definitely wouldn't say so. Maggie Thatcher had a lot to answer for, in her push to get people to buy instead of renting starting around 1983. Councils weren't allowed to rebuild replacements for houses that had been sold under 'The Right to buy'. This article is quite a good one about all the factors which have contributed to the problem
The history of Mortgages

It is supply and demand. As it became more normal for a couple to both be earning fairly decent salaries, house prices rose to reflect this. That then removed the possibility for most women who wanted to be SAHM to be able to afford it.

I think there’s a massive caveat around “women did not work”

MARRIED women may not have worked in general in “nice” households, and certainly post WW2 there was a brief time of “never having it so good” thst familes could just about get by. But it was rarely by choice: most decent employment was closed to them, in certainly private sectors. And those that had enlightened bosses, certainly were fired if they got pregnant

But…single women certainly worked as a norm even post war. Albeit, women married younger.
My mum worked, full time till she was 29. A STEM career job, which she was forced to leave when she married. Like most women. She missed that job for the rest of her life, although she did retrain after having us in 1960s and worked agian full time in 1970s onwards.
that’s a massive difference re choice and affordability vs no choice becuase women were forced out of jobs

my grandmothers worked once married. One went into service at 14 in 1920s, and when married she worked in dept store as fitter, then post WW2 she and dh owned shop . The other (altogether more exotic) was bar maid, then became club hostess to my grandad hosting,. Both worked all their married lives. I know from my family research that their mothers worked…and their mothers…farm labourers, ladies maid, nurse, seamstress, housekeeper, in tanneries, cement works, docks etc etc…census after census.

Add to that All married women, when they did marry could no longer open a bank account in their own name (single women could after 1870) , so salary would go to husband account by default. And her salary would be massively less

In 1974 It changed. Equality act. And the equal credit act. Enabling women to keep their jobs, their financial security, their wage, and (at least on paper) challenge for equal pay

so, let’s be clear…this wasn’t a lifestyle choice. Families struggled massively on one salary even then. Skilled trained married women ended up doing shit jobs for pin money to make ends meet.

Depends if primary or secondary and the size of the school.

Women have always worked, yes, but before the industrial revolution many people, both men and women worked at or very close to the home. People haven't always left their home to go to work.

@Marshbird Yes, single women worked but professional married women were not allowed to work. I think it was around the time that my parents married that the civil service allowed married women to work. Of course, working class women always worked doing whatever they could to make ends meet, though I think the OPs question is slanted towards better off families?
My generation had less options for nurseries, school breakfast clubs etc. than now and tended to work part time or not at all for a few years. Many of us never got back on the career ladder.

Asking them isnt really possible, ive not had contact with my dad since the late 90's and my mum doesnt do talking about the past. But that was their first house they bought together in 1978 when they were both in their first years in the jobs and newly married, my dad worked at the same school my entire childhood, he got deputy when in 1987 iirc, my mum was a casualty nurse the whole time too. My dad also did 2 degrees in 2 different subjects, one maths, one science, before he went on to do his teacher training though im not sure how that happened as i dont have him around to ask. I only know this as my mum did tell me about the 3 unis he attended when i was looking at unis myself. There was no unemployment. They may have had debt i was unaware of as a child, but it has always baffled me that we lived a very "poor" lifestyle compared to those around me with 2 parents working instead of just one. But ill never have all the facts to know why that was for certain.

Both my parents worked, I was born late 60s. Mother's salary paid for food and extras. In fact Mother had two jobs, she taught in a school during the day and then taught in the evenings at an Adult Education college. Father's salary was mortgage and bills. He studied at night to get professional qualifications for his industry sector and improve his prospects.^^

As a teacher, Mother was mainly able to cover childcare during school holidays, although we were latchkey kids through the week. We were allowed two after school activities, one of which had to be Brownies / Guides. Hardly ever ate out or had takeaways. If we went anywhere, we took a picnic and a Thermos. Pocket money was in exchange for doing chores.

I only found out about their financial setup as an adult. They didn't think we should know about money worries as children. I was very surprised to learn much later that my father was at high risk of redundancy during the 70s, in which case the back up plan was that we would have left the UK and gone to live in Mother's country of birth.

