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?

I think cinema must have been quite cheap in the 40s/50s because they did those news reels as people didn't have TV in their homes. None of the multi screen cinemas so presumably the film changed more often.

DH and I used to go to the cinema most weeks in the 1990s when we were going out / first married. I can't remember the last time I went - but the prices are completely shocking to me now. I used to take DS as a child to the cheap Wednesday special after school.

We first got a colour TV in the mid 1970s, and my parents continued renting their TV until early 2000s.

Really good points. You touched upon the 'essentials' for hobbies too, which reminded me - I often feel quite overwhelmed with choice, to the point where I procrastinate and avoid starting something new

As an example I joined the gym, when I went upstairs to the equipment bit, there were so so many different, complicated looking machines and I found it utterly overwhelming. Years ago, you had a cross trainer, a treadmill and some weights!

Same with running, it's a whole new hobby world. "Weighted vests" sweat bands, different types of pouches for phones , arm bands, apps "Strava", competitive posting of "maps", smart watches, calorie counts, ear buds, "couch to 5k" "park runs", HIIT, personal trainers, 450 running shoes, pink ones, black ones, rubber ones, thin ones, light ones..... Etc etc. it truthfully made me feel utterly "paralysed". I know it's ridiculously but I know I'm so out of touch with this world that I darent start. I would feel like a freak and 'left out' for just having a second hand pair of running shoes and no gimmicks.

This choice, choice, choice, billions of internet pages with differing opinions on affornentioned "hobby essentials". I mourn my 90s upbringing so much.

The point about choices is a good one. It’s the same everywhere you go now and it’s utterly exhausting and overwhelming. I long for simplicity.

Want/need.

Clothes - All mine (bar underwear) & my DD’s clothes are bought from Vinted or given (all my friends know to offer me hand me downs).

Phone - refurb off black market, £6 sim EE deal

Luxuries - no gel nails, botox etc.

Car - saved (due to the above) then bought outright

Nobody seems to do this anymore, everything has to be the latest/most expensive of everything. My friends take the piss out of my attitude but we simply can’t (unless you’re rich!) have everything! I feel like the world is just so entitled & materialistic these days.

Absolutely spot on. And it was never sustainable, but now there gap between what people need / want and what they can afford is closing.
Not for everyone though. Tourism's been booming since the pandemic, so plenty of people with disposal income around.

I agree with this completely, we have too much choice and it's suffocating

The reasons why my partner and I were able to save for our house deposit and buy our house last year was because we don’t drive and we haven’t got children yet. We also sacrificed holidays. We haven’t been on holiday once in the six years we have been together. We simply couldn’t afford to do it all.

I try to strike a balance of saving money for emergencies and luxuries, investing in my S&S ISA (in hope of retiring early) and still having £200 disposable income each month. Sometimes I wonder what is the point…

@StarDolphins

Nobody seems to do this anymore, everything has to be the latest/most expensive of everything.

Lots of people still do it. They're just the "silent majority" who don't go on social media shouting and boasting about it. The quieter people aren't the ones you notice. It's the extraverts you notice, who are the ones most likely to go socialising (hence lots of spending on coffee/cakes), expensive make up, hairdos, nails, etc. The quieter ones aren't "out there", so you don't notice they're not spending a fortune on manicures, etc.

It's still a minority of personal new car sales that are on lease - it's "company/employer" cars where most are leased. Average age of cars on the road today is 13 years!

My son should be your "typical" young over-spender. He has a professional job, pretty highly paid for his age, an active social/hobby life, etc., but he's as tight as a duck's arse (that's my boy, well trained by us!). Even at Uni he didn't use a penny of his overdraft, and hasn't since starting work either. No credit card nor store card debt - all paid off in full every month - he delays buying stuff if he knows he won't be able to pay the card off next month with his wage. He goes shopping with his Tesco club card and buys loads of yellow ticket short dated stuff, gets bog-standard cheapish trainers from Sports Direct, drives a 16 year old car despite being able to afford a new one on lease, goes on comparison sites every year for car and house insurance, electricity, phone and broadband. Has a 6 year old smart phone on a tenner per month data sim card deal. Makes his drink(s) last on night's out, typically just one or two drinks for the whole evening. Makes a packed lunch to take to work. And that's living in an expensive city where 3/4 of his wage goes on rental, utilities, food and commuting! As I say, "that's my boy"!

Yep, nail on the head.

Unless you've been on NMW, wages have stagnated and not kept up with inflation nor housing costs. The gap has been widening for about 20 years.

Low interest rates has kept official inflation rates, but when you delve deeper, most other things have shot up in price, even before Covid and Ukraine. But because interest rates were low, the overall headline inflation figure has appeared low, artificially.

Now that interest rates are higher, that's what has caused headline inflation figures to rise and attract the attention. Big business has taken advantage of that to increase their profits by increasing their prices unnecessarily.

