Cost of living or prioritising the wrong things 🤔

[Sbrown32]

Firstly, this is not to offend anyone, I just find it a interesting debate that I recently came across and wanted to know others opinions on this.

Is it the cost of living or are we prioritising the wrong things?

When I came across this, the woman who was discussing this topic had some really good points (in my opinion), back in the day, we prioritised differently, we didn't have a takeaway each week (guilty of this myself tbh), food deliveries on our phone, we didn't grab a coffee on the way to work every morning, family trips out to the cinema or nights out used to be a treat not a given etc

I am pregnant with my first, and looking at ways we can cut down on spending whilst I am on MAT leave, when I really looked into my spending habits I have realised that I do a lot of these myself, I get a coffee each morning usually with a breakfast meal deal of some sort, we have a takeaway each week and we spend a lot on going out, date nights, cinema trips and going to nice places to eat etc.

I haven't decided myself if I fully agree with this or not yet so please be respectful.

This thread is depressing. It seems almost everyone is just posting what they feel rather than looking up the statistics for how much prices of essentials like housing have risen compared to wages. People just want to confirm rather than challenge their own biases. The “Millennials waste their money on avocado toast” trope is very boring.
Why do people do this? Is it because they find numbers and %s difficult?

• “House prices have skyrocketed by 2,385% in 50 years - increasing from just £10,978 in 1975 to £272,819 in 2025.
• However, salaries have grown by 1,400% in the same period. In fact, if wages had kept pace with property inflation, today's average salary for two people would need to be £116,303. This means current salaries are £46,103 short of keeping pace with house prices.“

I think you’ve raised a really interesting point it’s definitely a mix of both. The cost of living has definitely gone up in ways we can’t control (housing, energy, groceries), but I also think we’ve normalised a lot of little luxuries that previous generations saw as treats. It’s so easy now with apps, subscriptions and convenience culture that we don’t even notice how much it all adds up.
That said, I don’t think it’s fair to blame people entirely life is more stressful now, and those small comforts like a takeaway or coffee can feel like the only “treat” in a busy week. It’s more about awareness and balance, like you’re doing by reviewing your habits before mat leave.

For some genuinely having enough money to eat, heat the home and pay for water, electricity etc is a real struggle. For lots of people though they have a bigger mortgage than they should have taken on based on income and cars on finance (should not have taken the maximum mortgage offered and should have saved and got a cheap car that would do the job, not a new luxury car). Food and drinks during the day should be made at home and taken with them not bought out and about. Sky, alcohol, cigarettes/vaping, trips out to the cinema, pub, meals out, holidays etc are not nessessities. Clothes can be bought from second hand shops, super markets and cheap retailers. So many people buying branded trainers and clothes and then moaning they can't afford to heat the home or eat. It's about choices.

I believe many people don’t understand financial priorities.
A fantastic example are those people who do not bring any bags with them when shopping. The bag charges have been in place in England for ten years, Scotland and Wales, earlier than this.

I shop regularly at the same time a couple does. They never bring bags. Buy about 6 of them. That is £1.80 per shop. I doubt they bring bags with them to other shops. Talking about clothes, toiletries and top up shopping. Using the example of £1.80 on bags bought from those shops £3.60 a week. Or £187.20 a year. You only need to spend 5-8% of this for some decent reusable shopping bags.

My friends who struggle to make ends meet are the ones that never bring bags with them. For a birthday present, I bought 6 bags which can fold up into a handbag and a larger tote for heavier items. She has not bought a bag since.

