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?

Yes it’s broadly shifted. The working class are the new poor. The middle class are the new working class and the lower upper class are now middle class. And absolutely nothing has changed for the rich they just keep getting richer.

Not my experience though I grew up working class I’m now lower middle class and my children are middle class. I’m in my fifties and my children are late twenties.

She hasn't got a comparable life though, her parents were obviously loaded and had a privileged life and the op is not loaded , I think she might be trying to find blame somewhere but as it stands the Op is just as not as well off as her parents, usually generational wealth just continues i don't know why it hasn't passed on to the op. Maybe her parents want her to find her own way, after the privileged start her parents gave her?

Maybe your parents inherited all that "family money around" and spent it all on private schools and holidays.

You seem to suggest you moved down south. Going from the north to the south is going to hurt in terms of finances.

Back in the 90s someone worth £1 million in total in the Midlands had a nice house and plenty of cash to spare left over.

Nowadays £1 million in London gets you a run down semi.

Somewhat bizarrely, I decided to check how much old boyfriend's house was worth and whether it would still be affordable on a teacher's salary, and the actual house is on the market now.

Mortgage repayments: £1,988

Combined take home salary of 2 teachers: £5,200 (I'm a teacher, so know what the take home is)

So short answer, yes, you can have exactly the same lifestyle as your parents depending on who your parents were.

Peak welfare state was the 1970s.

benefits have been cut generally since then.

The economy has been on borrowed time since the last financial crisis. There has been rapid asset inflation that has tanked living standards. It's impact has not been equally felt across all social levels yet, but the addition of the AI boom means that or soon will be.
The working class who 'escaped' via the university route and now have laptop jobs that consist of forwarding emails to each other are about to be made redundant in huge numbers.
Only the landed aristocrats, plumbers and electricians will be safe. It will be interesting how the debate about benefits changes as these people find themselves in the breadline.

To put it another way, had wages risen with actual inflation, eg house prices, the average wage would be 65k not 39k.

Surely the main point is that 95% of children didn't have the same very privileged childhood as you even when you were growing up?

You refer to "if I worked as hard as my parents did..." Does that mean you think that builders, plumbers, nurses etc., who presumably also worked as hard, if not harder than your parents didn't deserve your idyllic childhood?

You probably are right about the trappings of upper middle class life being harder to afford now than 20,30,40 years ago based on the earnings of similar professional roles. But it's important to realise that your childhood was never representative of the vast majority anyway, so extrapolating out your lifestyle to make a wider point to the rest of society doesn't make any sense.

Honestly I think it’s more that your parents were pretty unusual. I don’t know anyone who regularly goes to balls and does canapés, sirloin and champagne every week and never have!

What I would advise is thinking about whether any of this really matters given that you’re all healthy and happy.

There was a very specific point after the war when middle and upper middle class professionals did very well. It was a bit of fleeting point in time.

Back to the exam question - I am doing a lot better than my parents. They were tenant farmers who worked all the hours god gave and left school at 16. Our house (this as the 80s and 90s) had no central heating and holidays were a week away at relatives or a couple of days added to my dad's business trips and i did not go abroad until I was 19. Most of our consumer goods and clothes were second hand.

I have two degrees, a comfortable well paid office job with a decent pension. I own a flat in London, I have several foreign holidays a year and can generally afford the consumer goods I want.

Social mobility works in both directions. Some are better off, some worse. I have more than I could ever have dreamed of as a child. My DC have more still.

I can relate to what the OP is saying. My parents were similar. However, their lifestyle was heavily subsidised by family money that has now run out.

Balls, Like in Cinderella?
I know plenty of rich people, they go on a lot of holidays and they live in beautiful houses, I’ve never met one yet who has told me they go to balls.

Many of the comments are missing the point. It is irrelevant whether the OP is referring to a lavish lifestyle or a basic one.

The reality is that if you are entirely self funded ie no inheritance or family support from 18 then if you have the same job your parents had a generation ago, your standard of living will be significantly worse than theirs was.