At the same time, all the money pumped into the economy (Brown's tax credits, followed by Covid furlough etc)., has increased demand and thus basic economics says prices rise when demand increases without a corresponding increase in supply. Covid and the Suez blockage caused shortages of goods, so supply didn't increase. Now prices are higher, they'll not come down.

Wages need to rise by a significant amount to catch up. For lots of people, with relatively low wages (even at professional levels) and high taxation/high working benefits, it's just not worth them working more, or sometimes not working at all.

It's all an absolute shambles, and has been gathering steam for 25-30 years, and now it's really hitting us.

All the people banging on about gym memberships, costa coffees and phone contracts are missing the point. None of that is relevant when you've not had a wage rise for a few years but you now have to pay £1,000 or more rent for a one bedroomed flat and your food bill has doubled. Getting a cheaper gym membership, or phone or a few less coffees won't allow you to save the £20k you need for a deposit to buy a grossly overpriced one bedroom flat! In the years you'd be saving, the price of the flat will have gone up, so it will always be out of your reach.

People who bought their homes years ago when the multiples of wages to house prices were a lot lower just don't understand the virtual impossibility of doing today what they did 30/40 years ago. Nor do they realise just how much rents have gone up nor how difficult it is to find places to rent.

We haven’t been on holiday once in the six years we have been together.

Really well done on saving for the house deposit. The holiday regime sounds extreme though. We rented a fairly shabby but historic cottage in the south-east for £450 for the week this August (would have been less earlier in the summer). Had the best time on the coast, food cost us no more than it would at home and we were just walking, on the beach, fish & chips, ice creams etc. Lovely and relaxing.

Good point about low interest rates. I think that also pushed people into becoming landlords - interest rate on savings was so low that property felt like one of the few ways to get a return (or at least stem inflationary erosion). And I'm not convinced that hordes of amateur landlords has been good for the housing market (both buying and renting).

I agree. I have loads of clients with savings who were aggrieved at the pitifully low interest rates available over the last decade or so, and wanted a better return on their savings, so bought a BTL or two as "their pension". These are people who have no real interest and barely understood all the rules and regulations, whether building standards, fire safety, taxation, etc. Some made a decent go at it and learned on the job, but lots screwed up badly, often with the tenant suffering, but, of course, they still blamed the tenant. You know, the kind of people who didn't expect any kind of wear and tear, and were whinging about minor marks on carpets, minor scuffs on walls, etc after the same person had been renting for several years and "normal" wear and tear was entirely expected (at landlords' cost to maintain normal W&T). Or whinging they had to pay emergency plumber call outs for leaks, boiler faults, etc as they thought it was unreasonable that tenants wouldn't want a week or two for their normal plumber to have time, etc. The ones who begrudged paying letting agents and solicitors fees for drafting contracts, doing credit and identity checks, obtaining references, and "managing" the lets. Such landlords fell squarely into the trap of thinking that renting a property was easy money - they just wanted to sit back and watch the cash rolling in, never actually thinking they'd have to pay others for managing it, maintaining it, etc.

As keen DIY/hobby person I love the amount of stuff and information available now.

Back when my parents were young adults, a lot of the things we consider DIY essentials today were hidden behind a counter in a trade hardware shop , guarded over by a man in a brown overall. You had to know what tool you wanted by name. You practically had to prove your competence to him before he would grudgingly let you pick from an expensive choice of one. Woe betide you if it turned out not to be the right thing.

My DF was terrified of these encounters so would have to 'get someone in' for a lot of fairly basic maintenance jobs. DM was of sterner stuff and would give them a go if she could do it without DF hovering about unhelpfully.

I'm a keen sewist and gardener. There are so many helpful videos on YouTube where you can watch someone demonstrate a particular technique.

I really don't get where people's money goes.
Dh and I both earn minimum wage, equivalent of one wage goes on rent, bills, food and car and the other is ours to spend, we manage to have savings and eat out several times a week, we never think about money, never run out of money and we have all the things mentioned above, phones, Netflix, sky and go on holidays, nice days out, buy nice clothes.
I hear of so many people who earn much more than us and they're living in absolute poverty, I don't understand.

I presume you don’t have childcare costs?!

Can I ask what your rent is? Presumably you’re both earning about £1500 a month (full time, minimum wage take home?) I know of two friends-both renting, both are paying about £1400 a month just on rent.

I also love the options on hobby stuff, and the amount of information around! I've found useful YT videos, forums etc, and there's more options for experimenting. I remember when my dad wanted to take up jogging in the late 80s....he got a terrible injury cause he just went running with his normal shoes - not thinking/knowing he needed some specific footwear!

