AIBU to feel middle-class luxuries have become increasingly out of reach?

[cocobow]

I had to go to the local shopping centre the other day to pick up a click and collect for my husband, new work shirts so nothing fancy! I thought why not make an afternoon of it as I rarely go shopping and I could maybe get a coffee and cake and even treat myself to a little something as my birthday is coming up.

I loved some of the clothes in places like monsoon and seasalt but it was all way too expensive dresses were £80 to £100 or more same with skirts which seemed to start at £65 and I know that isn't even considered expensive today but for me it is! I went for a look in the sephora as I love skincare but again it was all really expensive. The queue for the till was full of school girls buying things I wouldn't be able to buy for myself!

To be fair they were probably there spending birthday money and probably aren't spending money like that all the time. I suppose it just feels like the goal posts on these admittedly luxury items have been moved since I was in my teens and early 20's when I imagined that by my 40's I'd be able to at least buy some of these things or buy nice clothes now and then. My husband and I both degree and post graduate educated and work in professional jobs but we have to prioritise bills, the kids and food over luxuries. To be fair we have no debt at all and we will save for an buy large purchases cash mostly but I admit to feeling a bit personally deprived at times! When my mum was my age she worked in a call centre part time in the evenings and would go round the shops most weekend and buy herself a new top or other item of clothes and exclusively used clarins skincare, I use the ordinary, cerave or boots and superdrug own brand mostly and my clothes come from charity shops. My parents were working class made good but their disposable income seemed to go a lot further than mine does. We don't even have a large mortgage.

DH and I recently looked at taking a short trip to London as a joint birthday present to each other but the cost was so expensive we seem to have quietly shelved the idea.

In the end I had a look in waterstones but even that was expensive, since when are paperbacks routinely £14.99! I never even had a coffee or bit of cake as the selection of cakes looked dry and unappetizing but would still have cost £10 in total.

Am I being unreasonable to think the cost of a middle class lifestyle with a few luxuries has had the goalposts moved by quite some amount?

You’re not wrong. I mean I could afford an £80 dress if I wanted but it would have to be really special for that price.

Today I got an £80 dress in the sale for £35. There’s no way I would have bought it full price.

I like Fatface clothes but I only buy in their sales as I just can’t justify the price in my head for what the items are. I mean £65 for a flimsy skirt and £40 for a cotton top that probably cost a few pounds to produce in India. I like them but I am just not paying that.

I do like beauty products but I only get expensive stuff for birthdays/Xmas as a treat.

Look for the sales OP.

Influencers on SM are hugely to blame I tell you now! They have set expectations very high for stuff we either can't afford or don't need.

Look at this cream, that eye liner, this holiday place, that villa, this dress, that gadget, all fabulous and you definitely need it and right NOW!

You could get up and make a cup of tea during the ads in the past, but SM is always on (mostly) so there is no escape from people trying to get you to spend, buy, try. I know it depends on your algorithm, but believe me I only use history, ahem US cop cams (!) and groups for a health condition I have. And still some one will wang on at me to buy, use, enjoy this product or that. And of course many ARE influenced and wonder why things are so expensive out in the wild.

Anyhow, we won't die for the want of a coffee or a cake. The problem arises if you see next door and others going off on three hols a year and a new car every two years, and home improvements, similar set up to you (but who knows), same house same road. I think it makes people unhappy that they can't do the same. Dissatisfaction results and the cycle repeats itself all over again.

Paperbacks are routinely £9.99 in Waterstones.

This is true. I think that someone on lower or minimum wage should be able to afford at least a small amount of treats too, but right now most people are squeezed.

It also seems to be a quality issue too but I suppose that's linked to prices.

We just have to hope it improves. It is sad...but at the same time (depending on where you are) stuff like books, theatre, museums and others can be easier to access with little or no money (previews in London, for one, or seats at the top which often still have a good view).

