how do they expect you to live when everything goes up!!

[mommmmyof2]

I am sooo sick of everything rising apart from mine or my husbands wages!! We struggle at the best of times to get through every week and i just had a promotion and what for....so they can take benefits off us and to be taxed more on it!
I sometimes feel the harder you work the harder it is, i not sure how they expect you to survive these days, and when your children are asking for things and all you ever say is no then you feel like a bad mom

Clothes I don't care about. I've worn the same things for years. Uniforms are a pill though, especially for man sized teenagers

Have you an asda riven? I got my ds men's washable suit trousers for £6 a pair a couple of weeks ago.

I don't think my nan had it harder financially,(in other ways yes) her and my granddad moved in with his mum and saved there very low wage job think it was a normal working class wage around there for 6months did some overtime and bought a house in cash for 10,000 . That same house now costs 100,000. My nan came from a coal mining family too.

I would love to see someone on a normal working class wage save for 6months and but a house in cash today.

I think the problem with these MN threads is that we are comparing apples and pears. Some of us are only feeling the pinch in the sense of having to give up luxuries that we can quite frankly do without. So it's fair enough to tell us to stop moaning/our parents coped etc etc.

Others were already struggling before the budget and will be finding it very hard to make ends meet at all now.

The two cases are not comparable.

Why, why, why are Brits constantly comparing the present day to the past and then beating themselves, and everyone else, with cat o' nine tails for any progress that's been made?

How completely stiffling!

Is it somehow a good thing that the majority of people in a supposedly developed nation go with outdoor toilets, no adequate washing facilities and no heating?

'Oh, well, in my nan's time. We have it so so much easier. We are spoilt.'

Yes, in your nan's time women weren't allowed to work at all once they were married in many cases, they had no control over their own reproduction because abortion was illegal and there was limited birth control, their husbands could beat and rape them, their husband could go piss away all his wages and leave her and his kids to starve, etc.

Do we really see times like this as good?

My nan said it was horrid and she's glad things have changed. My MIL says the same. She used to have her arse pinched at work on a daily basis and could do nowt about it.

FGS. How ridiculous.

Expat - I don't think it's that we think those times were better, more that we all do remember them and that puts the current woes into perspective.
As you say, it was piss poor then, especially for women.

I do think young people who have only real reference points to the last decade have no idea that we have just lived through a rather lovely economic bubble and that it isn't normal for ordinary working people to have so much and expect so much.

That for many of us a few savings here and there won't 'hurt'. Actually may do the environment good as we all become a little less wasteful.

This is not, however, the case for people who are really struggling. I accept that there are some for who ten quid means a hell of a lot.

Also worthy of note, is that we have just lived through a period of record breaking tax take.
That too is not normal.
And so, as a country we have to make savings.

Did people really expect the tax take ( and consequent public sector spending) to go on indefinitely? Did people really believe the no boom and bust shit?

well said cory and expat

(Those two always seem to speak sense wherever I bump into them)

'I do think young people who have only real reference points to the last decade have no idea that we have just lived through a rather lovely economic bubble and that it isn't normal for ordinary working people to have so much and expect so much.'

That sounds so patronising.

'Young people today . . .' sniff, sniff.

Young people today are mostly screwed, and it's not the government's fault, however much people my age (39) and boomer generation don't want to accept the blame. WE got greedy. We want house prices to stay high. We want them to pay for their education in the name of 'savings' when many of us did not have to.

They'll be stuck, too, struggling to support people who don't want to work because they are entitled to 'retire' and they don't die, either.

If I were a young person I'd be seriously pissed off and not take kindly to old farts telling me I need to do XYZ because I'm spoilt and don't know I was born.

Well, I have spent a lot of my life in a country which has extremely high tax takes, and I am not convinced that it is always the way to rack and ruin. I don't get the feeling that there are more people in Sweden who make living on benefits and never working their lifestyle choice. So maybe it's not so much about welfare as such, but more about people feeling alienated?

Anyway, I do agree with expat that it is hard on the rising generation. If they are spoilt, we spoiled them. And now they suddenly have to become unspoilt.

I did not mean it to aound patronising expat - merely the truth.
I think if your formative years have been in a period of economic growth and record breaking tax take, then your points of refernece will be high income and high public spending.

I think it has come as a massive shock to many that the good times can't just keep on rolling and all everyone wants to do is whinge.

I'm from working class northern stock and we don't do whingers well, I'm afraid.

Nor do I pander to the delusional. Thos ehtta can't believe the economy is going to be up shit creek for at least five years need to wake up.
Yesterday, I was chatting to the head of DDs new secondary school and she said that she had been surprised that she had received a record level of applicants and a record level of acceptances. Given how ridiculously expensive it is to go there, I wonder if some folk just aren't waking up and smelling the coffee.

'I did not mean it to aound patronising expat - merely the truth.'

