To find my elderly relative’s attitude to money very wearing

[definitelybothered]

I help an elderly relative (late 80s) with various admin tasks, paying bills, ordering shopping, etc. It can be time consuming but she is virtually blind and can no longer do this herself.

But I find it really hard to bite my tongue as she is constantly complaining that she doesn’t have enough money, can’t afford to put the heating on in the winter and is one of those people who says young people today have more money than she ever did but they spend it all on holidays, coffee and concerts etc. She honestly believes it was harder financially in her day and young people today are just spoilt.

When I try and disagree with her she shouts me down. But what really irritates is she pleads poverty but it’s rubbish, she has an income of £4.5k every month (after tax) and barely spends a grand of it. She has an eye watering amount in savings too. Her latest grumble is she doesn’t think she should be in the higher tax band (she’s just been taxed 40% on something) but I said she must be based on the maths but she won’t listen.

I get a little bit of SERPS or SSP on top of my state pension. Everyone contributed to it unless they had a work pension. It stopped when occupational pension contributions became “opt out” not because it was unaffordable.

she genuinely thinks someone on £30k today is much richer than she is because she never earned that while working

Presumably she has no idea that £30K in her day was worth a lot more than it is now.

Not all pensioners are well off. Many lost businesses, lost houses along the way. Some did not have jobs which paid into pensions.
The final salary pension that people call gold plated was literally decades ago. And no longer existed in the way it originally was.
Some pensioners have pension credit because their income is so low they need it topped up. They don’t own their homes.
There have been some nasty recessions in recent history. People ended up in negative equity on their homes. They owed more than the home was worth. The homes were repossessed. The idea everything has been easy is not so.

They are not doing this any more though, sales have completely stalled beyond people that absolutely have to move in most areas it looks like. The house price bubble was deliberately created and stoked by the bankers, politicians and the media, unfortunately the public fell for it. For most people demand isn"t the issue, they may want something but the bank tells them how much they can borrow and the bond market tells the bank the cost of the debt, that is the dynamic that will eventually unwind house prices back to more sensible levels.

I imagine this person has always been a bit unreasonable. Its not inevitable for someone in their 80s. My DM is not like this. It does sound wearing. You are doing a good thing for her.

If she has £4.5K a month she can afford [rofessional help, tell her so and step away.

She will go balistic at the thought of the extra cost.

Really uncomfortable with framing older people as thick.

I think some people might be about to experience this. In London prices for flats seem to be falling. Not sure about the rest of the country.

Back at the end of the 1980s there was a huge drop in house prices and some people who had borrowed as much as they could on mortgage to buy somewhere they only expected to live in for a couple of years were unable to sell their flat or house for enough to pay the mortgage back - negative equity. They were trapped in places that were too small or not where they wanted to live any more for years until either prices rose or they were able to borrow enough from other sources to move on. We were very lucky not to be affected, and it was sheer luck.

We should never have moved to a position where people treat a house as an investment as much as a place to live.

I never said she was thick.

Well, imo, you implied it.

My mother remembers rationing well, and says that so many people were deeply hurt by it emotionally, only this wasn’t talked about. A make do and mend approach was adopted, including with mental health, but as a result many people, particularly those who lived through a war or two (including my grandparents) had a very defensive attitude towards any money they had, to the point where they may have the trappings of a comfortable and even well off life, but with a deep seated fear that all could be lost.

Younger generations have forgotten what they lived through. Young people now have fewer chances and opportunities in many ways, and life is undeniably difficult, but they have more comfort and predictable safety than our grandparents had, and no amount of introducing them to newer concepts is going to shake off the lived experience of those who lived through a war and years of rationing and scrimping.

MN is known to be ageist at the best of time, but plenty forget what older generations lived through. Ironically we live in times where young people are traumatised by the slightest thing.

"We should never have moved to a position where people treat a house as an investment as much as a place to live."

Very true, a lot of people are going to be stuck for a long time waiting for their "windfall", however the public are just as much to blame, millions of people lapped up this house price nonsense over the years, the bankers must be chuckling to themselves at how well their little Ponzi scheme played out?

My late mother did not complain like the OPs, but was frugal and always wanted to end up with some money at the end of the week/month. My thought is of a wish to always have enough for full time carers at home if ever it was needed, as the idea of being in a nursing home was something she hated the thought of.

