to ask how do people afford all these things ?

[kermitspants]

Me & DH have a fairly good/decent income between us. What with the cost of living increases etc and general costs to run a house for 5 of us, we don't/cant afford to have many luxuries. I see FB posts with friends (acquaintances) who:

Were celebrating the coronation at home with Fortnum & Mason champagne & hamper

Purchased a brand new landrover as a gift for their wife for Christmas

Brought their DC a brand new car for their 18th

Pop up marquees in the garden with the biggest TV screen for friends to come over and watch England playing

Christmas and the gifts are ££££££ with some people taking the DC to lapland (in addition of the summer holiday they had) and buying top of the range gifts/food/hampers

Have the biggest Christmas trees (ours is usually around 5 foot and costs around £50 (real tree) which I thought was a hell of a lot of money for a tree). Goodness knows how much the bigger trees cost

New York trips for Christmas

My 'luxury' for Christmas food was a posh bottle of M&S prosecco for the table along side Tesco food. I splashed out on a £14 posh bottle of fizz for the coronation, and that was pushing the boat out.

Am I missing something here ????

NB - those who think I am jealous, need not reply.

@BetterFuture1985 - I think it says more about you than your ex wife that you begrudge your own children "luxury fruit"

So between your cleaner and takeaways you spend approx £200 pm?

That's your new car finance or a good chunk towards a holiday right there!

News flash! Not everyone is struggling.

In social media it is easy to get a skewed view of what 'everyone else' is doing. It is easy to conflate Person A, B and C doing different things and start to see it as everyone doing everything.

It is also easy to see something as luxury and indicative of a fabulous lifestyle when in fact they are a one off and not as expensive as you think.

Due to car financing, hpi, leasing, cars are no longer an indicator of wealth. I know plenty of people who drive round in brand new 4x4s who aren't in the least bit well off by anybody's standards....if you could only buy cars outright, the roads would practically be deserted.

we knew with people like this, turned out when they got divorced, it’s all been on credit

This.

And it's seriously worrying that someone claiming to earn this amount of money can't grasp this VERY SIMPLE fact.

Yep, and I think this plus of course the cost of living is why these threads come up so much. Things that used to be indicators of wealth now aren't.

Designer or at least branded clothes can be obtained much more cheaply second hand. Travel is more accessible and lots of people have ways to do it on the cheap. And now many more people are driving new and/or 'prestige' cars because of leasing and HPI options. So sometimes people see these things and wonder how they're affordable. I think that's particularly true with cars, where a lot of people don't realise how much more relatively expensive used cars are now because they bought theirs pre covid. There isn't the understanding that the affordability of eg a 4 year old Range Rover vs a decent second hand car isn't anywhere near the same comparison it used to be.

There wasn’t anything really in my bag as I never carry cash. My Credit and debit card got stopped immediately.
Never stopped the clubcard. The thing was who ever took it were spending way more than me. . We went to the Red Sea, and France and Disney on those Tesco vouchers.

Remember the days of 4x clubcard points if you bought anything through them

This one always pisses me off too, the idea that if someone the someone can't possibly be earning that kind of money and they MUST be in debt.

It is extremely hard to be in a lot of debt for a long time and to get into more debt. You get to a certain point and can't continue, the debt needs to be paid, the cost of debt is extortionate, it is just not possible to continue on and on in debt and racking up credit cards and loans.

So whilst there might be an element of debt, it is not to the tune that most people think it is.

If you ever find out who this person is, please ask them if they would also like to nick my Clubcard!

I’m just can’t imagine how @BetterFuture1985’s wife managed to let a prince like this slip through her fingers.
feeding his children grapes! £400 a year so his children could have a hot lunch at school- what shocking waste 🙄

We know a family who are incredibly tight (but earn decent wages) so I imagine they have plenty of savings. They are the sort who claim they “don’t like snacking or chocolate and sweet stuff” and proudly buy the bare minimum groceries and preach about budgeting and meal prep. - the kind where you eat the same meal twice or three times a week. Not for us tbh! We like food too much. They came round for dinner once and cleaned us out of our big tin of chocolates mind and all our nice cheese. Their kids are also like them as I don’t think they get nice snacks much at home either. We save as much as we can too but I couldn’t live without nice food and life’s little luxuries! But I guess everyone is different.

I agree with some of this, but it misses out the incredibly significant point that there is huge variation in housing costs because of our deranged housing market over the past couple of decades. A few years difference in when people bought their first property could easily mean hundreds more disposable income per month, if not more. And then obviously there's the regional variation.

So certainly, some people do have more money than others, but it's not necessarily because of 50k vs 100k household income. When our household income was 50k, we had more cash for treats than some friends in London who were on well more than that, and one couple were privately renting on that income too so weren't even going to end up with more equity than us. People don't necessarily realise the extent to which housing in particular but also childcare makes a difference, hence the interesting discussion about the ONS chart upthread.

Surely it's obvious, they either earn more than you or have less monthly regular outgoings than you.

Hahahahaha! OMG not two bottles of wine a week - what an alcoholic spendthrift!

Yes, BetterFuture begrudging his children grapes just illustrates the differences in people's choices really. Thankfully plenty of us manage to divorce with a clean break and then can spend our own earned money how we choose including on grapes (which we certainly can afford as I am a lawyer).

It is just for people who are on similar amounts of money choose to spend money on different things. They are neither right nor wrong - just different. I chose to pay 5 sets of school and university fees. Loads of people would think that ridiculous when school is free and student loans abound. I am comfortable with my choices and other people theirs. Live and let live.

(which we certainly can afford as I am a lawyer).

Oh goodness, are you? You could have mentioned it at some point!

@DarrellRiversCriminalBehaviourOrder 😂

I have a friend who goes on the most amazing holidays all over the world, her FB and insta are full of fab photos of her, her DH and another couple.

They have minimum wage jobs but most people don't realise that the other couple are millionaires and pay for every single holiday.

Sorry. I usually let it go. It's not as if we don't know to expect it. I'm just a bit over it.

You say family of 5 so I assume 3 children. Other families may have 1 or 2, so less people for money to go round.

Some people earn very high salaries, even outside of London.

May have family or inherited money.

There are many other reasons.

In my experience (not personal) it's either inheritance or very well paid jobs, or a combination of the two, usually alongside having got onto the housing ladder a while ago. Usually run own business or self employed and taking lots of it as dividends so less tax too.

A lot of the time it isn't obvious and you wouldn't know their circumstances unless you were best mates with them, for example.

I know loads of people who have the above.

I don't know anyone flashing the cash and putting it all on credit.

It's not too hard to understand how people afford these things, there are plenty explanations as many others have pointed out.

I find it more difficult to understand how you're high earners, so careful with money but have no savings?