to think the baby-boomers had it easy

[Ionderog]

Is it me or did our parents' generation have it much easier than us?

Yes, good post Huffy, and good point about the mortgage endowment shortfall. Many of us younger baby boomers (me 1963, DH 1956) were caught out by that.

Like someone said further back, the generation that "had it easy" with housebuying and a job for life and a final salary pension were my parents generation who were born before and during WWII, not the baby boomers. They had it hard early on with rationing, no health care and other deprivations.

I was born in 1963 and although I went to a grammar school it went comprehensive while I was there. Out of a cohort of 360 very few stayed at school past 16 and even fewer went to university (as opposed to polytechnic).

I've been working since I was 16 yet changes to the pension age mean I'll have to work until I'm 66/ 68- more than 50 years!

My children didn't get free pre school education- we had to pay for it. Then they missed out on grants for further education too. We didn't get tax credits and although DH was always low paid he always earned just a little bit over the limit to claim anything.

Like many of our generation I got married at 20. We saved hard before we got married and with both of us working FT just about afforded a little house, with no heating, furnished with other people's cast offs. The only thing we had new was our bed, bought by the ILs as a wedding present. We didn't have holidays or go out because we just couldn't afford it. Yes we were lucky that house prices were still manageable, but it didn't just fall into our lap with no effort, and it needed 2 FT salaries.

Newlyweds at my office have a car, go to the US on holiday, have all new furniture, expect central heating as a matter of course, etc etc. It is just different expectations.

It's very easy to look at someone else's life and pick out the good bits but you don't always see the downside of it.

Are you me elvislives?
House prices were managable, but mortgages were strictly rationed. You ..had to wait your turn, and if the building society manager thought you were over stretching yourself you wouldn't get one. ALso as I keep warning my DC mortgage rate did go up to 15 1/2%. Stuff for the home such as white goods, furniture, even sheets etc. also cost more in real terms....probably because they were still made in the UK!

I think the 70s were tough. High unemployment, winter of discontent, 3 day week, etc. My dad was a teacher and my mum left teaching to have me and my brother, no choice about going back to work until we were both at school. Food prices were really high compared to now, I can remember mum really having to watch the pennies at the weekly food shop.

I think luxury goods are cheaper now as are clothes, foreign holidays, etc.

I don't see how you can define the baby boomer generation as "selfish".

They made the most of their opportunities, as the current generation does too.

Should they have said, "Oh no, we're not going to buy a house. It would be selfish to profit from future big rises in property values?" Even if they could have foreseen them?

Or, "Let's not bother with a pension. The next generation might not be able to afford one as good?" Even though contributing to a company pension scheme was probably compulsory?

They were lucky, not selfish.

I think every generation has it tough when they are starting out and have young DC. Back in the 70s/80s, and before, very few families received any extra financial help apart from CB. Most didn't have free pre-school for under 5s. There were nursery school attached to infant schools but only in larger towns. In most areas parents paid for a couple of hours playschool in a cold run down church hall. Tax credits are very recent. Previous generations of parents are probably envious of those!

My parents were slightly ( by a few weeks) pre baby boomers and I guess I am late ( early 1960's) baby boomer.
I wouldn't say they had it easier, just that there were different expectations.
My parents were not allowed to go to grammar school as their parents could not afford the uniform ( no grants in their day) so their career opportunities were limited because the secondary moderns only offered school certificate, not o levels. neither went to university ; their parents neede them to be at work bringing in a wage to help support the family. They never managed to buy their own property and mum still lives in her council house now. There were not the material goods around then that we have now. My mum didn't have a washing machine until I was about three years old. There was no/ very little child care but in any case, many employers would not employ married women and there was no maternity leave either, so if you had a baby you often had no alternative but to become a SAHM, at least for a while. if you did then go back to work, there were not the number of childminders that there are today and they were not, I believe, regulated like now. If your marriage broke down, as my parents' did, it was extremely difficult to find childcare to enable you to work, and benefits were very low.
When my mum re married, my step dad had a car. It was the first car we ever had and I was ion my teens. We never had foreign holidays when I was young and neither did most of my friends. if you knew someone who had been abroad, you were considered a cut above the rest. We didn't have a TV for about five years. For no other reason than we couldn't afford it. Yet we didn't really consider ourselves poor, because most of our contempories were in similar situations financially.

When I married (early 80's), we were lucky enough to get a mortgage on a little house, but other than our bed which was a wedding present, all our furniture was second hand, from friends and family.

Most people I know getting married nowadays, would not contemplate a home without TV, fitted carpets/laminate flooring, central heating, double glazing, washing machine, microwave, dishwasher, electric shower, garage or at least space to park a car,etc etc. Many families 'can't survive' without at least one foreign holiday a year and at least one car. If we want these things, they have to be paid for.

So, no, I don't think their generation had it any easier than ours, it is just that priorities were different and expectations have changed.

I agree that expectations have changed.
My parents were able to buy a small house in the early fifties, but they lived with one set of parents first. My in laws did the same. Even in my generation (born 1952) I knew people who lived with parents after marriage while they saved a deposit. We rented for five years and moved to a cheaper area before we bought a house.
Expectations now are quite high. People expect to own a car, or, in this area, two. The things available for homes now and often regarded as "essential" were unachievable luxuries to us. All our furniture when we got married (1970s) was secondhand from various relatives who had died. We were given a fridge and a twin tub washing machine as wedding presents. Neither of us went on an aeroplane until we were in our forties.
Our parents were very thrifty, as a result of the war. Make do and mend was the order of the day when we were children and there was pride in living within your means.As children we had a maximum of three of everything clothing wise: one on, one in the wash, one in the drawer.Compared with the vast quantity of clothes children have today (my own included) that seems incredible.
I think we just have become accustomed to a very high standard of living which we take for granted.

