Memories of cost of living in the late 90s, early 2000s

[goudacheese]

My kids were young then, born 1994,97 but I remember finding it quite tough financially. I have memories of our weekly food shop at asda being £150 per week and buying new clothing was a struggle so I always waited for the sales. Nursery costs swallowed up my salary at £600 per month and there was no funding. Nappies were at least £6 per pack.
I don't know if I was just young and just not very savvy at that time. Both husband and myself were lower on our career ladders but we had OK salaries. Maybe it was just that period of having young kids and I worked part time but my clearest memory was the high cost of the weekly food shop. I remember asda seemed the cheapest as lidl back then was rubbish compared to now. Just wondering if anyone else felt the same or things weren't as bad as I remembered.

Different life stages i guess. I was on about 9k a year in 2000, and somehow had enough money for bills, a food shop, pub after work and clubbing three times a week! My mind boggles at how I did this somehow

Somehow I was able to afford cocktails at Pharmacy, Met Bar or the Atlantic every week and clothes from Matches without saving up despite earning £17.5k in 1996 increasingly to £50k by about 2006. Bought flats in zone 2 a short walk from zone 1 during the period as well. Essentially never was so rich (I probably had no weekly grocery budget as ate out or lived on canapés at work events. Lord they were great times)

For a single person, I clearly remember spending £20 a week on grocery shopping in 2003. I was earning £15,000.

No. Things have gone up ridiculously. I remember having a Saturday job years ago as a teenager. Out of my wage for that job alone I managed to go out at weekends ( cafe, pub, cinema etc etc ), pay fares, and even buy clothes and accessories sometimes. I doubt a Saturday job wage would enable you to do that now. Of course myparents paid for the big things but i definitely remember always having enough cash to really enjoy myself just out of my Saturday money. I honestly dont think a teenager could do that nowadays.

In the year 2000 my salary was £17k and I felt quite wealthy to be honest. Don’t remember having to scrimp on anything.

I was only young but moved into my own flat in 2003 and myself and my then boyfriend spent about £50 every two weeks on food. Your shop seems like an awful lot.

I was renting very late 90s early 2000/ can’t remember the rent. I do remember i was on max £5:40 an hour as a senior nursery nurse come 2002. I was 23. No minimum wage.

We lived like students and didn’t have much money but we could do cheap nights out in student indie clubs and have enough for a taxi home or night bus.

I remember the next door terrace which was modernised for the time: it was up for sale £36k!

I could buy clothes but it was Primark and new look.

I was a student, almost due to graduate, and for some of that time had worked in another country with different VAT equivalents on food and non-essentials, and so on. In that country, the 'VAT' rate also changed while I was there, not a popular move, so can compare a bit. The stipend for what I was doing was approx £600 for 21 hours a month.

In the UK, I do remember Sainsbury's points and vouchers making a difference to the food bills - in that my partner and I would make decisions on a) Sainsbury's shopping instead of other places, and b) buying 2 of the same thing (and making a lot of use of the freezer) for the sake of the points and £5 back that would be reached earlier. Iceland also did quite a lot of 2 for 1 I think.

Cheap flights were at the best rates they were going to reach - fortunately for me, as this was the most I have ever used them, although I wasn't hopping home a lot at all. Somewhere between £35 and £65 for a 3hr one, I remember.

Mobile bills...felt high in the scheme of how much income I had. I was buying PAYG. No data and not tied in to contracts, though. Instead of home broadband I would use a cybercafe. Fellow users were trying to Skype, then, if they had a headset themselves, but it looked unreliable in the extreme and I gave up after a couple of tries.

2000 was also 26 years ago. If you did this exercise in 2000 you would be talking about how far your wages went in 1974.

That is not to say there hasn't been wage stagnation over the last couple of decades.

21 hours a week! Not month (otherwise I'd still be doing that!)

£150?
Surely that’s not right!
You must’ve been eating like royalty?

A big food shop for us in 1997 would be £40, even Christmas was only £100.

I used to buy 2 litre bottles of Asdas own cheap pop for the staff where I worked, this was in 2004, they were 7p!

Now about 70p. I am aware this is very specific.

I was 18 in '94 and started University. I worked part-time and my wages seemed to go really far I was out all the time, buying new clothes and travelling during the summers. I look back and have no idea how I managed it all, I didn't get handouts from parents so things must have been more affordable. I do remember getting fivers out of the atm and being out for the night on that.

