To be absolutely sick of hearing about the cost of living crisis

[Katypp]

I surely can't be the only person sick to death of hearing about the cost of living crisis?
I am tired of reporters interviewing middle-class (usually) mothers inside paid activities such as soft play and hearing them moan about how they are struggling to make ends meet.
Have we completely lost the ability to cut our cloth according to our means or does 'struggling' now mean carrying on spending as usual then complaining when there's no money left?
There have never been as many massive new cars on the road, towns are full of hairdressers, nail bars, brow bars, tanning salons, soft play, play cafes, coffee shops, ice cream parlours, dog groomers, most of which didn't exist 25 years ago and are probably the recipients of the money of the families who say they can't keep up with spiralling costs.
Yes, some families will have been hard up before prices started to go up and will have nothing else to cut back on. They have my sympathy.
But i am utterly fed up of hearing how hard households ars being hit by the cost of living crisis when all that's needed is a few minor cutbacks which they don't want to make.

Out of their depth but that's what happens when you put socialists in charge of money.

Oh good another standard right wing response to avoid actually engaging with facts. Which page of "Right Wing Responses For Dummy's" does that one come from?

Firstly neither the Blair / Brown govenrment or the current one are socialist in the way you imply. They are democratic socialists which means they embrace capitalism and the free market but understand the importance of good public services.

Secondly I gave you hard data to show that the 97 - 2010 Labour government performed better than the Tories that came before and after them - you said stop focusing on the past it is about the current government.

So I gave you hard data which showed that even after two years the current government are already performing better in terms of growth and services than their predecessors.

Both sets of data show the opposite of Labour being bad with public finances.

I also said in that post I knew you still wouldn't engage and would just find another way to obfuscate.

Seems I was right.

I also wanted to remind posters that individual posts can simply get suppressed if it looks like a one-off mistake - it takes a lot for Mumsnet to ban an account.

There's a lot we can all do to ensure this place continues as a productive, interesting, informative platform for sharing knowledge.

Two tier intolerance among races and cultures

What do you mean by two tier intolerance?

he's done nothing to tackle the pro Palestinian protest marches which harbour oppressive material

We have freedom of speech, but Starmer has now said he could take action.

I'm saying some representatives of Islam as with other cultures, seem to have things more leniently

Again, I don't know what you mean by this? Can you give examples?

Agree!
Add the H2B loans inflating property prices on shoddy , thrown up new builds, we havent seen the start of that fallout yet

They have a leader.
The Conservatives had
David Cameron: Dec 2005 – Jul 2016
Theresa May: Jul 2016 – Jul 2019
Boris Johnson: Jul 2019 – Sep 2022
Liz Truss: Sep 2022 – Oct 2022
Rishi Sunak: Oct 2022 – Nov 2024
On average a new one every 2 years they were in power.
Kier is holding up quite well relatively

Everything had gone up noticeably. My weekly food shop is so expensive I’ve no idea how people on lower wages manage.
However in my city on weekends every bar is rammed and you have to book restaurants the week before or you can’t get a table. Hairdressers and beauty salons and aesthetics clinics are booked. I went on holiday recently and the flight was full there and back as was the resort and town. It’s been that way since after Covid. Clearly people have money and the are spending it. Or they don’t have money and are spending it anyway who knows.

He's hanging on a thread. At least he's pleased that Arsenal won the league though.

I'm not going to get bogged down by this topic, because I know where that will go. I mentioned it as a legitimate concern which is why Reform did so well in the local elections. Two marches took place a week ago and only one saw the PM talk about thuggery. That was his chance to be impartial and condone all potential violent activity during both marches. He's doing a great job for Reform. This thread is about the cost of living crisis and which the PM doesn't seem to have at the top of his agenda. Great that Arsenal won the Premier league though 👏 🙄

I'm not going to get bogged down by this topic

You brought the topic up in the first place!

It is a myth that 25 years ago many families still had only one parent working. Maybe this was the case in the 1950s?

By 1970, stats suggest around 55% of women worked.

There has been a rise in the number of families with mothers working. Some stats suggest around 66% of mother were working in 2000, compared to around 75% now. An increase but perhaps not as significant as is often suggested here, where younger posters seem to think they are the first generation to work full time and that none of their peers work part-time whilst raising families.

The number of women working part time has remained fairly constant since the 1960s.

I’m frustrated to keep reading how easy it was to buy a house and raise a family in one wage only 25 years ago. That is total nonsense and spouted in ignorance. The statistics show it might have been slightly easier, but the younger generation are ill informed to apply such a swathing generalisation. There were some people who achieved this (34%) if the single wage was sufficient. That is true today also (25%). But the majority worked. Recognising this might make you feel slightly less dissatisfied.

