To not understand how housewives of yesteryear could afford to stay home but being a SAHM is a lifestyle choice now?

[PeachyParisian]

Am I missing something really obvious? Or is it just a case of the cost of living rising and our standards of living increasing too? How could everyone manage to get by on just one wage?
I understand that work wasn't really an option for most women but traditionally families got by on one wage didn't they? When did that stop being possible for so many?

Yes the selling off of council houses and the failure by successive governments to build more is one of the worst things that has happened, in my opinion. I have always been bitterly opposed to that. I also blame greedy property developers, estate agents, endless property development programmes and the view that a home is an investment rather than just a home.

Housing costs - both rental and sale prices - are governed by market forces. When most couples shared one income, prices couldn't rise beyond what was affordable on one salary. Now most couples have an income each, housing costs have risen to what the market can bear.
Which effectively means that being a SAHM is only a viable option if your partner is a very high earner.

15 years ago, I was earning £10k in a full time job, first house I bought on my own was £27k, so 2.7 times my annual salary. I could've borrowed up to 3 times.

The same job, with the same company (I still have friends working there), now attracts a full time salary of £15k, but the house I bought back then has recently sold for £125k. It would be completely impossible nowadays for me to buy that same house, whilst working in the same job. In fact, two people earning £15k a year each wouldn't be able to borrow enough money to buy that house!

The house I rented just before buying was £45 a week! I distinctly remember that all my bills - council tax, electric, gas, water, tv licence, telephone bill - came to just under £150 a month, so rent and bills was under £350 a month, and my take home pay was about £750 a month, so £400 a month "spare".

Until recently, I was renting a similar property at a rate of £475 per month. Bills on top of that were £325, so £800 all in. That's an increase of over double for cost (not including the increased cost of food etc) but the salary for a retail type job certainly hasn't doubled over the last 15 years.

Higher expectations for lifestyles, increased housing costs etc have made it more difficult for one parent to stay at home now.

But realistically large amounts of women have always worked after having kids, even it was casual labour or part time. The idea of a SAHM who doesn't go out to work at all for x amount of years is a very recent concept historically for anything other than very comfortably off families.

Not sure if someone has mentioned this as couldn't read through all the posts but my mum always blamed Thatcher! She made it possible for two earners to contribute toward a mortgage, instead of just one previously. So the property market rose/grew to reflect this, that is was now necessary and the norm for two earners to afford one. It was designed to give us more choice, but in reflection it has not.

www.theguardian.com/housing-network/2013/apr/17/margaret-thatcher-legacy-housing-crisis

My DPs like yours Dowser saved for anything they needed .They never had a credit card and the only
thing they ever bought on the 'never never' (hire purchase) was a new cooker from the Electricity Board which they paid off with their electricity bill .Apart from a brief period when I bought my own house prior to marrying when the interest rate was 18%,I have never not paid off my credit card in full every month .My DD1 aged 29 is about to apply for one for the first time ,partly to boost her credit rating as she will shortly be applying for a mortgage ..Dd2 aged 25 doesn't have one either.I do think easy credit has a lot to answer for too .And there is obviously far more available to buy now .
Your childhood sounds very like mine .I was born in1950 so a little older .I suppose the difference was that no one in our social circle had that much .The local professionals like the vicar and headmaster lived in ' tied' houses and most of my parent's friends were tenant farmers .Some of them were proably quite well to do but they didn't splash it about

My mother was a mortgage broker and in those days if you worked for a bank, you got a staff discount on a mortgage (can you imagine????) she had no intention of going back to work. My parents bought their house on a 6% interest rate, and when my mum left and lost her staff discount the mortgage went up to the standard for the time 16-18%

My dad is a plumber. Can you imagine people being able to cope with that hike now? He had to do anti social work (away from home, nights) for extra cash, and they did go without quite a lot (but they're also bad with money)

I blame Thatcher for lots of things, but two earners could always contribute towards a mortgage! Only the main earner could get the mortgage in the first place, though.

I think the other important factor is about population growth, increased pressure on existing housing stock and the limited land available in the UK. Houses in France are cheap because land is cheap. There is a good supply of rental property in most areas (not Paris) and a house is a home not an investment.

Evelight -The ' ideology' of owning your own home is a curiously British thing ;far less common in the rest of Europe.Driven by the loss of social housing and the ridiculous cost of renting -Dd1pays£860 a month for some bed flat south of the river in London .?
But regarding it as an investment (rather than somewhere to live)whose value will rise is a comparatively recent thing I think .

