It's just so depressing.

[Karenanderson2057]

Who else is depressed at not being able to afford to do anything since cost of living crisis? I find life really boring.

Also sick of some people on mumsnet who earn over £50k and are pleading poverty. Absolute c*s

Thats it thats the thread.

I think you’ll find that everyone has had to cut back. It’s all relative and location specific. £50k is not a lot of money in London and the south if you take housing and childcare costs into consideration. It might not be poverty but a no frills life all the same as no help from the govt and pay a high rate of tax. No-one wins in this climate.

OP

Older and wiser and having left work at just over 50, IMO I think more about those on income and those that are left with very little having paid for their mrtgage/rent/bills/food etc
Re people on 50k or more, you say it make you "sick" when they complain re money. Sadly, mortgage rates/rents shooting up has impacted the masses, more so those on lower incomes

The food prices are shocking as almost nothing left at one quid and prices have shot up but the items get small inc food packs and washing powder etc. It mab be my imagination but doubt it, Mrrisons Quaisians have gone up in price and are smaller, the fress baked ones

I'm not bragging but we are financially ok-ish but we too worry as often the more a person earns the more they spend.

Therefore, people on what some people perceive to by higher incomes are struggling as well

We alswys shop around c=for car/property insurance, we don't use BP petrols stations any more as they are often up to 10p a lite higher and our cars take a to of fuel. We shop around for car ins, we even have tried supermarket brands and been pleasantly surprised as they taste better and about 70% of the price of well-known brands

We've always tried to save and never paid interest on borrowing other than the mortgage and that way we saved a lot of money. We also worked many extra hours when younger to move the mortgage debt sooner that we had borrowed for

Some people on low/mid/high will have spendngs monthly where these is little left behind once needs for the month are met and as soon as rates/rents/food rises, it becomes even harder

The supermarkets are actually hitting harder those on lower incomes EG, 3 for 4 or 4 for five results in massive differences if you buy one item or the offer items. Thnakfuly we have the money and space as we bulk buy what we can to save money but not everyone has the capacity for that

They say inflation is going down but food prices are still going up or staying up and items are smaller

No-one wins in this climate.

Not quite true. Without being conspiracy-minded: Governments quite like a bit of inflation because it deflates the value of their borrowings. Given the choice between repaying debt or allowing it to deflate away at 2 or 3% a year, they always choose the easy option.

In general terms, inflation steals from savers and rewards borrowers.

I agree, the poor me high earner threads are tedious.

The richer are winning in this climate tho arent they getting richer such as during covid

Yes ok. The 1% super wealthy are still mega rich. But you cited £50k earners. It’s not them living the high life (also do you mean £50k per household or person? So £100k couples for example?)

The CoL crisis is very tough, yes it is depressing.

Of course it is harder the less you have, but I think you're wrong about £50k salaries - they don't go far now if a family has childcare plus mortgage plus commuting costs, especially in expensive parts of the country.

Lower salaries are very tough these days, I don't know how people are managing if they have minimum wage jobs.

Am single earning 25k, life has become impossible

Raspberrymoon49 · Today 00:04

Am single earning 25k, life has become impossible

What is life like for you, my eldest DC earns a similar amount and he keeps refusing my help when I offer it to him. I know he must be finding life tough at the moment?

I find it equally irritating with people acting like the COL crisis is a new thing and no one before has ever encountered it. Because interest rates have been so low for years, people have got into a lull of low mortgages etc and having plenty of extra cash and are now whining because suddenly life is harder.

Those of us over 50 will have been there, seen that and got the T shirt.

I said on another thread that as a professional working in London in the late 90s I was on the bones of my arse. I would be paid and my bank balance would revert to zero on the 1st of each month and then I would gradually go into my overdraft to live. I didn't have a car and lived in a shitty, stinking flat. I had to get another job in the evenings to survive. And my experience was not uncommon. In fact it was normal. I was considered lucky amongst my peers because I owned a flat with a mortgage; most of my peers were flatsharing or had digs.

Food now is as cheap as it's ever been - relatively and the internet has meant that it's a buyers market as there's so much competition.

People older than me will remember the crash in the mid 80s (off top of my head). My mum did 3 jobs at one point.

It's all cyclical.

