General life is different to years ago

[kmr24]

Hello,

I'm just thinking of how everything thing has changed over the past 5 years . No one has a lot of disposable income , rent and food is higher and just general things are not the same... I've heard taxes are going up now also! I feel low with it all and I need to find a new house I've been in for 10 years as the landlord wants to sell and I can't find anywhere to rent. And the council have a very long waiting list. There's a lot of people in this boat it's sad how we have to live like this.will the climate ever change or is this how it is now?

It's more the general notion of not going without.

When I went to renew my phone contract the salesperson took it as a given that I wanted to upgrade to a newer model and was genuinely shocked when I said I would be paying no more than the £22 per month that I pay now and in fact I'd like to pay less if possible. When I mentioned I'd change provider then if only the £600+ Samsung's and iPhones were available with their gazillions of megabites of data and frills, he admitted "well actually we've got a Google pixel. It's dirt cheap but it basically does the same thing". I took it. And it does exactly the same thing indeed. I paid off the phone part of the contract the minute I was able in full. Short term pain, long term gain (no interest applied)

It's these tactics that save money. It stings to pay off £300 in one go for a phone and I'd have to be frugal for that month. That's why they want you getting a contract for the latest I phone because they know you can't pay the £600+ in one go and every monthly installment has an interest charge on it. If you do this on multiple items (cars on finance etc etc) then naturally you have no leftover income.

Most people I know pay £60+ per month for their contract on phones. Because "oh, it's only 60 compared to 50 quid for a way better phone, so I'll take the 60- bargain" but all these extra tenners per month add up eventually to hundreds per month.

I honestly just don't think some people see it and are blinded by it because it's so normal to do.

I was bought up with it drilled into me not to get credit cards or finance. Although it makes life harder initially, I think it makes it easier eventually. It's that short term pain long term gain thing.

I grew up in the 1980s but I hate the argument about mobile phones because a smart phone - or connection to the internet - is basically a necessity. It's no longer a "nice to have", loads of things are much more difficult or impossible without it. We survived without it because it wasn't invented!

I'm pretty sure entertainment outside the home has got more expensive (concerts/cinema etc) so a £7/month Netflix subscription could be equivalent to what people in past generations were spending outside the house.

I agree with this. I can't even give away my DCs clothes which are practically brand new. I'm shocked with how many people have very expensive cars on finance.

While it is true that a smart phone is a necessity for some people - not all, some actually have computers to connect to the internet - there are smartphones, and there are smartphones! I have seen people with expensive phones which they barely use and would be better off with a cheaper phone. Salespeople try to talk you into expensive phones when you don't need them - I know, they tried it with me but unfortunately for them I had done my research first. I also know people who simply must upgrade to the newest model, again usually unnecessary.

But there's a huge difference in cost between what's essential and what some people are paying.

For as long as I remember, my phone has cost me around £10 a month including the phone. I pay £7 a month for the SIM with unlimited calls, texts and plenty of data (12 Gb?) and every 3-4 years I'll get a new handset in the Black Friday sale for about £200 and sell my old one on ebay for about £50.

So about £600 a year less than someone with a £60 a month contract.

Repeat for cars and all the other stuff that people can spend a little or a lot of money on and you can have a difference of hundreds of pounds a month or even £1k+, which adds up to big money and can make a massive difference in financial stability over time, even more so if you're paying for it all with borrowed money instead of savings so you're paying interest not earning it.

Lots of people have disposable income. Not everyone is affected by the cost of living crisis. My life is far better now than it was 5 years ago. My life is far better than people had it 30 years ago. My parents (boomers) had nothing and still have nothing.

@Bjorkdidit @ForGreyKoala post says a smart phone or connection to the internet is pretty essential.
Although (as discussed on a separate thread) so many things require an app or scan a QR code, that smart phone is probably more useful.
But yes agree its not compulsory to have the latest, or highest spec phone. I have a mid range Samsung that I bought on a black Friday deal and a sim only contract. My last phone I had on a contract but I kept it 2 years longer than the contract, on a cheaper rate.