I'm agreeing with all those who said that our lives as young people were / are very different from the lives of those born in the 1940s and 1950s. We notice what they have now (the houses and the pensions), but we rarely notice what they didn't have.

Actually, they didn't necessarily have the freedom to travel the world, due to the currency restrictions. You could only take a certain amount of money out of the UK, which meant you could only go on holiday for a short time.

Food was far more expensive, as a proportion of household income, than it is today.

We looked at the photos of my mum on a 3 month research trip in the early 1970s, and laughed hysterically to see she only had 3 tops and 3 skirts for the whole trip. She said that was considered entirely normal - the overwhelming majority people had far fewer clothes than we do now.

I totally agree. My DH and I have to work our arses off to pay the mortgage on the 500K it costs to buy a modest semi detached family house where we live (I know we choose to do this, so no posts about how we could commute into town for 3 hours a day and buy a semi for half that please). My mother in law NEVER worked, and my father in law retired at 50 after a low ranked middle management type job at BT, with a final salary pension scheme. When they were our age a decent family house could be bought for about twice his (probably not very high) salary. They have NO idea what its like for us - local schools and NHS catastrophic so we pay school fees and BUPA as well as huge mortgage, and MIL wonders why I can't give up my job to look after a baby full time? It drives me mad.

jealousy is a turrible thang

No being shafted by your own parents is a terrible thing

Do people really expect to get everything new? When I bought my first house (it was a wreck, had no kitchen, central heating etc.) My brother gave me his old futon, Mum and Dad their old dining table and buffet which had already been passed down the street and about 6 months later I bought a brand new double bed. Passed all of it on during various subsequent house moves. Isn't this normal, or did my mother bring me up to be exceptionally thrifty? I'm only 37 by the way

I'm 38 and my first house was furnished with relatives cast-offs including the carpets. I didn't have the money for any furniture or white goods.

I lived there for six years and didn't replace the carpet in my bedroom or redecorate in there until I sold. The other bedroom was tarted up twice by my Dad once because I got a colleague in as a lodger and then because I was expecting dd, for all the three minutes she spent in that room.

I sold up, went to rented and furnished, got a council flat then a two-bed HA house having also met DH.

We live in fear of credit and had no carpet there for almost a year and when his family came down for our wedding had nine adults in the sitting room with just one two-seater and a few hard-backed chairs in it (Guess what people bought us as a belated wedding present? )

Having it all immediately is quite foreign to me too.

Exactly Milady. Pretty much everything in our new house we've bought from new as we moved 6000 miles away and the firm gave us a generous relocation allowance, but that is a long way from friends and family to have new stuff. The dcs who are 4 and 2 on the other hand get really excited about hand-me-down clothes and bikes from friends and proudly say things like: this was x's t-shirt! Perhaps I'm instilling something good in them after all!

Why are people comparing now to the 1970s?

That was 30 fucking years ago.

Of course things aren't the same.

This is starting to sound like a monty python sketch
I just wish those born from 1955 onwards would at least acknowledge they had secure tenancy's/council housing/the right to buy and property prices at a sensible ratio to earning which was then inflated away for you.
I'm sure most worked hard, i'm sure many didn't make the most of the opportunity but the reason that our generation of 25-35 yr olds aren't in the same position is nothing to do with our love of buying ipods.

mama there was a thread a while back about this in Chat IIRC with people saying that they lived in a shoebox on the M4 etc , was very Python.

Agree with you Avril, my lovely two-bed maisonette close to hospital (ideal buy-to-let) and station in the S.E was £33K when I bought it. Imagine!

But I didn't have enough for furnishings and fittings or clothes / transport for work or quite often food so I borrowed and got into trouble. So even then owning a house as an employed graduate in the '90's was unsustainable.

Mamatomany...I'm not sure what you say about secure tenancy is actually correct. 'Cathy Come Home' was set in the mid 1960s. It is fiction but I'm sure very true to life. Plots a young couples decline into the gutter. Hope we never see the like of that again. It really frightened me has a child....don't know why my mother let me stay up and watch it!

I for one do acknowledge that DH and me were LUCKY to buy when we did. We also got a 'good' endowment mortgage, which did as the man said it would give us a nice windfall. The house we live is worth more than I could have imagined 25-30 years ago. But any money is tide up it's not spending money. We could have remortgaged and lived the high life but chose not to! We did not have it easy....we had 3 small DC......0% pay increases(if you were in private sector work), high inflation, rocketing mortgage rates, the poll tax, power cuts...I'm getting carried away now.

Tide up.....that's wrong it must be!.....you see I'm not a baby boomer so didn't get a good education!

I do think its cause the young have different expectations. When I moved out and bought my first place I had everything new and so did all my friends.

I was only 18 (just turned 19 when the sale was complete) but it was a big thing then not to have anything second hand as it wasnt seen as cool. I am 26 now and I realise that was ridiculous and buy second hand stuff now but I think it is because the younger generations are more spoilt. (I will admit it as I am of them!)

Good post cat64. It is definitely also a question of expectations. My PIL and dh's brother and girlfriend are coming to visit us in the States soon and are worried about staying with us as it may be cramped. Our dcs are v small and we have 4 bedrooms and 3 bathrooms, only because we live in the US of course. The in-laws have a holiday cottage next to their large house that people can stay in, whereas for my parents it just would never be an issue! I still think they don't realise how lucky they have been in terms of inheritance, able to buy property at really cheap prices etc.