I mean it's definitely true that we live in a consumer culture and people spend way way more today than they used to. When i was a kid meals out and takeaways were a luxury. Christmas and birthdays were a chance to get things that are now routinely bought throughout the year such as clothes and nightwear, new sports shoes, games, toys etc. You would never buy bottled water or takeaway coffee or have a fancy coffee machine in the kitchen. You would drink instant coffee not posh coffee. You wouldn't buy individual ice creams except on holiday - it would be a cheap tub that you had to scoop out yourself. You wouldn't have all the 'healthy' snacks and protein bars etc - you would come back from school starving and eat toast and drink orange squash. You wouldn't get your nails done or have beauty treatments, you would use bar soap not endless expensive shower gels. Food was barely ever thrown away. The week's meals would be planned each week, a list made and only those items bought. Meals were cooked from scratch most of the time so a lot less processed food. There wouldn't be any impulse purchases. Parents were very used to saying 'no' to kids routinely and didn't feel pressure to make sure their kids had an amazing life. There was no sense that kids had to have loads of nice experiences so no trips to Lapland, Xmas eve boxes, 'magical' days out at depressing christmas experience events. But it is the electronic/digital world where life is so much more expensive today - in the past there was no broadband, streaming services for music and digital media, no games consoles or apps with in app purchases. No ipads, smart phones etc. the only subscription tv service was the tv licence. however having broadband and even a smart phone is now an essential so you can't really not pay for it. Holidays is another big one - it was more common for people to have one holiday a year not also lots of weekends away and extra trips and exotic long haul holidays. Society is unrecognisable with the level of expectation of what life even is. It will be interesting to see where this all heads. But on an individual level i do think a change of mind set and regular budgeting and evaluating expenditure can make a noticeable difference.

Well I’m 62 and growing up we did have a car, went to university, had central heating, went on foreign holidays, had fish and chips on the way home from swimming lessons every week … what’s your point? But when I look at my own dc, there’s no way they’re going to be able to afford the kind of lifestyle my parents (and me) could, despite earning what should be decent salaries - not having takeaway coffee is going to make no difference. The cost of housing and latterly groceries has been going up and up along with inflation but my salary has been stagnating/going down in real terms.

Absolutely this
So many young people I work with are " skint"
It's not just buying "a coffee" it's a mortgages worth
Latest gadgets, meal deliveries ( minimum £15) streaming, subscriptions ( beauty, underwear, razors, boxes of clothes)
Vapes, botox, fillers, nails, eyebrows,meal deals
Lease cars
Weekends away abroad
Then Klarna etc
It's endless, all very nice of you can afford it, they cant though, debts of 30K+ on CC.

No doubt the replies will be I live on one tin of beans a week and still cant buy a house but these people are spending masses on nothing substantial.
It's a huge con and a massive problem

Your statistics only give half the story though, interest rates are every bit as important as the cost of buying a house. Right now prices are pretty stable, it’s interest rates that cause the squeeze really.

I think in the past people just wasted money on different things. Smoking being the biggest one, very big culture of drinking in pubs - many men drank all their wages away on a Friday night etc. It wasnt a utopia for sure. In my youth we spent a fortune literally on clubbing.

Things are hard for younger people right now for sure, but I’m only in my 40s and think that we won’t be worse off than our parents in the end. In some ways we were lucky and in others frugal (and others not so much). Those in their 20s now it depends on what happens in the next 20/ 30 years and that is impossible to predict. I am always really puzzled by people buying big houses, expensive cars just because they can ‘afford’ it as it makes your life more expensive and in terms of big houses creates more work, you can save less, fewer holidays etc. I’m not a big coffee drinker and find avocado unexciting but I waste some money on wine instead and I like holidays.

But for sure the idea that people who have studied and work hard should just exist is wrong.

Is it really that different now? I'm in my 30's and we usually had a takeaway on a Friday night growing up (don't now but that's more a health thing). My grandparents used to get fish and chips every Friday 🤷‍♀️

Coffee shops weren't as big a thing until I was a teenager but lots of people went to the pub every week and smoked.

I don't think affording a few treats is a particularly big ask in a developed country. I'd rather look at why cost of living is rising so much quicker than wages than judge someone for buying a latte.

It’s both. But there’s also a huge mental aspect to it.

People think/assume that people in the UK (or many other developed countries) SHOULD be better off than people in 2005, never mind 1975. But the majority aren’t really, not when factoring in stuff like total working hours, real wages, and the cost of housing. We’re not worse off, we’re the same - but that feels much worse off.

