@Overdueanamechange
My grandmother will tell me stories about everyone have net curtains so "folks couldn't see what you didn't have". If you wanted benefits then an official would visit and tell you what furniture you needed to sell before you could claim anything. They mended clothes, brought jumpers from jumble sales to unravel and re knit, didn't run a car and thought they were well off if they had a black and white TV. You were posh if you ate out at all.
DH was unemployed for a few months in the early 70s. An inspector visited our home to ensure we weren't sitting on any assets. It was fairly humiliating. I was pregnant with DC2 at the time, and it was poverty level, in a crap house hundreds of miles from family.
Growing up, my parents weren't poor, but nearly everyone was careful and mended and repaired. People also cooked most things from scratch, and there was much less choice. My mother, like so many of the time, made my clothes and knitted and mended. My father was a manager, but we lived in rented housing, never had a car, and only got our first TV in 1960, which was black and white, and rented. We ate well, were always nicely clothed, but there was little spending on extras.
I think there is a lot more to spend money on nowadays, advertising has made people see what they could have, and deferred gratification seems to be disappearing. I was a council housing officer and worked on some fairly deprived estates, and the comparisons between households on similar incomes was surprising. Most of the difference was expensive debt, poor spending choices, and an inability to cook even the most basic meals from scratch.