Has the lifestyle our parents had become impossible?

[bumblebugs]

My parents had what I suppose you’d call a very privileged/upper-middle or upper-class upbringing. They went to fancy private schools, there was family money around, and when they married they were able to buy a lovely big family home.
Growing up, we went to private school, had nice holidays (often a few a year), and generally had a very comfortable lifestyle. My parents would go to balls, have dinner parties, entertain friends etc. None of it seemed particularly unusual in their circle.
Now I’m married with a child myself, I’m realising that recreating anything close to that lifestyle seems almost impossible.
Between us, my husband and I earn roughly what I would have considered comparable to what our parents earned, and we both work hard. We have a nice life and can just about afford the things that matter to us, so I know we’re fortunate. But private school, a large family house and three nice holidays a year? Absolutely not. Even the social side seems different I don’t really know anyone regularly going to balls or hosting the sort of dinner parties our parents did.
I always assumed if I worked as hard as my parents did, I’d be able to give my children a broadly similar upbringing to the one I had. Now it feels as though the goalposts have completely moved.
Has anyone else from a similar background found this? Is this lifestyle simply much more expensive and inaccessible to our generation, or am I looking back at my childhood through rose-tinted glasses?

That sort of lifestyle was relatively privileged for the time.

yes, the sorts of the jobs that get that lifestyle have changed. GPs are now overworked and stressed public servants and the salary doesn’t buy you and upper middle class lifestyle anymore,

the sorts of jobs that get you that lifestyle are now investment banking/city finance jobs, tech jobs (although admittedly I live in Cambridge which is filled with rich tech bros).

My parents (born 1940s) were comfortable profsssionals.

We had one car. One week's UK holiday. Practically no gadgets - a black and white TV and a HiFi, that was a major purchase and saved up for and researched for years. I had piano lessons and Guides, but not a whole raft of extra curricular, eating out was for very important celebrations, not even birthdays, less frequent than that, birthday parties were at home, cakes were homemade, as were some clothes, and we children had one pair of shoes and wellies until they were outgrown. Everyone owned one coat.

So yes, "our" parents' lifestyle is perfectly possible, and probably better for us, certainly the planet, but it's not what we aspire to.

You are correct. Despite being the first in my family to have a higher education, as a couple DH and I have been unable to buy a house age 25 like our parents, unable to have a SAHP, unable to support our DC though university the same way we were. Also social lives have changed, my sports club does doesn't the 2 annual balls (aka piss ups) my parents did at the same age. We'll have a child friendly BBQ instead.
My parents were lucky to be born in the early 1950s and have ridden the waves of a growing economy and house price growth.

It's asset inflation. In the 90s the average house was about 3.5x the average salary, and now it's 9x. In many places in the SE it's more than 20x.

My parents bought a house I could not possibly afford now, even though I have a "better" career, earning in the top 5% compared to their top 25% at this age. To buy their house I'd need to be in the 1%. And it's still not even a posh house. It's just a semi in a place with decent transport links and state schools.

A "middle class" lifestyle of 1990 requires an upper class income today, because the super rich use our essential needs (homes, utilities) as financial assets for capital gains. It drives up the cost of things because we always need those things and can't just opt out like in consumer markets.

The whole thing with class is that the higher you go the fewer of you there are.
Royalty is at the top. If there is a tree. Aristocrats next. Dukes, Earls, Lords.
Upper class, Right Honorables, ( the very wealthy who have made fortunes can mingle here even if not entirely accepted yet), Go to public and very expensive private schools. And finishing schools.
Upper middle class, very affluent, can afford a very expensive private school.
Middle class. Very comfortable rather than affluent. Not as well connected as the upper middle.
Lower middle. Lots of people are in this box if you have to box people. Go to state schools usually. Not well connected. Often call themselves middle class.
Upper working class. Value cleanliness, education and being law abiding. Strong work ethic.
Working class. Many people are here.
Lower working. Rough working class.

I had the same upbringing as you. I now have a very similar lifestyle but the main difference is I only have one DC- private school would be tough with more than one.

I went to a GDST school in the 1990s and out of my school friends three were on assisted places so came from a socioeconomic background that couldn’t normally afford private school. In our friendship group of 8 only three of us can afford private school and one person has grandparents funding it. In my class there were lots of teachers, doctors and accountants’ children and like PP said I believe they would struggle to afford private school now on their salaries. The relative cost of living has risen significantly.