I’m 60 so in the middle really. Growing up my parents owned their own home with a mortgage but the budget was tight. My dad was paid weekly in cash. My mother
dealt with the finances and everything was costed on a weekly basis. Eg, gas, electricity, TV licence, insurances, savings etc. My mum worked part time and my dad full time. We had two holidays when I was a child, I would have loved to have gone to Brownies, dance classes etc but it wasn’t affordable. Luckily my Mum’s friend had an only daughter and I had all her castoffs. My first bra was hers! So from your relatives point of view she probably does think a lot of money is squandered nowadays as she is a similar age to what my parents would be. I don’t feel particularly hard done by as
the majority of my friends had the same type of upbringing.

An awful lot of money is now spent on what your
relative Would consider to be unnecessary
probably as those things weren’t available in her younger years.

I blame Mrs Thatcher. When we bought our first house in the mid 80s the rules were very clear. You were only going to get a mortgage if you'd been saving regularly at that building society, and you had to have a 10% deposit - I think - certainly at least 5%. You could borrow up to 2.5 times joint income or 3 times the higher income + the lower income. Not sure what the maximum was for single people.

Banks didn't do much mortgage business then. Building societies were mutual organisations that were owned by the people saving with or borrowing from them. The Nationwide is still run like that, but almost all the rest were bought up by banks.

Mrs T abolished all those restrictions and then it was a free for all. As she also made it possible to buy council houses at a massive discount and banned councils from using the proceeds to build replacement social housing, she must have singlehandedly had a massive effect on house price inflation.

That sounds super frustrating, OP - you have my sympathies. In the interests of balance, I look after a relative of a similar age and have been helping her with her finances. She has worked hard her all her life and has a good pension (nowhere near the size of your relative though!) but often reflects on how much harder it is for young people today in all sorts of ways. It's very hard to get her to spend money on herself but she's very generous with other people.

What does she mean when she says people were deeply hurt by rationing emotionally? It was a scheme to ensure that everybody could get the essentials, not just the people who could pay the most. It was carefully designed to give everybody the nutrition they needed. There's research that shows the nation's physical health improved considerably under rationing because people ate less sugar, mostly had to eat wholemeal bread, and ate more vegetables. I'm sure it was very boring at times and it must have made feeding a family a challenge, but I don't understand how it could have deeply hurt people to have to live a very simple life. The war itself was obviously a different matter, but there again a lot of people found a purpose during that time and lost it again in the post-war years when women and older people had to make way for the young men returning from the military.

I should have clarified-I don’t just mean via benefits. I also mean free bus travel, rail concessions, eyecare, self-care (e.g. pensioner rates for hair cuts), arts concessions etc. etc. etc. Everything in this country seems to be geared towards making sure pensioners stay on side. I wonder why?

It's part of cognitive decline. Just agree with her and change the subject using the distraction technique. It will make for a more agreeable time for both of you. Work out the safe topics and stick to those. Old movies and songs are also good. Even with limited sight, familiar movies should be OK as she should remember them if you go back far enough.

If you mean they're more likely to vote than younger people, the solution to that is very simple. The young need to get out and vote. Postal votes are available for those that can't get to the polling station on the day.

Most of the concessions you mention were introduced at a time when pensioners were often a lot poorer than working people. However, keeping older people engaged in society and able to get out and about and take an interest in things pays off because it keeps them in better health for longer.

Tough luck- unless you enjoy giving up your time for free , and listening to the moaning.

DH and I both have DB pensions, and we are only in our 50's.

Because they have worked all their lives and paid into the system and now they are getting a little back. Haircuts? Jesus. Pensioners in the UK get £1000 per month to live on. I dare you to try that.

Btw, I live in Scotland and we get free travel from age 60, and all under 22's get it too. However, I am 62 and my husband is 63 and we don't have free bus passes. Not everyone who qualifies for it claims it.

What eye care? Everyone in Scotland gets free eye tests. I still have to pay for my actual glasses, which are around £600. The free eye test is the least of my worries.

Arts concessions? WTF?

And what about keeping younger people out and about and engaged with society? What about the health and well-being of working people? Because they are being constantly squeezed from all sides. What about their mental health?

Like you say, those concessions were introduced for a different generation of pensioners. The boomers and baby boomers do not need those concessions like their parents did (or indeed like their children will). So why do we as a society continue to pay for them?

I for one would much rather we had a system of giving people in work X number of free bus rides a week to get to and from work than giving free bus rides to people based on nothing more than their age. We need people out there working and contributing don’t we?