Because we have social media, knowledge at our fingertips, cheap air travel, takeaway coffees. It feels like we live in a world where people shouldn’t need to work so hard, hardly see their families 5 days a week, and struggle to pay bills. But that new stuff is all just window dressing which has made a tiny minority extraordinarily wealthy while making our lives better/“more convenient” (for whom?), but in arguably quite superficial ways.

Meanwhile the economic realities that really matter haven’t really improved much for the majority of people since the late 1970s/early 1980s.

It’s clear form the data that on average most people don’t have cars holidays etc as @Dollymylovesaid - yes some people did but it wasn’t the normal standard of life

it looks ( from data comparing wages, inflation etc ) that living standards - ie free cash when basics are covered - probably peaked around 2010 and have been falling ever since / initially due mostly to housing costs and since Covid due to inflation . Averages. Suspect the standards of the top 10% are still rising

note that during the last 60 years there were short period when things went drastically backwards but over most ten year periods things got better - this decline has been sustained - austerity and Brexit probably

it’s easier when things get better

housing costs are the really change as rents and house prices have risen much faster than general inflation/ and that goes back to the 1980s and thatcher who sold off cheap council houses that until then provided a stable roof over peoples heads at affordable rents - remove that option and the housing market became a profit making disaster. She also went big on privatisation and we can see that private water is a disaster, private dentistry too expensive for most, private rail has failed completely

it’s how policies decades ago can play out long after the people who made them died and how we expect short term fixes to things that took decades to create

I don't see how it's either-or. For people who do the things you've listed, or regularly spend money on other inessentials: yes, it's a good idea to see what can be cut out when budgeting. But essentials like groceries (in ADDITION to luxuries like a hotel stay or an iced coffee from a cafe) have also increased far more rapidly than wages over the past few years, and it's challenging for a lot of families and people that were relatively comfortable before (and brutal for people on a small fixed income).

I think it’s both. The cost have things has gone up, utilities now for example. So people who had cut their cloth to suit their means (but quite close to their means) or those in lower incomes families are struggling.

We have never overspent, we save for what we have and are lucky enough to have company cars which saves us money overall, but if one of us lost our job/the company folded, our lives would look very different.

We don’t earn an excessive amount of money, we are ‘comfortable’. We don’t live in a modest house because we don’t need anything bigger (and I don’t have the time to clean anything bigger) so I didn’t see the point in us ‘upgrading’ just for show which means we have always had a buffer and we have savings.

We are wasteful and excessive in many ways though and it is a conversation myself and my DH have had to have recently as we are now in a situation where we are having to step in to help his mother and father (very fiscally irresponsible) and it is going to leave things much much tighter for us.

I don’t buy coffee out, but DH does every morning (Maccy’s), I do have nails done (but don’t pay for hair as my mother is a hairdresser), we have regular take aways and every week we stop at Maccys when SS plays football, I do cook, but if I have a busy day and can’t be bothered we will buy something easy which costs more. Days out with SS can stretch easily to £100. We go out with friends (much better off than us, think much higher earners/owners if successful businesses) regularly. We used to buy lunches each day, but are currently trying to knock this on the head.

Ive been on the other end too where I have had to run a household alone and make money stretch with absolutely no extras.

The coming few years are going to be about us tightening our belts again. So, I think when you are in a position to ‘waste’ money you do it and in some ways I am looking forward to getting back to a place where we do so less as I think as things ease coming out the other side of this time, it means if we were sensible we can make some further smart investments for our future.

I can't remember when, 8 years ago?
Pre-lock down, anyway
Someone at a client was asking around about what people spent on various unnecessary stuff
I don't drink tea or coffee, almost always bring sandwiches for lunch when I'm on site, have an annual membership to my local cinema chain, don't go to the gym, don't go to a pub, and worked out that I spent over £5,000 p.a. less than the people I worked with (and I assume prices have only gone up since than)
I'm not consciously aware of not doing these things, they just aren't things I'd spend money on
On the other hand, I always travelled as much as I could, so probably those people felt I was wasting my money in a different way

don't think affording a few treats is a particularly big ask in a developed country. I'd rather look at why cost of living is rising so much quicker than wages than judge someone for buying a latte

It doesnt have to just be one thing

Houses prices are extortionate, inflation and the marketing of normal things as takeaways i.e drinks, meals are all factors
.
Im not judging anyone for buying a latte
However things that were just normal such as making a sandwich for lunch or a cup of coffee have been changed to " treats"
A constant stream of dopamine hits in the form of cheap, crap food, drinks and stuff £££
It's become people's personalities!