You don't hear about people getting second and third jobs now but many people with full time jobs in those days worked evening shifts in pubs or morning shifts cleaning or both. Negative equity was a huge thing where your house wasn't worth what you had paid for it, often by 10's of 1000's. Most working class women still worked after having children.

My first house didn't carpets for a couple of years and furniture was a bed and an armchair each. I'm not denying it is hard now but as you say it is a cycle and there seems to be a feeling that we all lived in luxury.

While I don't agree that people earning over £50k are living the high life in this COL crisis period, I do question whether we actually want people returning to the bad old days of having to work multiple jobs, not being able to afford basic holidays or even furniture?

It shouldn't be such an ask, in a developed country, to expect that people can enjoy decent quality food at reasonable prices, quality homes, a chance to enjoy time off and holidays etc?

Some do win in this climate, if you have substantial savings and no mortgage then even with power and food rising it can be negated by the amount of interest earned. Just like when the market collapses someone will be around hoovering up low cost stocks and shares up.

I absolutely get what you're saying, and if you are on the bones of your arse minimum wage/benefits etc then 50k sounds like a fortune.

In reality, you can be on 50k and get zero help for anything from the government, high mortgage, high childcare, no treats, nothing left at the end of the month, secondhand everything, no holidays. Life is still tough despite a decent income.

Everyone but the mega rich are feeling the pressure right now.

I was a teenager the 80s and we had completely different expectations. For years we didn't go out for a meal but even when we did it would be once a year or so. No takeaways ever. I've carried that on.

I do feel sorry for those who are struggling but our expectations have changed so much. I don't have haircuts and I've never had my nails done. My dd is having these things done and eating out constantly. I don't have my heating on, I just run a dehimidifier to stop damp and go to bed with hot water bottles and she taps me up for £50 a time to eat out.

My income is low, part time min wage. But my expectations are also low. I can see that most people would not want to do all the weird things I do to save money.

My own dc will never have houses. They consider luxuries to be neccessities. I get free vegetables and tins of soup given to me from time to time and dd won't touch any of that. I have saved hard for my dc since they were born. Tiny amounts, regularly. They consider these savings to be for frivolius spending money, when I consider them to be a house deposit.

I've been largely insulated from the cost of living crisis because I have low expectations. I consider luxuries to be for other people. I am content. My dc want life to be fun and exciting and to go nice places, wear nice clothes. I can go for a walk for free.

I hate the Tories with a passion but living under Thatcher taught me to have extremely low expectations, and that is how I have coped.

My friend grew up in poverty in Poland. She eats cabbage twice a day, every day. She is very frugal despite having a well paid job. She is appalled by the waste of money she sees around her.

Food has shot up but it is still relatively cheap. The meals we had in the 80s were horrible. The first time I ever enjoyed a meal I was 16 and my mum bought a jar of pasta sauce and we had spag bol that was (to me, then), delicious. We lived on microwave baked potatoes and horrible slop from the slow cooker. There was no removeable inner from the slow cooker back then either so it was inconvenient or dangerous to wash. There were no value ranges. Interest rates were 15%.

In the 70s my mum collected bits of wood for the fire. To her the crappy, dangerous slow cooker she got in the 80s would have been a luxury. My parents were extremely frugal, much more frugal than I am. They consider me a spendthrift.

Sad to say the sooner you get out of the mindset of thinking life will be enjoyable or confortable the more content you will be.

Having said all that I feel terrible for those who are dying due to mould. I have lung problems that have developed over the last few years, and I have mould on ny windows. I am so lucky to have my dehumidifier or the whole house would be covered. It is so frightening when you can't breathe and people have no choice but to live in these conditions and die gasping for breath.

Same with people with no food. Horrendous.

Our country is on the wane and we need to adapt and manage our expectations accordingly.

Was with you until the 50k comment. People who earn alot pay alot of tax which pays for things like UC that some low earners will be getting. FYI 50k isn't alot nowadays.
It's the mega rich you should have an issue with. Those who dodge tax. Those who benefit from huge bonuses out of pure greed (energy companies for example). Years of austerity. Direct your anger at the c*s in parliament. And no I don't earn as much as 50k but won't begrudge someone who does because I'm not bitter or jealous. They will feel the pinch too.
Fact is things are so much worse than they were and unsure if/how/when it will get any better.

