To ask why everything is so f**kin' expensive?!

[MummyStruggles]

Just that really?

And, also, there's ALWAYS "something" that needs to be bought or replenished i.e new pillows and duvets for the whole household! Grrrr!

Meant to be a lighthearted thread but you know, I get really bloody stressed about it!

Anyone else?

Honeydukes92 We're supposed to be taking both kids to Disneyland Paris in August and that's expensive enough, I don't know how I'd ever manage to take them to Florida!

Our duvets went very thin at once - we didn't have money to buy good quality when they were bought. We bought few more over two months then doubled up the existsing one so there were two on some beds.

They're ususally ones brought downstairs for snuggling under and watching TV if it's cold and we don't want to put the heating on.

@downcasteyes inflation is about spending power. So, quite literally 'at this time £1 could buy you x, now it can only buy you y (less)/ now it can buy you z (more).

At its most simple, you could look at the cost of one item and say 'a year ago I could buy 10 apples for £1, now I can only buy 5 apples.' The trouble with that is that it doesn't tell you if the value of money has gone down, or if something has happened to apples to make them more expensive.

So the National Office for Statistics used the Retail Price Index to keep track of how much it would cost to buy a selection of items. If the cost of those items goes up, inflation is higher.

Now they also look at the Consumer price index, but it's essentially the same concept.

I don’t agree that buying cheap means replacing more. When now dh moved in he had a new kettle that cost over one hundred pounds. Within a year it broke. I replaced it with a £5 Tesco kettle and it’s still going strong 6 years later.

Sometimes it’s the difference between need and want. Our kitchen carpet has worn through, I can’t afford to replace it right now (big room) so got a rug. I want a carpet, I didn’t need one.

If your wages go up 1%, but the cost of living goes up 5%, your money is worth less.

Mummy Tesco does Silentnight pillows fairly cheap. If your DD sweats a lot, and if you haven't done so already, make sure her covers and sheets are 100% cotton - again supermarkets sell 100% cotton duvet sets. Pretty much all the novelty/character sets are poly cotton which isn't good, so you could compromise with a plain white duvet set (cheaper too) and then a character blanket at the end of the bed.

We also go for the 7.5 tog duvet and top up with blankets when it's colder, the fleece blankets are good for that.

So have we Tinkly. In fact, I wish some of wasn't so sturdy, so I could justify replacing it, but I fear a lot of it will live forever.

I must live in a parallel universe to a lot of people. I shop in normal shops, towards the cheaper end, Ikea, supermarkets, Currys/AO.com, Dunelm, Matalan etc and most stuff seems fine and usually lasts.

Some stuff seems quite cheap but when wages haven't gone up in years and everything else has then it is hard. Council tax for instance is up 7 pounds a month for me, utilities are crazy prices. New boiler set me £2000 last month out of savings which will never go back. My biggest difficulty is the huge cost of tradesmen such as electricians etc which bears no relation to my hourly rate. Every month seems to bring another pay cut effectively.

I think a lot of things have got a lot cheaper.
When my children were babies there was very little in the way of supermarket clothes for them. Baby clothes were bought in mothercare or department stores.
Same with white goods as no Tesco direct or buying online.

We replace things that don’t need replacing like the sheet example. A stained sheet would be soaked in a stain remover/bleach then washed as normal. Duvets became a thing when I was in my teens and I still have and use my first duvet as a spare. Now people seem to change them as they just want a new colour scheme.

It is harder with children as they do grow quickly but then if you know you have a growing teen why would you buy top of the range when they are going to outgrow it within months?

It’s so difficult these days OP! Need a baby gate for my DD’s room but it’s a very narrow door frame so one that fits would cost at least £100. For a baby gate that’s just insanity! I’ve had one pair of, luckily sturdy, trainers for the past year now as most nice ones are £100+ and can’t justify loads of pairs. I only get my hair cut and dyed for birthdays or Christmas as it costs £200. And then minuscule things like not being able to up my dumbbell weight because a 7.5kg one costs over £30! Can’t justify that either with DCs

I think of this when I read the budgeting threads.... People carefully costing out all the predictable monthly costs and bills, and then saying they save the remainder for a rainy day, holiday, university fees etc... Doesn’t it “rain” almost (at least once,
mostly more!) every month in most households with some kind of ad hoc bit of spending?!....
In my experience you need a reasonable sized “other” figure in any budget.

I agree, forever needing to do something. We’ve lived in our flat 3 years and other than the kids room which changes, the rest has stayed the same. When we finally started looking at paint colours etc to decorate the bathroom needed done, whole thing ripped out and redone. Fine as we got another room done but it took all our savings and there’s still things going wrong it, leaky shower, bath not sealed properly, bath panel falls off.