OP, a major problem is that a person doing the same job cannot afford anything close to the standard of living now as they could 5 years ago. At higher wages that means less luxuries, at lower levels that means no luxuries and choosing what essentials to skip.

The fact that housing is expensive and unstable means a constant source of anxiety.

And while we live in a time where there are far more affordable luxuries than ever before, the idea that Grandma and Grandad never did xyz is absurd. They went down the pub and smoked and had alcohol in the house. I don’t do that

> it’s about working out what you want and what really gives you joy
I know that I only speak for myself, but I do not understand how any of coffee, clothes, TV subscriptions, decorations etc. can give one 'joy'
Going to the library, however ... not being able to that would definitely deprive me of joy

I think the " joy" is short lived -dopamine
So you need more and more
The marketing dream

Both.

I'm surprised how many people who 'have no money' 'waste it' or 'fritter it away' on Ubereats or similar, huge amounts of clothes, disposable shit, takeaway coffee every day, it all adds up. Its definitely a 'must have it all NOW ' society.

"back in the day, we prioritised differently, we didn't have a takeaway each week (guilty of this myself tbh), food deliveries on our phone, we didn't grab a coffee on the way to work every morning, family trips out to the cinema or nights out used to be a treat not a given etc" Straight away you've identified areas where you can save money or fritter it away.

Agree. The money spent/wasted on Autumn remake of hone decor, or Halloween tat. Baby reveals. Hen weekends (whether friends can afford it or not). Along with various tat for the home, takeaway or delivery takeaway... the spending goes on and on and on, but 'don't have any money'

When I was a child in the 60's and 70's children would be sent to the shops to buy food so you knew what was needed to make a meal. There were very few takeaway shops and I don't remember ready made meals being available.

Of course things have improved since the 70s!

My dad had a good job however we did not have central heating on half as much as we do now as a culture and it was colder. Think ice on windows- inside! We never ate out let alone had regular coffee out and take away fish and chips was a treat. None of this constant fast good delivered to your door or built in to every day life.Holidays abroad were a rare treat. We went 3 times during my whole childhood and that was out of school holidays and self catering. We had a crappy black and white tv, didn’t have a video for a long time when they came in let alone this everybody in the family having a grands worth of tech each regularly updated. We didn’t drive everywhere. We walked more and used the limitations of public transport.We had to wait and save for most things- no Amazon Prime instant gratification. We didn’t constantly do house renos and made do with grotty kitchens and bathrooms for many years, a lick of paint was pretty much it no endless room accessories and updates. Clothes were kept for longer without this continual spending on clothes, skincare, hair, nails etc .….

People waste amounts of money now and try to make out they are spending it on necessities. They’re not.

Societal expectations have changed fuelled by social media which fuels insecurity.

Everyone’s costs have risen, it’s an individuals choice to purchase treats, luxuries or anything that’s beyond the basic such as take aways. As a household our habits haven’t changed at all as extra costs are easily absorbed.

There are some people who would be a lot better off if they controlled their spending and stuck to a budget. I’m 67 and comfortable but still live quite frugally because I like to get as much as I can for my money and I like to support my 2 adult children from time to time.

But there are a lot of people who generally struggle to make ends meet despite living frugally, because of low wages that don’t meet their genuine needs. Which is why we have benefits like UC, free child care, free child care etc and I don’t begrudge them this. These are the people who do suffer when the cost of living is high and we shouldn’t patronise them by suggesting they stop spending on ‘luxuries’

Well said. This is my analysis, too. Basic lifestyle expectations are drastically different now.