You see it as the truth, they see it as some old fart preaching to them how spoilt they are and how this old fart had it rough and doesn't suffer fools gladly and yadda yadda yadda because at that point they'll no longer be listening to you seriously.

The ones with more manners will pretend to not have tuned stuff like this out.

Pontificating really isn't the way to the heart of the teenager.

I mean, just look at the veiled contempt you have for the other parents at your kids' school. They must have not woken up to smell the coffee. They can't possibly be all able to afford it like me.

'I think if your formative years have been in a period of economic growth and record breaking tax take, then your points of refernece will be high income and high public spending.

I think it has come as a massive shock to many that the good times can't just keep on rolling and all everyone wants to do is whinge.'

Good times I am 22yo my auntie who is 40 bought a house for 50,000 20 years ago. Her dh wages are the same now as they were then that house is now worth 300,000. Her house is a 4 bed roomed detached house in a very popular area. My dp wages are the same as hers (my dp has a graduate job her DH does not) the best mortgage we can get is 100,000 3 bedroom house in a not so nice area. We pay double the mortgage she does. My generation have to earn at least double the wages the last generation had to have similar life.

So we struggle through and get endless people being smug saying they are better off than us because they really worked for it, earning the same wage as we do, and how easy we have things.

Exactly, slushy!

My dad is nearly 76. He grew up all dirt poor, worked since he was 7 and had to give up some or all wages to the family to survive, got two degrees at night whilst working full time and having a family, etc.

He pities young people today. He thinks they have it rougher today than he ever had it because everything is so expensive.

He points out things like how the workplace has changed.

When he started at the company he retired from after 36 years, the company treated s its employees well and employees were therefore more loyal. You could work there for life and there was chance of promotion if you wanted it.

Pensions were protected.

Things like this.

"'m from working class northern stock and we don't do whingers well, I'm afraid."

oh right - that must be a different breed of the working class northern stock that I grew up in (and still have family in)........as god they can whinge for the whole bloody country!

Not contempt - just incomprehension that folk wouldn't factor in the tough times that are ahead of us.

It's not difficult to understand. The facts and figures are all there. Deal with it.

My own DCs who are under ten understand the impact of the recession on our family. Dad has had to travel more because there's fuck all work in the UK.
They don't like it, but they get it.

Why adults are so incapable of accepting the situation I do not understand.

Oh, and slushy, expect to get a response that you expect too much. You should 'start off' in a bedsit in a dire council estate and be grateful, because back in the day they had to start by buyin a rat-infested wheelie bin in a dockyard area to live in and it also had to do the job of feeding them.

But by jolly, they worked hard and didn't complain.

'Not contempt - just incomprehension that folk wouldn't factor in the tough times that are ahead of us.'

So it never crossed your mind to consider that perhaps there are still plenty who can truly afford it? Instead you just assume it's because your peers haven't woken up and smelled the coffee they are that stupid and that's not contemptuous?

'My own DCs who are under ten understand the impact of the recession on our family. Dad has had to travel more because there's fuck all work in the UK.
They don't like it, but they get it.'

And nobody else does.

So what?

My dad had to go abroad to work for years during the big oil crash in the 80s in the US.

It was that or no job.

So because someone's kids had to go through that that assumes they understand better than everyone else? Everyone else is just a spoilt, whinging, clueless, feckless spendthrift?

And here I thought I was a cynic!

'Why adults are so incapable of accepting the situation I do not understand.'

I have accepted it fuck all else I can do really is there now. I don't moan about it but why should I have people sat there moaning and whinging at me how easy it has been for me, how much harder life was for them when that is absolute crap.

So it is okay for people like you to whinge and whine about young people today, have it all, moan about sacrifice. But it is not okay for me to moan about the shit my generation have been dropped in. Bit hypocritical wouldn't you say.

'Oh, and slushy, expect to get a response that you expect too much. You should 'start off' in a bedsit in a dire council estate and be grateful, because back in the day they had to start by buyin a rat-infested wheelie bin in a dockyard area to live in and it also had to do the job of feeding them.

But by jolly, they worked hard and didn't complain'

Rofl expat .

Toccata - that was exactly my thought when I read that

Litchick - if you can still afford then school then no doubt many others can too? Slightly bizarre attitude...

Absolutely, slushy!

expat - you seem determined to misunderstand me.
Of course, there are plenty of folk still well off. I live in one of the most affluent areas in the UK.

There are those who the recession has not touched.
There are those who it has touched but are still wealthy, so you know, they can still continue to live a certain way.

But there are also large swathes of people who are living beyond their means. They hope things are aboput to improve any second - and that shocks me. getting into debt, getting second mortagages etc to pay for private school ( a luxury surely ) seems to me indicative of a nation who across the board can't quite accept that economies rise and fall. We can't control them.

then litchick, how come slushy, toc and Ali have understood you the same way I have?