To be so sad about my slide in living standards?

[ColdNow]

I grew up in a not so nice area, but my parents had a big house with a huge garden that they bought on two fairly modest salaries when they were younger than I am now. My mum took years out of work when I was born and although things like holidays and eating out weren't a regular occurrence, my parents admit they were never really stressed about money despite having several children and easily paid off their mortgage.

Fast forward to now, where I did my very best to do the 'right' things. I got a good degree, decent and stable job, married and bought a property before TTC. I'm now pregnant and feeling so sad about our financial situation. We purposely went for a modest property with a tiny garden to give ourselves a buffer, but now with the huge increase in our mortgage repayments and other expenses we're struggling to keep afloat. I would love to work part time when I go back but it's now looking very unlikely that we'll be able to make it work without being extremely stretched. I'm always worried about money and already buy all my clothes second hand, shop at budget supermarkets etc. The main cost is housing though, because we live in an expensive city, but this is the city I grew up in and where all my family and friends are, and moving away would be a very difficult choice to make and remove us from all our support networks.

I just feel so sad that within a generation the things my parents were able to offer me (space, time) I'm not able to offer my child, despite me earning far more comparatively than they did. I'm also the youngest in my family and the older siblings are much better off than me, again just because of time - they got onto the property market much earlier before prices sky-rocketed and now although I don't earn a lot less than them, I'm only just scraping by. I notice this at work too, I have colleagues at the same level of seniority and pay to me but a decade or more older, and the houses and lifestyle they sustain far exceed mine.

I don't know what the purpose of this thread is except to just say that it makes me sad that this is the situation I'm in, and people younger than me (I'm in my early 30s) are even worse off.

I can relate to this. Our household income is more than double what my parents earned (adjusted for inflation). They like to claim that living costs aren't worse these days because we have a new car and they drove second hand ones. That's literally the only aspect of life where we have better things than they had. In every other aspect we have less, but apparently that new car means the world isn't more expensive.

They just can't accept that even if we had an equal standard of living to them (which we don't!), that would still mean the world was worse off because they had those things on half our money!

Rental income is already taxed at exactly the same rates as earned income @Slightlyboredandseverlyconfused.

I think that comment sailed right over your head!

Even at 60, i only just scrapped some final salary pension, being slightly older, i d have had a full FS one and found houses cheaper still.

Our generation and older have been incredibly fortunate, i doubt our children will ever get a triple lock pension guarantee!
We are even going to escape the worst results of climate change, that we ourselves caused.

UK needs a huge redistribution of wealth but instead its getting even more unequal.

Comparison is the thief of joy OP. Just stop comparing and appreciate what you have. Yes the cost of living crisis sucks but there is nothing we can do about it. If you didn't have a good job or a house then you'd be even worse off.

I didn't do anything 'right'. Got pregnant unexpectedly at 20, finished my degree off online which I have never used. I now have 3 kids and have worked full time, part time and stayed at home. They have continued to thrive throughout it all. You have to do what works for you.

That’s not the point being made. It’s an unfair system. Of course everyone would “do the same” - why would anyone intentionally deprive themselves of resources that are legally theirs? But it doesn’t mean it’s not incredibly frustrating to be the ‘losers’ of this system, especially when a lot of the ‘winners’ don’t even recognise it and think everyone else just needs to ‘work as hard’ as they did!

This is more than a slump. Living standards have been declining now for over a decade, as has life expectancy (for the first time since WW2).

Wages haven’t kept up and are the same in relative terms to what we were earning 16 years ago. Yet the price of everything has soared.

Public services are in the gutter and will take decades to be restored, if ever. This means an entire generation will lose out and inequality is rampant.

Housing is completely unsustainable. Many will now never own a home (myself included) and rents are extortionate. A roof over one’s head is not a luxury as many seem to treat it these days.

Now two wages are needed simply to exist. And two wages do not guarantee a roof over your head.

Pensions have been decimated, for anyone in their early 40’s and under. When you cannot afford to exist how on earth can you afford to pay into a pension?

Anyone who is early 40’s and under are the first generation who will not do as well as their parents. This is the first time this has happened since post WW2. That is utterly devastating for those of us who were born from 1980 onwards. And in relative terms, things have never been as unequal as they are now.

Greed and gross financial mismanagement by successive governments has fuelled this shambles. Homeowners are obsessed with keeping the value of their homes, despite that being utterly irrelevant when it’s the only home they have to live in. And of course, it’s easier to blame those in their 40’s and under for living ‘beyond their means’ than acknowledging our economic system is broken beyond repair.