My children were born the same years as yours and my weekly food shop in 1997 was £30 and I put £5 of petrol in the car for a week.
My weekly food shop now is £150 per week and fuel is £50 per week

Spot on, I was similar. The same job now pays £24k yet most costs have gone up way more.

We have just become poorer as a nation.

I wonder if a decade plus of wage stagnation and pointless austerity might have contributed?

Agree, no way was it £150 per week. Nursery costs were around £600 per month.

Private school was similar costs, so felt more affordable/aspirational.

I left home in 2001 and could spend £14 on a night out including the bus home!

I was renting a room for £60 a week. I remember in 1998/9 my mother was spending £60-70 in Aldi for a week's shopping for 8 of us.

I mostly got my food shop in Netto because it was close, and clothes from Select, New Look, Topshop, and they were affordable. I've still got some Topshop stuff from 1999.

You could rent anywhere in a shared house for £200-£250 a month late nineties early noughties. Might have even included bills but they were low if it didn't. I used to go to a club where drinks were £1-£1.50 around 2003. Same drinks would cost 6 or 7 quid now. Since then housing costs here are 4-5 times more. My salary has only gone up about 2.5 times.

I arrived in uk in 1994

i was paid £3.01 ph at Weatherspoons.

my first full time job I took home just over £200pw. I think that was £13k Pa. I was 26.

i remember going to Sainsburys for the first time & being very confused as lots of ready meals/prepped food when I had always cooked from scratch. It was very different to what I was used to.

My DH and I met at in the mid-1990s at uni. I agree the food shop seems far too high. We did used to go to Asda some time and it was more like £50 to £60 for two adults…

We got married in 2000 and I was the higher earner as a PA to a construction company on £17,500. DH was a forklift driver on £12,500. Our 2 up, 2 down in a run down seaside town was £550 a month to rent with a damp problem and dodgy electrics (I remember having to buy fuse wire from Woolies to replace it when it blew, which often happened if you boiled the kettle at the same time as running the washing machine).

We put £25 each in the pot for our weekly visit to Safeway which covered everything including packed lunches for work, although it was a stretch if it was a "washing powder week". I'd felt quite well off in the late 90s on a similar wage but it was starting to feel like a stretch into the early 2000s - but with hindsight, this was down to repayments on storecards and having to be more sensible than I'd been in my early 20s.

We had our children in 1994 and 1996. No way were we spending £150 a week on food. You could buy a tin of beans or tomatoes, albeit value ones, for 9p back then. Bread was about 50p a loaf, too. We used to buy big packs of nappies in Boots which worked out the most economical way of buying them iirc.

Clothes were more expensive but we didn’t buy them as often as people do now, which was a good thing imo.

DH and I graduated in 1994, bought our first house in 1997 (2 bed semi). We were 23/24and 25/26 in 1997. Teacher and doctor both working full time. Definitely didn’t feel we could afford children at that time with us both lower on our salary scales and still paying off student loans, needing to furnish a house and buy cars etc. Holidays seemed a lot cheaper but we only went on one every other year. Definitely only modest/necessary spend on clothes. Shopped in Sainsbury’s and didn’t budget for food - no idea how much we spent. I think I would’ve been a massive stretch to have children before we were 30 but felt we had a very comfortable life as a couple.
By the time we were 29/31 we felt we could afford children then - were earning more, student loans (and the loan we took out to furnish the house) paid off and we were moving to a bigger house.

I was 20/21, lived with a boyfriend, not much money and I used to budget £20 per week for food. I earned about £50 per week plus commission. He earned I think about £100 and worked for his dad. We ate really well. It helped that I could cook though I suppose and I know how to stretch a meal.

I'm impressed that people can remember actual figures from so long ago! I was a single mum in 1999 and I remember getting income support of about £50pw for me and the baby. I had a council house with 2 bedrooms that cost £45pw to rent, paid for by housing benefit which went straight to the council, and council tax was fully covered too. I was a student and other friends were paying the same rent for a room in a shared house. I arranged a council swap to London in 2003 and my rent there was £80pw for a 2 bed flat in zone 1, the full rent was paid by housing benefit.

I don't remember exact grocery figures or what I paid for bills or bus fares now. But I remember managing OK on what I got, I was able to pay all my bills and buy food and clothes. I managed to oay for some cheap holidays. But I did have access to credit cards so that helped with budgeting.