It's the opposite in our case. Both of us have moved up in the world, so to speak.

DH's dad died when DH was 4 leaving his mum with 3 children under the age of 6. They were poor to start with, then became even poorer.

My family didn't have much money either. We didn't have a TV until I was 11, then it was a rented black and white TV, and we didn't have a car.

DH and I are retired. While we aren't wealthy we are comfortable and don't have to watch every penny. What we both had though was something money can't buy - loving family backgrounds, and so does DD.

Nope, because my family weren't uber privileged. We were a normal middle class family. Modest home. Which is what I am now. Normal middle class, modest home.

It would be unreasonable to expect the same.
The high UK's lifestyle for upper middle class jobs was an exception in time and space - rich country with big advantages coming from colonialism era and very strong currency, all together it meant that buying stuff from abroad was very cheap. But the rest of the world is catching up now.

When I was young 1£ was worth 40 crowns in my currency. Now it is 25 crowns. The change reflects that my country (eastern half of EU) is more equal in technology, productivity, able to deliver the same level of service in online and offline space.

And it isn't only the EU, big parts of the rest of the world are getting on par as well.

With the costs of things, food and energies becoming very similar around the world, and technology/productivity in everyday life becoming more similar, the wages are becoming more similar as well. Both between jobs and between countries.

Yes the middle class lifestyle is disappearing as the tech bros hoard more wealth than they would ever be able to spend on themselves.

Otherwise I agree with @Ninetwenty

I also think that the culture has changed. The formality of an old school dinner party might feel heavy for busy dual income couples, even if they have the money. They want to relax more, or maybe do an activity together with friends like a spa visit or playing golf.

People also have less time and are more divided on food. There’s a fair chance that beef and salmon would be seen as an unsuitable choice by some rather than a nice treat. Minefield!

There wasn’t the same ‘entitled to benefits’ culture then. Nowadays your salary is subsidising the lifestyle of numerous people outside your family who choose not to work /so obviiusly the amount you can use to fund your own lifestyle is reduced.
Same cake but you are getting less of it.

The middle class is contracting. So yes there are still people living an upper middle class lifestyle. But there are fewer of them.

Also technology has changed jobs a lot. Very responsible jobs like bank managers who made decisions on who to give a loan to, now have far less responsibility and thus pay as decisions were centralised and managed by algorithms.

Your lifestyle growing up was unusual

I had a giggle at going to balls

it is time the royal family was made to stand in their own two feet

Somewhat similar background, zero issues maintaining or even exceeding my parents’ lifestyle.

Balls and dinners are very much a thing still btw, ifykyk.

Honestly this is rubbish. Eighties had highest youth unemployment imaginable, much higher than today. Lots of single parents totally supported by the state as they did not have to work until their child was 18.
The only growth in benefits has been disability benefits. Back in the eighties you got a home help, but no extra money.

I think your parents upbringing (and possibly yours) was unusually privileged, but I do agree that in general, standard of living is worse and it is harder to replicate the upbringing we had. Even just the fact that a family living on one, normal, wage used to be possible and comfortable, now it isn’t really.

However, you do say there was family money around when your parents were younger.

have you not benefited from family money in the same way? Has nothing been passed down to you?

jobs and salary are only part of the picture. You cannot compete with inherited / generational wealth.

As an example, a colleague of mine recently got married and bought a new house. A 5 bed period property in a very expensive area. He earns the same as me so I couldn’t help but look a bit shocked when he showed me his new house. He looked a bit sheepish and said “family money” like that explains it. Which I guess it does. In this case it was his wife’s family money.

I can only dream of such a thing. In a lot of these situations, this “family money” just floats around, tied up in trusts or whatever. Money is often never given directly to the beneficiaries, so therefore limiting the possibility of it being squandered, but when it comes time to buy a house it’s pretty much “pick a house and we’ll instruct the payment to come from the trust” and when kids come along “pick a private school, the trust will pay the fees”.

Meaning that all salary / earned money is free to be spent on holidays and parties and the like.

Dinner parties were common because people couldn't afford to eat out at nice restaurants very often.