As someone in my early 40’s without a pot to piss in, I get extremely frustrated when certain sections of the population say it’s ‘all our fault’, because it’s not. I don’t know anyone who goes on holiday at home or abroad. I don’t know anyone who owns their own home other than those who are elderly, I don’t know anyone with a fancy car on finance, and I don’t know anyone who doesn’t worry every day about how they are going to get through the next week.

Anyway, because of this gross inequality, the burden on tax payers is a ticking time bomb. All those extra renters who can no longer afford to buy homes will require housing benefit once they are too old or too sick to work. And more and more people will be too sick to work up to retirement age because their living standards are so poor. It is well documented that inadequate housing, heating and food leads to health problems. The housing crisis will come home to roost in the next 25 years.

Additionally, as it is impossible for this generation to save adequate amounts into pensions because living costs are so high, again they will need to be supported by tax payers. Another crisis looming in the next 25 years.

The short-terming attitudes of successive governments and many homeowners are going to create a shit storm of epic proportions. But no one can say they weren’t warned.

And that should be the rule in all countries. Including the UK and USA.

I'm in my early 40s and there's a big difference between people my age and colleagues who were ten years older - they bought places of their own when single at the same level that we are now (and have since moved on to live with partners/start families) and graduated without student debt/loans to pay. Meanwhile everyone my age is either still renting, living with family or have been lucky enough to get together with someone who already owned. I don't think that's because Netflix was invented, somehow.

And, of course, it's way, way worse for people who are in their twenties. It's interesting how so few younger people in mine and friends' workplaces are people who have moved from elsewhere to the city to work - they're all relatively local and living with family because even a room is so expensive now.

I bought in my mid 20's as a single woman. It was 3 x salary and at the bottom of the market. I sold that house 3 years later for 2.5 times what I paid. My salary hadn't doubled. I am 52. It was very lucky timing in terms of house prices, after a massive crash. Total accident of birth

Ah well - it will just get worse and worse - imagine what it will be like for your kids in 20 years eeeeeep! the future is bleak so i just enjoy my life while I can

How much do you earn OP?

It wasn't normal. At one time it was the case in the Civil Service and teaching but not since the 1950s. I was a Civil Servant in the mid 70s and it was history then.

Nobody said it was normal.

I've just reread the first post and the OP's mother chose to give up work. She wasn't made to.

YABU to describe it as a slide in your living standards - the truth is that it is that a decline in the living standards of the bottom 90% / 95% / 99% / 99.9999% (relative to those above them) is an absolutely inevitable and DELIBERATE effect of neo-liberal economics as pushed by the Tories since 1979, and tolerated by Blair and Brown in that slightly better period when labour were in power.

It was @Floopyfloop at 9.02, not the OP.

So exactly the same as people today, except that people today still can't afford to buy a house then?

You're looking at things through rose-tinted glasses.
You obviously had a great childhood and you were really very fortunate to live in a nice house with plenty of space and a nice garden. But that wasn't the case across the board and huge numbers of people faced housing challenges throughout the 80s and 90s during my childhood (I'm early 40). Your parents were either truly blessed with a simple life or did an excellent job of shielding you, as a child, from the daily grind of their lives. That's what all decent parents try to do to the best of their ability.
I'm not rubbishing what you're saying though: it is true that property prices have corrupted so much of how we traditionally think of markers of success or being 'middle class'. There's a housing crisis that won't change until we, as a country, commit to building many more new homes. But other things are SO MUCH better now than they were then.
For example, my mum missed out on the sort of education and opportunities I've taken for granted because she was a girl/woman. She then spent her 20s and 30s (when she had small children) having to work in unskilled jobs such as shelf stacking as it was the only thing that fitted around my dad's job. Not working wasn't an option and working in the job she was qualified to do wasn't an option because childcare was either non existant or hugely expensive. Most of my friends' mothers were in similar situations.
Men - on the whole - did very little childcare and everything to do with the kids fell to mums in most cases. I'm conscious that some family dynamics are still like this but in the 80s and 90s a dad at the school gates was a rare as rocking horse shit.
My dad also lost his job twice - in the early 80s and in the early 90s. Again, that wasn't uncommon due to the huge economic challenges in Britain at the time.
A typical family back then had one car (a rubbish one that broke down a lot) - another barrier to women working, one holiday a year if they were lucky (camping in the UK or maybe France). Anywhere that one had to fly to was considered posh. Although I'm only a decade older than you, I still remember Blue Peter saying "if you have a phone call xxx" because it wasn't uncommon for families to not have one.
Most people rarely ate out or got a takeaway. Our mums bought our clothes from jumble sales. And my overriding memory is of the house being freezing except for the one room where the gas fire was on, which was like a furnace.
And we weren't poor and we didn't live in some "tough" area! My dad had a junior managerial role in the hospitality sector. I felt quite boujee compared to many of my classmates in suburban south east England. But I still remember my parents having to watch every penny and there still not being enough some months.
So yeah, a three-bed-semi with a garden but if the car broke down we quite literally had to walk everywhere until payday and there was money to get it fixed.
My mother-in-law also shopped for kids clothes at jumble sales... And she was married to a doctor and sent her kids to private schools. Indeed, my father in law recalls making house visits in the 80s where people were burning furniture to keep warm as they had no money on the meter.
My point of all this is that for everyone in their 30s or 40s who had a nice house there were many others who didn't. And for those who did have nice houses, things were often a bit shit (or really shit) too.
Yes, the cost of housing acts as a millstone around most younger people's necks (my own included; I didn't buy until I was 33). Yes it's grossly unfair and wrong that people doing ordinary jobs cannot afford an ordinary house. Yes, it boggles my mind how one average salary in the 80s was enough to buy a house now worth 600k. Yes, the erosion of wages is horrific. It's all a terrible recipe.
However it's far, far more complicated than "30 years ago, life was easy and now it's not". I'd never swap my life now for my mum's life back then - or indeed for the life of an 80s woman in the kind of professional role I'm currently in.