Our internet is £20 and we buy our phone outright, cheap Motorola smart phones £70-119 and put a lebera SIM in it for £4.40 a month, we keep phones until they break 3-4 years.

No Spotify, Netflix, Amazon prime ect, no TV licence

There's plenty to watch online for free.

I always go for the model that was 'the next thing' 2-3 years ago. If it was that wonderful a few years ago it will be just as wonderful now. I buy outright abd get a cheap sim deal never pay more than £200 or so.

Absolutely. I wish people would stop insinuating that having g a smartphone or some kind of computer is a choice! It's not, how would we do our banking, pay our bills, apply for literally anything (including jobs) without access to the Internet??

And yes the cost of leisure activities has gone through the roof! We went to the cinema as a family last weekend, I actually felt sick at how much it cost.

But the cinema has always been a bit expensive so a special occasion rather than just something to do without thought.

I can't think of a time when you would go without thinking 'how much?' unless you could get a student discount or were going to cheap Saturday morning kids screening.

Expectations are definitely different. Dsd is moving out, rather than taking the furniture, crockery and cutlery offered (her grandmother died recently so plenty of things available) she wants to buy new, they have also ordered Sky tv and broadband with Netflix, have amazon prime, Disney +, both have phones on contract etc etc... me saying have you budgeted is falling on deaf ears.

You need a licence to watch iplayer so what do you watch online for free?

I have yet to see one of those cost of living/ food bank/ sad stories where the subjects hadn’t made bad choices. Living frugally is just not manageable for some people now with social media pressures and so many companies after your money.
Multiple pets, beauty treatments, take aways, clothes, gambling, holidays, credit card debts, irregular migration status, too many children born in unstable relationships.
The vast majority of people have enough. I don’t think my parents ever had a cocktail, a spa break, a granite worktop. Yes they had a family house but very little stuff and very few hedonistic pleasures.

But that is actually the problem. So now its all subscriptions which is actually a mugs game, because you don't own anything. And now clothes are dirt cheap but food is exorbitant. The quality if things is getting worse and worse, yet overall the price is creeping up. We've slept walked into this situation and it's going to get much worse

This!! My new mum friend was upset she had to go back to work earlier than she had expected as they were running out of money. Her and her husband have the latest BMWs. Her car probably cost a years average wage.

I wouldn't say clothes are still dirt cheap, but the quality has gone absolutely awful. It actually makes it easier for me to buy at the lower end, eg sainsburys I got a fantastic thick cotton cardi I've been wearing all summer for £20, similar in eg fat face would have been £50 with no difference whatsoever in quality.

My car is 2014 and was second hand when I got it and as I am 2 yards into outer London Ulez it costs £12.50 to go just about anywhere these days including the council tip. If we are comparing to 5 years ago - 2019 that was just before the pandemic. I am not sure things were that easy then either. 2008 was awful too - credit crunch, no jobs. There have been some pretty awful times for most people who live a long life. At least unlike my parents and their we have not had world wars whereas my uncles had to serve in the navy in WWII at risk of death etc

This is one reason since the 1890s in some parts of our family we have tried to pick jobs that pay more than others and I and 4 of my children are lawyers, my sibling a doctor as was my father etc. We might have wanted to mess around trying to earn a living singing (family of singers) but by age 14 we knew the reality - that life is hard, a veil of tears and if you pick low paid work it will be even harder.

fat face is probably the only High Street shop with decent quality clothes now. I have bought a lot there this year as they have proper cotton t shirts which aren't so thin you can see through them.

What I've noticed with shoes as an example is you used to have the expensive shops with good quality and the cheap shops with crap. Now the expensive shops have crap quality and the cheap shops have crap quality but the price at the cheap shops is what it used to cost at the expensive shop less than 5 years ago. It's been very noticeable to me. I tend to not really buy many clothes, but this year I got a few cheap warms tops and they are so crap that they will all be going in the bin. I have never thrown clothes in the bin, always have given them away but these are just such poor quality.

You need a licence only for BBC iplayer specifically, not for other catch-up services. There are also a lot of films on youtube.