There’s tons of stuff needing done in the house, I actually have a list of stuff by room as it’s pretty much the same list as it was 3 years ago with the addition of “repaint all walls” as the kids found a pack of crayons one day 🙄

@Lougle - thanks for the explanation! I think I understand what inflation is and how it's calculated now. I am wondering about the statement that 'real' inflation is actually in double figures, i.e. that these calculations from the CPI are wildly wrong?

Try buying a pillow protector, plus pillows can be washed. I had some own brand John Lewis ones and they washed perfectly ok and didn’t go lumpy.

I’m not doubting costs can be prohibitive if you don’t have the money you don’t have it. But I don’t understand the real need by some people to keep up with fashions and trends.

But also people want (and have) more stuff. Phone contracts for example - some families have several on the go! Not to mention things like sky, netflix etc. And foreign holidays. Contact lenses instead of glasses (my DS) etc etc. Myself and most of my friends growing up and well into our thirties and forties had little in the way of clothes or make up. 'When I were a lad' these things weren't available or deemed necessary. We did, however, have to rent massive TVs from Radio Rentals!

The "food is too cheap" comment by Humble is understandable in context. In fact, some food is so cheap they give it away (food banks). In my opinion its really things like massive housing costs that have gone through the roof - supply and demand - supply restricted, demand ever expanding, and things like fuel costs, travel, council tax etc.

"Doesn’t it “rain” almost (at least once,
mostly more!) every month in most households with some kind of ad hoc bit of spending?!.... "

I think this is right.

I wonder how much this is to do with people really maxxing out their housing budgets (due to insanely rising housing costs), leaving little room for the 'emergency' spending which, as you say, is far less irregular than you might think.

Every month, first and foremost, I transfer all the money to cover my bills, that's paramount for me. Hate being late on bills or in arrears.

Then it's things like big weekly shopping (which I appreciate everyone has) but my bloody son eats me out of house and home, I cannot fill him up and DD is heading the same way! I want to keep them full but full of goodness and fruit and veg isn't cheap either!

I'm just having a whinge I think, like I say, all lighthearted but stressful sometimes also.

Also going back to families in the 60s, 70s, 80s etc, most people didn't really care that much about home decoration. Wallpaper was left on for years, the same with carpets, most things were pretty basic.

However, I do have some agreement re. things being made to last. I've gone through so many lamps in the last 15 years - all made in China etc. Whereas my parents had lamps that lasted literally decades.

Food is cheap if you compare it to other European counties.
I visited a Eastern European country last year and went superamerket shopping. Food was pretty much the same price as Tesco but named brand shower gels/shampooToothpaste etc was 3 times the price and this is a country where wages are very low and even skilled trades earn around £400 per month or less.

Our youngest son decided to pick a scan on his knee and crawl across our pretty expensive white bed sheets. Can’t get the blood out, they need replacing

No, they don’t need replacing. You want to replace them.

When I was a child, back in the olden days, I remember that whenever our washing machine, telly, cooker, whatever broke down my mum would call out a repair man. This is what people did then. Nowadays, things are far more likely to be replaced than repaired if they’re out of warranty.
It also seemed that things, appliances lasted a lot longer than they do now. We’re forever replacing cheap crap.

Sewer pump needs replacing and electrics need changing. We could leave it as is, it isn’t dangerous. But that means lifting the manhole cover, switching the pump on and keeping fingers crossed it doesn’t trip the electricity, daily.

Consumer goods are made appallingly imo. Things seem to constantly break down or are shoddily made and need replacing. Why on earth governments don't try to tackle this is beyond me. It's a massive environmental issue...as these items end up in landfill and not to mention the carbon footprint of buying new things.

I wish it was easier to buy medium quality stuff. Now it seems you have a choice of eye wateringly expensive or shoddy.

We live in a time where credit is freely available and consumer goods and their variety seem unendless

Cheaply (poorly) made items abound, wages are stagnant whilst the biggest expenditure (housing) has reached levels never seen before (and unlikely ever to be repeated)

Choice is dizzying, little wonder each person now probably owns 10 or 20 times more things than someone in the 70s or 80s

We are all expected to have more things these days. When I was a child I had 1 pair of shoes at a time which did for everything, plus wellies. We didn't have trainers, crocs, party shoes etc etc. It's become relatively cheaper to buy clothing if you go to supermarkets etc but we're just made to feel we need to buy more of it.