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?

Her mother gave her that as a wedding present.
Yes, she is rich. No denying it. But she is also frugal. Believe it or not.

@Monty36over 1m visited in the first week, you don’t think they were part of the general
population?

I'm probably upper working class. I don't work, I've not finished my degree. I had kids at 24 and 27. Bought a house at 26, extended it and paid the mortgage off at 40, 2 years ago. We've taken the kids to over 60 countries (some more than once) and to 20 US states, never Florida! We usually go away for 5 weeks in summer, this year we went for 6, mainly in China. We drive a £600 Vauxhall, I don't get my haircut because I hate having it done! My husband earns a decent wage but it's not as high as some you hear on here.

We can treat ourselves, but we were paying £1.5k a month, on average, when interest rates were low, when we could have paid £300 a month. We kept reducing the term and overpaid on top. We are better off than we would have been because of that, and because we had kids younger, and because we bought our house in our 20s.

Somewhere (maybe the Times) I read a really good article a few months ago, where the author said that to save money she'd decided not to buy a new sofa, and then listed all the events downstream of that if everyone else acts similarly: less money for the furniture shop, for the textile factory, for the warehouse operators, for the cafe near the factory, less paid in tax.

The British economy relies very heavily on services and consumer spending, we can't wish that away. But if we don't produce and manufacture then there'll be no money for goods and services to prop up what's left kf the economy.

I think a lot of those middling brands are priced to go into sale these days. I don't remember the last time I bought something from white stuff or Boden without either a discount code or in sale, but that's very geared to online and they wonder why the high street footfall struggles

Horses, private education, chefs, gifted homes etc are not what I would call a frugal existence even if you do rewear clothes but you can disagree!

me too

My old sofas were well over 20 years old and past it. The prices were astonishing and the material isn’t as good , but I had to buy something and with interest free loans , it wasn’t a terrible deal and will ‘ see us out ‘
I was still surprised how much some of the sofas were and I didn’t go anywhere that posh either. Like clothes, the materials used and the manufacture is definitely not as good.

I think such shopping then in those sorts of stores would have been undertaken by upper middle class people.
They may well have had a lot of visitors. To gawp. But those shopping would have been a lot less than the number visiting.

Anyway, I suspect you understand my drift. For modern day consumers, shopping has become more of a regular hobby/activity.

I agree with this even in recent years, we had our fixed term end after the mini budget fiasco and our monthly payments jumped from 900 to almost 1500 a month for the same house, a 3 bed semi.

I think the real point is that you must have bought a cheapish house and were able to extend it. You also had your kids at the age many now are just out of uni and settling into a job.

Your mortgage was very low- many new grads pay that now for 1 room in a shared house (ie £1500K a month.)

I know people now- friends of my adult children- who are only buying for the first time in their late 30s, as they settled down later, and are buying in the SE for upwards of £750K+, and earning 6 figures. But with big loans.

HUGE difference in house prices north and south.

Gawd. She is rich. Yes. But for a rich person she is known for being frugal.
You can be rich and frugal. Frugal means you do not go around splashing your cash. Frugal means you are thrifty. You dislike waste. And she is like that.
It doesn’t equate to poverty necessarily.

You can be loaded and frugal. The op isn’t really talking about the obscenely rich people, just ordinary ones who have tried to get on and have good jobs and do all the right things , yet they cant have a treat as it’s so much more pricy than it used to be.
We can all argue that it’s not and you don’t need these things in life, but if the middle classes are struggling each month, it doesn’t bode that well for the economy as a whole really.

Pre-pandemic, I would mindlessly buy Costa coffee. You know, if I was out and fancied a coffee. It was a treat, I knew I was paying more for it than is necessary - but it wouldn't be a treat I'd think too hard about.

Now I go nowhere near the place. HOW MUCH?!

I did the same as you in Joules recently - not a shop I go in very often. There was a gorgeous white summer dress - a day dress, nothing fancy. £75! I remember Joules being for yummy mummies and not 'cheap', but £75 for a sundress is ridiculous.

I buy my clothes on Vinted, from charity shops and Tu at Sainsbury's. And in fairness, it doesn't feel like a hardship because I have particular taste that only occasionally aligns with what capitalism thinks I should buy this quarter. But I'm bloody lucky I feel that way. Skincare is also Cerave and The Ordinary - but at least they're good...

I used to consider myself middle class. Now I think maybe I'm working class - haven't been able to afford a holiday for two years, money worries consume me... My job hasn't changed, my income has dramatically reduced as a result of the economic landscape, and the cost of everything has sky-rocketed. I hate it.

I did buy a cheapish house, repossession, but I was at uni, had one child, and my husband was in the Army on about £25k and our mortgage was still 4x his salary. And we borrowed more to extend. The same house today would cost around £375k (not extended). Up north.