Haven’t RTFT, but something that often gets overlooked in the discussion on COL now versus the past is that much of the developing world has got richer over the last few decades. This, coupled with the increase in the world’s population, has driven up demand for fuel, food, travel/holidays and therefore prices have increased.

Most people agree with the alleviation of poverty in the developing world therefore we have we have to accept that a drop in standard of living is inevitable with the redistribution of wealth globally.

Yeah I grew up with Caribbean holidays + at least a week in Europe every year, private education and a six bed detached house in Surrey. My kids live in a terraced house and I can't afford private until secondary. It sucks.

Around me are people who bought their houses 20, 30 years ago or more. Along from me is a couple where he is a driver and she is a school dinner lady. No way would they afford this house now. It sucks that so many people are priced out. As a professional but single person, I barely afford my mortgage now - have had to take on extra work to do so. But am still better off than most people. It is appalling.

A friend of mine is in her mid-thirties and both her and her partner are working. They're in a private rental and have realised they're never going to be able to be in a position to buy a family home anywhere near friends/family. That, coupled with declining public services, means they've decided to move to Eastern Europe for a better life. Says it all really.

I think the generation who have, arguably, had it easier is my generation - so those in their mid to late 40s, early 50s now. And I say that as someone who is not in the same financial position as many of my peers and friends. But they often had help from parents or grandparents in their 20s to buy a house with a relatively low deposit (a few years before the 2008 crash), with years of low interest rates and monthly payments, and are now very close to having paid off their mortgage. And, many of them, alongside that, have bought another property to boost their pension, either rented out on the local market, or listed on air bnb in a tourist hot spot. Some have been stay at home mums / parents, many of the women now work part-time.

For those in their 20s and early 30s now, these days are long gone unfortunately. Unless you can get significant help from parents with a deposit - a whole lot more than was required in the early 2000s.

So I imagine that a lot of my peers will have a pretty decent retirement. My DH and I only managed to buy a house in our early 40s, without any parental help, it meant saving for years to scrape a deposit together, thankfully just before the really crazy deposit requirements now, but we still had to find 40K. While I am very glad we are on the property ladder, we are in a small 3 bed-semi, and due to increasing interest rates and a fairly big mortgage I don't see us being able to 'upsize' to a nice 4 bed anytime soon - maybe when the kids have left home! Not that that's the be all and end all, but if you've had help or benefitted from years of low interest rates, then you will find it much easier to do so.

So I do feel for Millennials who don't have parental help, and even if they do, they're going to need a much greater percentage chunk of their parents' money than say 15 years ago.

We will be lucky to get a state pension at all tbh. There was piece of research from the IFS that concluded people under 40 would have to work until they're at least 74 in order to receive the same levels of state pension as today.

Combine that with a declining life expectancy and worsening health it's unlikely we'll get anything.

It's also widely recognised that millennials are the first generation to be worse off than their parents in terms of standards of living so not sure why so many are so adamant this isn't the case.

But that isn't a redistribution of wealth to the poorest people in the poorest countries, it's essentially a redistribution of wealth to those who are already wealthy. In the UK, while the middle get squeezed, the rich are getting richer and people on low incomes here have a lower standard of living than people in many other European countries.