Totally agree. I’m early fifties.I grew up in poverty. Now I’m a senior professional. Household income is now more than I ever dreamed someone like me would have. Yet I’ve less disposable income than when I was a student at university working part time at McDonalds decades ago. I wandered into Fatface recently and thought it had been a long time since I bought myself something ‘just because’ and yet I couldn’t believe a basic sweater I liked was £80 so put it back. My mum worked part time on minimum wage her whole life yet constantly bought herself new clothes, expensive makeup, expensive wine, nice jewellery. I don’t get it. I’ve tried to stop thinking about it because it just depresses me.

For me, candles are a good marker of how my attitude to luxuries has changed. Ten years ago, I’d have thought of a Jo Malone or Diptyque candle as a reasonable indulgence for a 40-50 year old professional. I bought one every couple of months. Now I view it as an extravagance (£56 & £63 respectively) that I just can’t justify.

Two full-time professional jobs, no debt and no large mortgage…yet you can’t afford the occasional treat? Do you know where exactly all that income is going?

Tbf disposable income is always at its lowest whilst you’ve got kids at home. It’s only now they are grown up and leaving uni/home that we have any money to spend again. We had very little at your time of life and we are supposedly boomers.

But yes times are tough now generally:

People in the 90s didn’t have to pay out for things we need now to live ( phones, wi fi, extra council tax , higher utilities bills , water bills have increased, cost of any diy , insurances gave shot up , running a car is huge, the list is long )
All devised to part you with money.
Sounds as if living in the US isn’t much better either though and they have to worry about health care costs too ( poster below in the US , it sounds even harder for them too)

Yes, that was exactly my understanding of class as well.

I think a lot of people just see that wages are 2-3x what they are in the UK and assume that spending power is thus 2-3x what it is in the UK.

However, for wages to BE that much higher, many things automatically have to cost 2-3x higher (and in my experience some things can actually cost more like 5-10 times as much - another random example, I just stocked up on tampons back in the UK because I could get 120 for 4 pounds. Here it would cost me $40!).

The number that sticks in my head is that people have 14% more spending power here, but I actually question if even that is calculated correctly. I swear I live way more frugally than people I know in the UK - we just don't have money left for the extras that they enjoy (holidays, meals out, beauty treatments, toddler classes etc.) Saying that, of course there are things that we do like about life here, but feeling wealthy certainly isn't amongst my reasons for staying put right now!

where is everyone living where they haven't closed the libraries? My closest one would cost me about £5 on the bus for a round trip, none within walking distance.

I think it depends on where you live too as your bills do of course determine disposable income.

I'm renting atm as moved to the midlands for work and still not sure I want to buy here. I pay a little over £600 pcm for a decent sized maisonette on a nice estate. Not quite private drive levels of poshness but it's mainly middle class families here with plenty of decent newish cars on drives etc. Got a front and back garden and fair bit of space.

I never really need to budget and just buy what I want within reason. Bought an OLED TV, games console, quite a few gadgets, a fortnight in Crete in the past year, plus had quite a few £150 nights out, and still managed to put £15k in an ISA. I made about £57k last year so I'm not a high earner by mumsnet standards.

However, I don't have nor really want kids and in my early 30s I'm becoming more certain of that rather than less. I always thought that was maybe why I don't struggle financially but on the other hand if I lived with a similarly earning partner we'd have over £100k between us and would share bills, so I dunno.

Probs gonna make £10k less this this year as can't be arsed doing the overtime atm but I'm still feeling fairly comfortable, even if I haven't been paying into my ISA as much.

I know what you mean. I spend more time putting things back than taking them to the till. I particularly miss book buying. I love reading and I love books. I go to the library which is great but it's not the same.

As a society we just spend so much more money wastefully than previous generations. And we are pressured to do it, as if it’s the norm. Most middle class people, just a couple of decades ago, only bought new clothes occasionally, only ate in a restaurant a couple of times per year, never bought coffees, didn’t get massages/nails/treatments, bought cheap face cream from Boots. We had the same furniture/carpets/kitchen/bathroom for decades.

I would consider my upbringing middle class, but we didn’t have loads of hobbies, we just did brownies. We only got new things twice per year - birthday and Christmas. We went on fairly budget Europe holidays or camping in the UK. We only ever had one car and it would be 5-10 years old. Etc etc.