We were obviously typing at the same time Emilyalice

Yes that's what I meant EmilyAlice, that two names could be on the Mortgage :0)

Available credit made a difference - in the early 70s there was HP but otherwise no Visa etc, and when my parents were able to get a mortgage, they had to travel 100 miles to the nearest bank that had money.

That house has gone up in value 100 times since. DH in a better role earns about 10x what my dad did.

Stuff is much cheaper now - complaining that people buy new clothes instead of farming and patching miss that the cost of a needle, thread and a patch is probably more than the cost of a new shirt, thanks to mechanisation, shipping containers, and cheap overseas labour. Ditto a huge fridge freezer will cost way less than the small fridge with icebox I grew up with, use less electricity, and given the local greengrocer has closed, be more efficient than more time spent shopping.

But while stuff is cheaper, rent is higher but so too are care-type labour costs like childcare, care for elderly family etc, and a lot of the skilled manual type jobs have been replaced by robots/gone overseasso while there are now some more highly skilled jobs, there's also more insecure/less-skilled jobs and less in the middle. Add the move from "a job for life"to needing to change jobs and thus longer commutes becoming normal, you've added transport costs that weren't a problem for many parents when I was young.

I think when we bought our first house you could have an 80% mortgage on two and a half times salary. You had to chase round the building societies to get one,I think it took us about six months. (House was was £4250, our earnings £1,250pa. According to Zoopla same house sold recently for £108,000).
The increase in the money that you could borrow definitely fuelled price rises.

It's mostly about wages.

Wages obey the laws of supply and demand - so they drop when there is a large workforce to choose from and rise when it contracts.

Women entering the workforce (in a more formalised and employed way than previously) virtually doubled the supply of labour. This has crashed wages.

At the same time, as everyone has said, dual income HH drove up prices on housing by being able to borrow more. But the impact of a larger workforce has gradually brought wages down to the point where dual income is no longer a nice to have allowing greater spending power but a must have to afford housing in many areas.

Just to be clear, I'm not saying this is a bad thing - I'm a feminist and happy for women to compete with men for jobs and let the most competent win - but it does have an impact.

I am hoping it is a blip and the longer term impact will be women shaping the agenda and pushing for a better balance overall but we are the generation stuck in the middle.

I was born in 1975,my Mum went to work full time(for then nowhere near as many hours as most people are expected to work now)my Dad worked long hours 5/12 days a week,he was a foreman on a building site.

My Mum worked Monday-Friday and my Nan would look after me(she was very old when I was born so well past the age people were expected to work till back then)my two big brothers were 13 and 15 by then so had both left school and were working full time.

We lived in a 3 bed council house,my Dad still lives there now.

My memory's of growing up were a rent man came every week,in with your rent was your council tax and water rates(my Mum and Dad hated when that all changed)it worked out a lot cheaper that way.We had a coal man come round once a week.None of the houses where I lived had central heating,double glazed windows or very reliable boilers.
The houses were freezing cold,you'd get frost on the insides of the windows in the winter.
Everyone bought they're milk from the milkman even though we had a little shop in our road.
Everyone had they're newspaper delivered every day.

If you bought a bottle of pop from the local shop,you took the glass bottle back and got some money back,can't remember how much,I think it was called corona.

The Ice cream man came round once a week on a Sunday about 4'0' clock.

Only one person in the whole road had a house phone and there must be nearly 100 houses.

We had one holiday a week,a week in Weymouth in a bed and breakfast.I thought I was really lucky to get that.Only ever went to a zoo twice as a child,no farm visits,no theme parks.

We didn't get anywhere near what we spend on our 5DC for Christmas or they're birthdays.I did tell my Mum once how much we spent on them(she'd asked me)she said for God sake never tell your father he'll have a heart attack and drop down dead.

I don't think it is just women in the workforce that have crashed wages though. Loss of jobs in manufacturing and heavy industry, goods made abroad and imported, mechanisation in factories have all played a part. Then there is the loss of the unionised workforce with the consequent rise in zero hour contracts, jobs outsourced to private companies etc etc

I haven't RTFT but for my mum I think it was just the expectation of the time that she gave up work when she had me (I am the eldest).
I don't really think there is a massive difference from then till now though as despite my dad having a decent job we had very little money. Nothing was new, all furniture was second hand -my grans hand me down's mainly.
We never had holidays or ate out. it was a very basic lifestyle and I know my mum often had to borrow from my gran and granddad.