It very much depends. We bought our house in the 1980s and I was a SAHP for a while. We only had a deposit for this because we both sold flats to put towards the deposit so the idea that you could just buy a house with only one person working and contributing to the deposit was well before this. My mother had to work when she had children in the 1950s to save up for a deposit.

People also used yo be very debt-averse and there was a stigma attached to ‘being on the dole’
People lived according to their means rather that what they ‘thought they’ were ‘entitled’ to. Very few ‘single’ parents.

I really don’t remember these mythical times when only one wage was enough. The women in my family have always worked in every type of industry. They were only just managing as well no foreign holidays, very occasionally eating out, infrequent purchase of new clothes, no washing machine until about the early 1980s. I really think that the past has been reinvented as a golden age when life was easy.

Well we got married and bought a house in 1982 and we only managed that by living at home with parents to save up for a deposit on a tiny 2 bed terraced cottage. There's no way we could have afforded to buy if we'd been renting or we didn't have two salaries to pay the mortgage. I think people do tend to forget this when they moan about boomers.
I worked full time for another 15 years before we could afford to have a child (just the one) then I went back to work part time.
Even my Mum worked from the 60's onwards as a home help and doing dressmaking alterations to cover the cost of cost of birthdays and Christmas.
I would say that unless that one salary is substantially more that the average, then it has never been enough to comfortably sustain an average family.

We bought in 1988 a one bed flat. 3 x joint salaries.

I don't see many twenty somethings buying one beds. They want at least two beds as many wfh. Plenty of one beds near us but not selling to owner occupiers.
Our son is currently house hunting. He has saved his deposit by living with us rent free. Neither I or the DH would have been able to do that. Our parents rightly charged 'keep' it paid for our young sibling's school trips etc.
We used a lot of credit in the 1990s but we learned an expensive lesson and have one credit card for emergencies only. We also buy our cars and run them until dot.

I grew up in the 70s as did my DH. Both of us had Mums that didn’t work outside the home and our parents owned (with mortgage) their own homes. Neither of us had foreign holidays - holidays were in the UK. The same applied to our cousins and most of our friends growing up. If Mums did go out to work it was usually as school dinner ladies or similar.
We bought our house in the late 80s and I didn’t work outside the home for 15 years from the late 90s until both DCs were at secondary school.
Surviving on one income isn’t a myth but it is getting harder when things like foreign holidays, big TVs in every room and designer clothes are no longer a luxury but a necessity.

So much depends on house prices/location. We bought a house for 95k (3 bed semi) in 2010. Easily affordable on one salary.

You can say that again.

My grandparents, born 1902 and 1910 in Bristol, lived three generations in one small house. Both always worked. Limited themselves to one child for financial reasons. One holiday in their lifetime. One.

Grandma didn’t fly on a plane till she was 83, to attend my sister’s wedding. That was the only time she was ever out of the country.

My parents worked from age 14 onward. Tiny 2bed, 1bath house purchased when they were 30 & 35, raised us there sharing a bedroom.

i wasn’t able to buy a house till nearly 40, it’s very tiny. Kitchen is 77 years since the last upgrade.

People today have an extremely skewed notion of life in previous decades.

Where was this?

My mother worked as an executive secretary before and during her marriage.

Would it be when "needs" became so much more.

My mum didn't work when we were small, but we had one small car and she was without one when dad was at work, one week's UK SC holiday, homemade clothes, one pair of school shoes that we wore for everything unless it was wellies, everything gome cooked, always a packed lunch on a journey or day out, never stopped in a cafe, ice on the inside of the windows (!) , no extra curricular activities etc

Life was good, we weren't poor, but it was definitely in the context of much different expectations.

I’m not sure I agree with the 80s, my mum was a SAHP for most of the 90s and my dad worked a very modest factory job, they also bought their house in the late 90s. We had enough for one holiday a year and although money was tight we never without. It was the same situation for most of my friends and family too, if their mums did work it was only very part time hours in low paid jobs.

My mum always worked full time but had to work it around school hours as there was no free nursery hours and not as many nurseries or after school / summer holiday camps either.
Certainly not in the numbers now