"Sad to say the sooner you get out of the mindset of thinking life will be enjoyable or confortable the more content you will be."

If this doesn't tip someone over the edge, I don't know what will. How utterly depressing.

@Frugalfruit

I agree with some of what you're saying. We definitely are accustomed to a higher standard of living, and we don't consider luxuries as luxuries anymore. It's just what we all expect.

But I don't think it would make a substantial difference to cut these things out of you're trying to get a deposit.

The best way is to have family who you can live with. That saves you £1000-1500 pm.

Cutting out 'luxuries' saves you £120 pm.

I think we are probably a similar age. This is not the mindset we should get in to. The wealth gap in this country is obscene. We should not be quietly accepting it.
Also, in the 80s at least there was free dentistry.

@Frugalfruit I'm probably roughly your age (or older) and I agree pretty much with what you've said. My DH and I are struggling a bit financially, having taken a hit to our salary - but we've lived through the 70s and 80s and will be fine.

We don't consider Sky tv/Netflix/Disney Plus to be necessities. We have probably taken 3 foreign holidays in 20 years. We don't have takeaways, coffee out, meals out unless it's someone's birthday maybe - these are a treat. I don't get my hair/nails done. We don't have the lates iPhone - we have old phones and pay £5 a month for unlimited texts I think.

We eat cheaply and from scratch. I make a lot of soup. All of our furniture has been given to us or came from junk shops, and we recycle stuff. I buy clothes in charity shops generally.

This doesn't mean life is depressing - it's just we don't aspire to an Instagram life - so many people seem to believe that they have to be living some kind of 'celebrity' lifestyle. They want to be posting 'memories' on FB, or constantly doing things. This was never for ordinary people, and yet folks today on very ordinary salaries seem to believe they are entitled to have a very luxurious lifestyle. I don't agree that life can't be enjoyable or comfortable - but you can't expect to live a Towie lifestyle on the wages you earn in an ordinary job.

This is what my dd says. That small amounts aren't worth saving. My income is just under £1000 so I certainty couldn't save that every month. I've saved and invested hard for her since birth and she just wants to spend it on things like gyms she never goes to and deliveroo. If she thinks the sum is trivial then she is free to add to it and grow it herself. I think it is a slap in the face. She is spending way more than £120pm on luxuries. More like £1000

I agree.

However I'm on sickness benefits and can understand that people on 50k could easily be struggling as much as me. I'm blessed to have affordable housing and housing benefit, council tax support etc.

If I was working full time, had a London rent, CT, children who needed childcare, previous loans, car payments etc, I can see how people on what seems like alot of money could be struggling now.

Most people are on the same boat. Let's not throw each other overboard.

Food now is as cheap as it's ever been - relatively and the internet has meant that it's a buyers market as there's so much competition

That's just simply not true.

Prices are going up and the size of things is getting smaller. Lots of things we buy have gone from 10 things in a pack to 8, or 5 reduced to 4.

Our food shopping costs at least £100 a month more than it did 2 years ago.

From the office of national statistics:

The overall price of food and non-alcoholic beverages rose around 25% between January 2022 and January 2024. In the 10 years prior to this, overall food and non-alcoholic beverage prices rose by 9%.

@Craftyy it is absolutely true before this inflationary period, proportionally people spent much more of their salaries on food in the 90s and prior; globalisation, trade deals, competition etc have driven prices down (proportionally) for the last couple of decades. I'd be interested to know how it compares to today though with the inflation we've seen the last 2 years.

What people miss about the "it was worse in the past so that makes it ok" narrative is that we feel the loss of things we had more keenly than the loss of potential things we never had - it's called loss aversion, and the best way to explain it is that the loss of £100 is a much stronger emotion than the joy of gaining £100.

So when things get worse, it's all relative. We are accustomed to a society where life gets better for each subsequent generation. For things to be going into reverse is extremely painful psychologically, let alone the practical difficulties it leads to.

People who earn over &
£50k are not mega rich. They get absolutely no help with anything. Child benefit cuts out if one person earns over £50k and the other partner earns nothing.

They don't get a anything subsidised. They most likely have higher outgoings. For example their energy company deciding they should pay £7k a year.

It's all relative.