These days people seem to think it’s the norm to afford lunch out every week, takeaway coffee, nails once a fortnight, new clothes just because it’s a new trend, kids doing multiple hobbies, upgrade mobile phones every couple of years, lease 2 new cars per family, upgrade household furniture, redecorate, get a new kitchen etc. When I was a kid (80s) only incredibly wealthy people lived like this.

Feel exactly the same. I prioritise my kids clothes and activities and then when ot comes to me I feel like I can only afford cheap cosmetics, toiletries, clothesl -- despite our household income being pretty high. I was easily able to afford new clothes regularly back in my 20s and 30s - of course it makes a difference having dependants but everything is juat so much more.expensive- and worse quality!

I always understood that someone was middle class if they or especially their parents and grandparents went to university. It's got nothing to do with spending power. If someone is born into an aristocratic family and falls on hard times, loses the family fortune, and works in Tesco it doesn't and will not ever make them working class. People can become middle class through education, however, many people will choose to still claim to be the class of their upbringing.

Hmm, I'm conflicted on this. I know plenty of rich builders who defo aren't middle class. However, my father grew up very poor in the east end and went to work for a big banking group in his late teens as a clerk.

He stayed there for four decades and became pretty senior. He's well spoken, plays golf, and you'd never guess he'd grown up poor. It's not even that he adopted the affectations of the middle class. He just spent his entire life from his teens until retirement in corporate environments and became pretty much indistinguishable from the other men around him.

I live in a big rural county with less central funding than many areas and have several near me.

We had internet in the 1990s and mobile phones and landlines, council tax or rates as we called them, water rates based on rateable value of the property (which were high), we had cars (but most people drove jalopies) and house insurance was higher then than what we pay now and tied to the mortgage company so they could charge what they liked. We also paid 25% tax and 15% mortgage interest rates. My first Hotpoint washing machine in 1987 cost £100 more than the washing machine I bought last year. We really weren't any better off in the 90s but I do agree that we didn't have the external pressure to spend more than we had either.

This is insane though. Surely you're paying a hefty mortgage or something to swallow up all that cash.

I think part of the issue is that the combination of stagnant wage growth, high inflation in recent years and the fiscal drag associated with the freezing of the tax bands means that the wages that used to afford a middle class lifestyle doesn't now.

The artificially low interest rates post 2008 until 2022 means what is affordable has changed dramatically. I think there probably was also people that were affording the lifestyle you thought you would be able to afford by using cheap credit.

We are "middle class" and I see families living a similar existence to the my childhood. We are coming to the end of the summer holidays and my daughter has had a growth spurt so has needed most of her wardrobe replacing. I had a browse online picked a shop that had the best range for a sensible price. I went on the next available day, I didn't have to think about payday and checking what we had left after the bills had gone out. I didn't spend a lot and I was selective about what we bought. I use to think it was odd that the only time I saw my mum write a cheque was for our school uniforms and shoes. I know now. It allowed her to buy the uniforms before the end of the summer holidays and without it being too rushed and chaotic. The cheque gave her an extra 3 days so the payment went out after they got their August pay.

We are mindful about what we spend but don't have to think about what we spend and I think this is what separates us out as middle class. For me, higher middle class and above comes when you don't look at the price at all.

Consuming less is good for the environment.

That amount of money on a candle is an extravagance I could never justify and few people would have justified 40 years ago.

You will be horrified to read that when we bought our lifetime house, in 1996, we stretched every which way to make the money and mortgage stack up. Once it happened all the problems happened at once, but we eventually fixed them all, and now we are 70, we think another family should have the space to enjoy. Unfortunately, because of the price being asked for the apartment we want, and the stamp duty at 5%, we cannot contemplate very much negotiation. The stamp duty on the apartment we like is roughly £30k. That is a lot of tax to move house from a place we like very much and are happy, to prepare for being old.

This!

Having things in the 90s seemed more doable and affordable though. DIY is extortion now , things like paint and diy materials seemed better value.
Or maybe I am rose tinted glasses and we were not rich back then either ( not rich now either !)