The UK is a rich country but the distribution of wealth is very polarised between the haves and have nots. The rich are continuing to get richer whilst the super rich are hoarding billions. As a society we are very accepting of this situation.

Nail on the head. The richer have got richer (and no I don't restrict that to millionaires, my threshold is far lower and would include "normal" people who maybe bought their homes 30 years ago, established in their careers, looking for early retirement with good incomes, etc). The poor have got poorer, by which I typically mean young workers who are typically on low wages but have to pay massively increased rents (if they can even find somewhere to rent), plus all the other costs of living and usually get little, if any, benefits, when they don't have children. We've certainly got a "squeezed middle" when others have largely been sheltered due to benefit rises being higher than wage rises!

Lots of people have lots of disposable income. But also ever increasing numbers are basically living hand to mouth with no prospects of that changing any time soon.

That's how we can have people paying hundreds of pounds over face value to go to an Oasis concert at the same time, we have young professional workers having to live in shared houses, basically low quality bed sits, who can't afford to even go out to a pub quiz every week!

What with population increase, more and more houses "lost" to the temporary university students or holiday lets, the repercussions of the Ukraine War (cost increases in food and power), repercussions of the Covid lockdown (tens of billions paid to people to sit on their arses doing nothing), all of which as we were just coming out of the ten years of recovery of the 2008 crash (most economists back then said it would take 10 years of virtual stagnation to recover, and it proved true).

The last 25 years since turn of the century is proving the pivotal point between the economic successes for the Western World of the 20th century and we're now in managed decline, again throughout the Western World, which is the inevitable consequence of the industrial power houses being moved to the East and our utter dependence on other countries to supply and make things for us, goods, services, power, etc., where out economy farts around with making posh coffees in the heralded new "service" industry!

We need to get accustomed to the end of the "good life" that we've enjoyed for the past 50-60 years. It ain't coming back, and the last few years are the "new normal", in fact, things WILL continue to get worse.

i think that a lot of the changes come down to a collective change in mindset. My parents and my generation were brought up.to.believe in being cautious with money and not take out too much credit. So mortgages were not multiple times people's income ( though of course that is unavoidable now) and people generally started out with other people's cast offs and ran.old cars etc.
As someone said the rot set in when Thatcher sold off vast swathes of council housing at a pittance which decimated the rental.market and made some people v rich whilst escalating prices so.that we have a housing market out of control and often propped up.by government policies.

By the 80/ 90s the push was towards high borrowing and the recent low interest rates have further fuelled that . So rather than people being brought up.to.be fiscally responsible we now have ( fuelled by the celebrity culture and media ) a generation ( or 2 ) that are primed to live beyond their means.
as we have seen before in recent times that can't continue indefinitely and as sure as night follows day, boom is followed by recession as the edifice crumbles only to.be rebuilt again by the next generation.
We need a reboot to.houses being something you live in and affordable again and people need to have more realistic expectations overall but I doubt v much that will happen.
All anyone can do.is take responsibility for their own financial.planning and try to insulate themselves from the cycle as much as possible.

i think that a lot of the changes come down to a collective change in mindset. My parents and my generation were brought up.to.believe in being cautious with money and not take out too much credit. So mortgages were not multiple times people's income ( though of course that is unavoidable now) and people generally started out with other people's cast offs and ran.old cars etc.
As someone said the rot set in when Thatcher sold off vast swathes of council housing at a pittance which decimated the rental.market and made some people v rich whilst escalating prices so.that we have a housing market out of control and often propped up.by government policies.

By the 80/ 90s the push was towards high borrowing and the recent low interest rates have further fuelled that . So rather than people being brought up.to.be fiscally responsible we now have ( fuelled by the celebrity culture and media ) a generation ( or 2 ) that are primed to live beyond their means.
as we have seen before in recent times that can't continue indefinitely and as sure as night follows day, boom is followed by recession as the edifice crumbles only to.be rebuilt again by the next generation.
We need a reboot to.houses being something you live in and affordable again and people need to have more realistic expectations overall but I doubt v much that will happen.
All anyone can do.is take responsibility for their own financial.planning and try to insulate themselves from the cycle as much as possible.