Once my mum went back to work when I was a teenager then there was much more money to go round.

Comparing it to today if I didn't work our lifestyle would be pretty similar it was when I was a kid, actually we would probably be slightly better off in that we would still be able to afford a cheap holiday and would still be able to save a wee bit.
Me working means we can have multiple holidays a year and have a pretty good lifestyle in terms of eating out, weekends away, money in the bank.
Almost exactly the same as it was for my mum and dad when my mum started working.

I wouldn't want my DD to grow up with the lifestyle I had as a kid as it was very limited.

The tiny terraced house my parents started out in in 1951 is on the market for £280,000. I think that is the reason. They bought it without a bathroom and with an outside loo, and it now has an upstairs bathroom in what was the third bedroom, but it is tiny and I remember how claustrophobic it made me feel (no wonder my first words every morning were 'Can I go and play out yet?').
When my parents married after the war priority for jobs went to men, as women were expected to stay at home and raise the next generation (the dreaded baby boomers). My mother got an office job when DSis went to Junior School and I remember a teacher asking us of our mothers worked and from the reaction I understood it was a VERY BAD THING. I was embarrassed to tell people after that.
When I had my first DC in 1975 the man was still assumed to be the breadwinner and the mortgage was calculated on 2 and a half times the husband's salary and half the wife's (expecting that people would be married) or three times the husband's. We couldn't afford to buy as I was a SAHM until DH got a job in a much cheaper area, where we still live.
It seems as though once women went back to work in large numbers house prices went up to a level where two wages were needed to buy.

And another thing - we pay far more tax. UK is the leader of stealth taxes in Europe - our tax burden, as they call it, is second only to Denmark these days.

Clearly housing but also as many have highlighted our want for 'more'. I work in the evil advertising industry but I never knew really how advertising started until I saw a lecture on it. Basically when the big crash and depression happened in the USA it was largley down to the increase in manufacturing investment. Previously if you had a pair of shoes (for example) you had one pair because that is what you could afford. As manufacturing increased you could afford two pairs, even if you didn't need them. But no-one bought two pairs because, you only needed one. Companies that had invested in manufacturing were producing products no-one wanted, hence the crash. So along came marketing and advertising to make us believe that we needed two pairs/bigger car/better house. It worked in terms of getting us out of the depression and creating a manufacturing boom but like all contrived policies there is always a nasty side effect.
Womens wages still suffer from 'the man needs to support the house' effect even all these years on.

I don't think income tax has got higher though. I thought it was highest in the seventies, was cut by Thatcher and then again by successive chancellors. Interestingly on the Jacques Peretti programme about how Britain has been screwed by the rich (my interpretation), he said that British society was at its most equal in the seventies. After that a smaller and smaller proportion of the population has owned a larger and larger share of the wealth.

Emily alice - I agree it's not just about women but I thought it was useful to point out the chicken and egg situation with regard to being able to live on one income.

I'm not sure about taxes Corygal, in terms of how much extra they take now. Certainly as a share of GDP tax hasn't shifted much but that's offset by lower corporation tax so there may have been an increase in family taxation levels as the burden has moved to personal taxation vs companies.

Companies are doing brilliantly out of all this. Wages as a share of GDP are about 10 points lower than they were in the 60's and '70's. That's about £100bn that companies are taking in profits rather than paying to workers.

I think you are right about house prices Larry

I think there is a difference between SAHMs who have NEVER worked, and those who stayed at home while their children are very small (pre school) and then returned to work. I (born 1958) and my mother (born 1923) both did this as did many people of my acquaintance of several different generations.

Certainly when I had my children there was no free child care until school at 5, (and indeed extremely few nurseries even if paying was an option) so it made more financial sense for me to stay at home with three pre-schoolers. We were staggeringly poor though; after paying the bills we had £30 a month for five of us to live on. (yes I know £30 went a bit further in the mid 1980s, but not that far!)

I went back to work when my youngest was 4 years old (evenings) and gradually increased my hours to full time working in the next few years.

It's a different thing to never working and remaining at home as a career and I can't think of a single person I know, of any age, who has done that.