To mention too, class is not all about money. It is about interests, values. Occupation. What education your parents had. And you.

As to different times. Many people in the past leant on credit a lot to fund how they lived. Some people had umpteen credit cards. And mortgage lenders were happy to lend people far more before the crash. And then drew the drawbridge up. So times will seem different. Credit is now seen as debt, which it always has been. And lenders grew nervous.
Expectations change too. When my father purchased his first house. By today’s standards dirt cheap. But it wasn’t to him. No holidays abroad. No carpet. No central heating. He had a long commute to afford to pay for it. Three hours a day. In all weathers on a bicycle. No car, no telephone until years later.

What sort of earnings level / jobs do you have? What did they do for a living?

That family money you refer to in your opener, OP, is what your parents spent to subsidise their lifestyle.

But no, both my parents were born in the 20s, both orphaned, both poverty stricken, made a good life for themselves.

I was talking about an old boyfriend of mine the other day. Probably looking at the mid 1980s. Both this parents were full time teachers. They lived in a semi in a not too affluent area of Birmingham but it was alright. Drove a clapped out car. Boyfriend got a full scholarship to a local private, his brother went to the state school up the road. My best friend lived round the corner from him. Same type of semi. Mum a teacher. Dad worked in a borstal. Another clapped out car. So these are the boomers. No family money helping them along. Public sector workers. And don't forget that mortgage rates in the 1980s were averagely around 12%. People had the basics. They weren't throwing dinner parties or drinking champagne.

You've completely missed the point. The OP isn't saying that everyone has that lifestyle. She's saying that she has a comparable income to her parents who DID have that lifestyle but that she can't afford anything like that.

I think this is interesting to consider from a socio-economic point of view.

My own family were middle class but definitely didn’t have that kind of cash, however I grew up around the kind of lifestyle that you describe @bumblebugs and agree that it is very hard to replicate now.

What people tend to overlook is that there were quite a few public policy initiatives that supported a certain kind of middle-class lifestyle, with far less attention paid to people who were genuinely disadvantaged.

The big one was the assisted places scheme. Local authorities would pay for places at private schools, even quite big-name schools, on the basis of a child being ‘bright but poor’. Eventually the scheme was scrapped because the government realised that few genuinely poor children were benefiting and a lot of quite middle-class parents had essentially managed to privately educate their children free of charge.

Back then you could even get tax relief on mortgage interest payments. It seems ridiculous now, but that was the case well into the nineties.

Some large companies funded private education as a perk for the children of senior staff. I remember a friend whose father worked for a high-street bank (presumably in a corporate role) telling me that she was going to sit some eligibility tests so that the bank would fund her through a private senior school.

Finally there was a much lighter-touch tax-collection and inspection regime. Tax returns and financial information was all on paper, the rules were less developed and it was fairly common for people who ran a company to put all kinds of personal costs (‘company cars’ or ‘hospitality’) through the business. Not ethical but a lot of it went on and it was just seen as being clever with your money rather than tax-dodging.

Different times.

Your parents and yourself had very privileged upbringings and very unusual. Only a tiny percentage of people have the sort of lifestyle where they go to balls, go on multiple holidays a year, and go to fancy private schools. Even back then that percentage was tiny, and the people who lived like that usually came from family money, as you said you and your parents did…so where’s your share? Surely your parents’ lifestyles were partly funded by their parents’ money so haven’t your parents helped fund you and your family in the same way?

I am not from a similar background but social life has changed so much in my lifetime (born 1970). My parents would often go to house parties, out to the casino with my uncle and aunt, and to dinner and people's homes. Even in the early 2000's when my children were babies, we still occasionally went to people's houses for dinner. That's a rare event in my social group now, if we meet with friends it's usually at a pub or restaurant, or perhaps a summer BBQ at their house.

I've certainly never been to a ball but I would love to!

Yeah, a bit. Mum worked nights for a while but spent most of her married life as a stay at home mum (4 kids) and dad worked away, often overseas or in a B&B miles away for the week. So in that sense yes, hard to pay off a mortgage and run a house of 6 people on one persons wage these days.

But we never did holidays, people didn't spend like people do now, didn't buy clothes all the time or any toys outside of b'day/xmas etc, food made from scratch and generally more sensible.