Amen to this
My eldest is 32 and amongst his peer group at school there was one SAHM .
Historically the work that women did was not acknowledged.
My GM and aunts were all officially housewives but they worked by taking in lodgers, cleaning,ironing,child minding etc
My Mil ( 86) and my DM( 90) were both teachers

Agree that is ridiculous

I went to school in the 1980s/90s (so more than 25 years ago) but at primary school (mid 80s) I think i could count on one hand the kids in the class who's mum worked ft.
My parents bought a standard suburban semi in outer London in the early 80s on one (quite average) wage as my mum was a SAHM until kids were in school. (She then worked pt, term time only) Neither of them got any inheritance from their parents or other relatives. The houses in that road are now £600-650k, which would be pretty difficult on one salary.

WTF has that got to do with anything?

Your argument is hanging by a thread if thats the best you can offer up as debate

When people with high salaries give a list of all the things they DON'T spend money on, there's usually a glaring exception, along the lines of "but we DO....pay private school fees for 3 kids/own a horse/live in London and have a mortgage 3 times higher than the average/am paying off debts/have a second home/am the sole worker with a SAH spouse thus my looks-good-on-paper salary is actually supporting 5 people...." etc.

Basically things that absolutely dwarf the "luxury" of spending £10 a month on netflix or £30 having your nails done.

Edited because I know that particular poster originally quoted wasn't making the "it's so hard to be on £100kplus" excuses you often see on here where high earners refuse to accept that the things THEY spend money on are equally non-essentials, even if they refuse to accept they are "luxuries."

I do think that there’s a lot of that yes - we pay really high rent to live in a nice house in a very nice city and I totally accept thats a choice — we also have a fair amount of business /tax payments in paying off - so yes I do think there are often things people aren’t saying and makes it hard to grasp the full situation -

I’m not dissatisfied. We do earn close to triple what my Dad did between us for a significantly smaller house though.

Tackle the Marches how? It's a legal right to protest that is also afforded to those with the opposing viewpoint. It's not like anti-Islamists never march, or are prevented from doing so.

What about the bunch of right wing yobbos who were stampeding across the North East last year. Our town was on the list of potential 'targets'. Shopkeepers were boarding up windows in readiness. Fortunately they never got here. It's their right to protest, they couldn't have been stopped, which is why they weren't, but I dread to think how much the heightened police presence cost.

I don't know exactly what you mean by 'harbouring oppressive material' but I do think chucking fireworks and petrol bombs into mosques is pretty damned oppressive, don't you?

How much are you paying in rent, that your nearly 6 figure salary does not allow a family day out?

Does your partner stay at home to look after the children (you mention ‘we’)?

it seems that you have got yourselves into a bit of a financial pickle 😬

Your dad was possibly a higher earner to be able purchase a large property on his own as his first time buy (in the late 90s/00s) and also support a SAHM and family.

If he had an average or below average salary, how did he do it, as that is impressive. Or was this a second or third property and he had made his way up the ladder. Still impressive regardless.

Nope. 30k at his peak. I think the mortgage was interest only and then endowments or somethings. Frugal lifestyle.semi detached 4 bed but still bigger than what we’ve managed.

Yes endowment mortgages were a thing - you paid interest on your capital loan and then also paid into an investment vehicle which was intended to mature after a set amount of years, allowing you to repay of the entire loan. The idea was that you’d have a little bit extra at the end as a cash bonus. I think it worked for some, but they then discovered that these investments were not performing well enough to cover the loan amounts and some were left with a shortfall at the end of their 25/30 years. Shockingly bad for some. I think they swapped most people onto repayment mortgages in the early 2000s

In today’s money, your dad’s income in 2000 is significantly over the national average (average wage in 2000 was around 18k) He did well and was in a position to support a family on this wage alone. I agree that someone on the equivalent of £58000 now might struggle to provide the standard of living that we have come to expect.

Its hard not to compare yourself with what the generation before you have achieved, but I also remind myself that we have a much higher ‘standard of living’ than previous generations, at least this is what we are trying to convince ourselves as we embrace consumerism more and more!

You can all shout at each other as much as you like but the tough reality is that we’re economically poorer since financial crash 2008 and it will take years for the economy to recover.It will be the next generation.

We’re going to have to bite the bullet. There’s no money. It is what it is.

We had the peace dividend from WW2 cushioned by US support which they’ve warned for years that they are not continuing.

So doesn’t matter who is in charge politically these realities won’t change.Dont fall for the snake oil sales man who promises to fix it. They can’t and won’t.

All empires decline and ours has.

Low income families have always had it hard.

You seem to suggest that a
low income family could live well on a single wage in the 90s? Surely you can believe this?

You definitely got a lot more for your money in the 90s of course you did
Assets were cheap and luxury shit that none of us need was expensive. That’s where it’s gone wrong.