We were paying £1.5k on average years ago. Not recently. So what people pay for the same today isn't exactly comparable. I think in the last year of the mortgage we overpaid £1k a month and then I paid off a £7k lump sum at the end. So more than £1.5k a month.

But as I said, a large part of having money now is that we bought when we did and had children when we did.

That’s how I shop too - never buy this seasons until the sales. Am in my 50s so don’t feel the need to wear ‘this years’ designs. Perfectly happy to pay 25-40% for last seasons.

No not unreasonable, everything is through the roof now. If salaries had kept up with prices a bit of occasional luxury would be achievable, but not now. I won't even buy ready made sandwiches, because £4 for 2 slices of bread and filling is just too much to stomach

I love Hobbs - but I love it even more on ebay. You can get great pieces on there whether used in great condition or from British Heart Foundation which seems to receive a lot of their stock.

I sort of disagree with it on the clothes front. Clothes have got cheaper. Those monsoon dresses were £100 or so back in 2000 and they are about the same now. I've seen posts where vintage shops have got deadstock from places like BHS and Topshop and they've not gone up in price in 30 years.

I think that whilst wages seem to give you less spending power there are so many more additional costs our parents and grandparents didn't pay or weren't that high - internet, tv, gas and electric is far more expensive now. You'd buy just a moisturiser and not a serum as well. Going to a restaurant was for birthdays.

I do agree re the cost of the lifestyle, but I don't think it's because shopping has become more expensive, I just think the expectation of what that life style includes is a lot more.

My income has barely increased over the years, everything else has massively sometimes, groceries, fuel, electric/gas. Back in the day me and DH would go to our local Wetherspoons with another couple two or three times a week. There were often "specials" for £2.99 to £4.99 including steak or Sunday Lunch. Not any more for a long time, sadly. They do not sell steak any as the quality/value was compromised. Now we just go once a week if there are the two couples. This means this summer time from June to end of August we didn't go at all as we were too busy with other things. When we go, we choose the all day brunch (2 sausage/bacon,eggs beans, chips) which is great value and I take some home to make into a fritatta/omelette for next day's dinner.

After tax and after household costs you are left with over £5k a week and don't think you are rich? Pull the other 1, pathetic brag post. What could you possibly be buying that leaves you too short to be spending £100 on an item of clothing if you wanted it

There’s lots of things at play:

• A profession requiring a degree and postgrad doesn’t equal a high salary. A teacher is on a pretty modest salary, for example.
• 30 or 40 years ago a teacher was probably middle class, but they didn’t have money lolling around for treats then either! My single mother was a degree educated professional, but we were poor.
• Expectations have changed massively. Some of that is new basic utilities to pay for, like mobiles and wifi, but it’s also what we now equate with a middle class lifestyle - a large new car, a detached new build house, an annual foreign holiday. And we expect more conveniences - prepared food and so on - than ever before.
• As a society we are constantly pushing for food, clothes, etc to be cheaper. We are unwilling to pay the true cost to the planet and its people. We have comparatively cheaper food than many other Western countries, and our own history.
• Other countries are getting richer, so the people who make our food, clothes, electronics, etc, are paid more than in decades past (though see above, we are still generally unwilling to pay at a properly decent level).
• Children are expensive. This is not a secret.

It has become like this now. Someone from a given class/place in society is significantly poorer than that same person would have been 30 years ago. Lots of things are obscenely expensive nowadays. I’ve cut dh’s hair since Covid and dd has cut mine. The prices skyrocketed. My mum thought nothing of goign to the hairdressers for a shampoo and set. I don’t even know what that exactly means! Makeup has become multi step artistry and “skincare” is largely a con. I do neither. And own none of those products. The people getting richer are the very very rich (8 figs, not 7!)Everyone else is getting poorer.

I’m 59 and this is the first time in my life I’ve felt flush. Still paying youngest’s rent at uni but have taken my lump sum and pension while continuing to work. Mortgage is paid off and I’m spending money on the house, on clothes and on books (lots of books). But fully aware that this is just good luck - teachers pension was a v good deal when I started 30 years ago and bought first house in 90s.

Its very easy for oldies (me!) to say we didn't spend on this and that but if these things had existed, most of us would have found them as hard to afford as folks do now & still wanted them (as folks do now)
I once made a faux christmas garland before you could buy such a thing, out of a broken 'tinsel' tree. For one tiny moment I was the envy of all my friends! & whenever the Christmas decs go on sale in the shops, I briefly remember that sad stringy little garland from yesteryear.
Seriously, there is so much now that it totally skews the idea of 'normal' consumption.