My grandparents were in service - Granny was a maid and Granddad an under butler. They managed to buy a tiny terraced house in Windsor in a shitty area near the barracks. My Gran’s house was sold for £50,000 when she died in 1985. I googled the house the other day and it sold last year for £835,000. That’s obscene. It’s a bog standard Victorian terrace with a tiny garden. The attic is now an extra bedroom, and they’ve knocked through the two rooms downstairs but apart from that, the layout is the same, although obviously updated. They’ve turned one of the bedrooms into a bathroom (there wasn’t one before). How does anyone afford to buy anywhere these days?

Our parents left education at 15 and 16 for work places then made different choices. They both had kids in 70 and in areas in 80s badly hit but Thatcher polices.

IL trade up houses and had hoildays but no car and one child. My parents had car and kids and rare hoildays and lots of money worries. MIl went back FT as soon as possible and Mum work p/t round us.

We had higher educations and higher paying jobs and had kids and got house later - we've had more UK hoildays than my parents, no car and same number of kids - but less hoidays than IL. Bigger house in less good areas.

So probably over all matched it.

However even just DH job twenty years earlier we'd have much better lifestyle than we can afford.

Why would you assume that you would be able to live the same kind of lifestyle as your parents? With all the massive shifts in society?
I read an article in the paper the other day where an expert gave his opinion that there is a 50% chance of humanity being wiped out by AI. In the meantime, many new graduates from good universities are finding it almost impossible to find work. See how the world is changing?

My parents didn't have holidays abroad until we kids had grown up. A car for Dad to go to work in and take us camping in the New Forest and old van for Mum to ferry us around in. I won't say what the van had been before Mum got it as she was famed for it. You could fit 6 kids in the back, we were were a bit embarrassed by it, but our friends loved going in it.

My parents had a different lifestyle and budget to your parents but yes, I agree. My generation (siblings and cousins) were the first to go to University and we've got decent normal jobs but wages and the cost of living mean we haven't been able to get the same financial security that our parents had by the age I am now.

The cost of housing is a major element of this.

How does anyone afford to buy anywhere these days?

I do not know - we bought first house 18 years ago just before financial crash we were already ruling out huge areas of country for work because we couldn't afford to buy there and still looking at long commutes. Even the cheaper area we've ended up in has gone up 100K since we moved here just over a decade ago.

My parents both worked for the NHS. Of my siblings two of us work for public bodies and the third has a multi million £ business (in turnover) so it's a yes/no answer.

My parents didn't go to university, we all went to state schools, they didn't run a car for a long, long time and it was only later in life had overseas holidays - a lot of the things that people class as "rights" these days.

The more well off sibling has all the trappings ie large house, holiday/weekend home and the holidays so definitely has a better standard of living than our parents or us. The rest of us have to be more careful.

I think for most people the answer would be a lot more nuanced. Its perhaps not lifestyle but standard of living you're getting at. In many ways I think there's more social mobility ie class isn't always a barrier.

I wish I had that van though.

It’s only housing that is more expensive in my life than when my parents were younger. Most other things (other than energy prices) are cheaper relatively speaking. Everyone in my house walks around with their own phone whereas we had one landline in my DF’s office and everyone I knew had second hand electrical goods and third hand cars. New stuff is cheaper and people have more of it but if you were rich enough to have all the new stuff then then it must feel very different.

I think the biggest difference is due to house price inflation. The first house I can remember living in was bought by my parents in 1977, a three-bed Victorian red-brick semi which they paid £9,000 for. A bit of a doer-upper tbf. In today’s money though that would be just £72,500, which wouldn’t even get you a studio flat.

Most people may not go to balls, but it is more or less impossible to ‘bob along’ finding a way as in say the 1970s and 80s and even ‘90s any more.

Apart from money, life is changing so fast through the internet with less actual social interaction, porn, a fast ‘Chinese whispers’ , and now AI, that there will be no resemblance soon.