I also think that it's perfectly reasonable to expect person who works full time to have a bit of extra money for just fun spending. God, life would be drab if everyone's expectation would be to just go to work with a packed lunch, hunt for yellow stickers, take free walks in the park for recreation. I know this is normal for lots of people (and it was for me, when I was working/studying simultaneously and had NO money left at the end of the month), but we should certainly aspire to people having little comforts and luxuries as a standard - grabbing a coffee with a friend, treating your kid to a new book or an ice cream, getting a massage once in a while. There is a lot of evidence that small discretionary spending on yourself on regular basis increases your wellbeing by more than one large big blowout holiday annually, for example.

I remember having small time, clueless landlords as far back as 1999, so I don’t think that’s necessarily just aligned to cheap debt, although it’s probably far more prolific in the last 15 years.

The key thing is that you're a couple with both people working. Your rent and utilities aren't double that being paid by a single person living alone or a single/couple with a young family. You've basically got twice the income but barely more than the same overheads of your home (rent, utilities, insurance, phone/broadband, etc).

My son's tiny one bedroomed flat costs nearly 3/4trs of his wage. He could get a two bedroomed flat for only a hundred or two more per month, so if he had someone else sharing, he'd be quids in as their "half" of the rent and utilities would mean he'd pay far less himself. Probably easily down to them both only paying half their wages in housing costs! He can't take in a lodger at the moment as the flat is tiny, can't have a permanent live in partner as the tiny bedroom only fits a single bed and barely any wardrobe/drawer space.

A working couple with no kids is probably the cheapest way of living at the moment. Rental prices for bigger one bed flats or two bed flats isn't that much higher than rents for tiny one bedroom flats.

To be fair though , different years ago would be that people didn't expect to live alone so much

It was much more normal to stay at home until married and the maiden aunt may well stay at home all her life or live with a sisters family

Although that may be more because women couldn't so easily live alone ( couldn't get mortgage for example , limited career choices ) - typically when people did live together it was still on a single income

Think I talked myself round there !

WTAF! Your outgoings are £5k a month as a single parent!!!!!! I earn £25k a year, my DH similar, 2 kids. Wow

Life changes.

I was born in the 1960s to two very middle class parents. But everyday items that are considered essential now just didn’t exist. Parents had lived through the war so there was the mentality of making do, mending and living within means.
One black and white tv in the house, one phone in the hall. Far more basic meals. Ready meals didn’t exist until late 70s. Camping holidays every time.
I can remember Mum getting her twin tub washing machine with the hose in the sink.

Even when I moved out flat sharing in someone’s flat or house was the norm. You simply didn’t rent an entire flat. If you went out twice in the week you ate toast or cereal for the rest of the week for dinner. Holidays you saved all year round and booked the cheapest. Cars were an old banger and that was a luxury.

The expectations now are so very different. Today’s youth would find it unbearable.

But I counter this with the full understanding that property prices were obviously considerably cheaper and it was still possible to buy your first flat with the maximum multiple wage ratio. But often a second evening job was required to maintain the mortgage and obviously all second hand furniture and a lodger. But still possible.

i was totally with you until the dig at the older generation ! of course we get it . We have adult children who are experiencing it first hand and many of us are doing all we can to help them get on to the property ladder. And I know everyone thinks we had it so easy but honestly it was a long hard slog for us just the same and someone mentioned the impact of divorce upthtead which I think.is a v valid point.
Nowadays families are much more likely to break down whether people are married or not and the result is people splitting into separate households. So just as people are starting to chip.away at mortgages and childcare costs it all implodes leading people back to.financial insecurity and almost starting again ( bit like landing on a snake in snakes and ladders).
It took about 20 yrs of married life before we even started to turn the corner and build wealth and now after 36 yrs we are comfortable with the house paid off ( good size house in rubbish area so not worth much in the grand scheme of these things ) and we have a decent amount of savings. Divorce and family breakdown interrupts the cycle ( no moral judgement here just looking at it from a financial impact point of view) and ftwn leads to people supporting children in more than one household , paying towards homes for those children etc which all has an impact.

i was totally with you until the dig at the older generation ! of course we get it . We have adult children who are experiencing it first hand and many of us are doing all we can to help them get on to the property ladder. And I know everyone thinks we had it so easy but honestly it was a long hard slog for us just the same and someone mentioned the impact of divorce upthtead which I think.is a v valid point.
Nowadays families are much more likely to break down whether people are married or not and the result is people splitting into separate households. So just as people are starting to chip.away at mortgages and childcare costs it all implodes leading people back to.financial insecurity and almost starting again ( bit like landing on a snake in snakes and ladders).
It took about 20 yrs of married life before we even started to turn the corner and build wealth and now after 36 yrs we are comfortable with the house paid off ( good size house in rubbish area so not worth much in the grand scheme of these things ) and we have a decent amount of savings. Divorce and family breakdown interrupts the cycle ( no moral judgement here just looking at it from a financial impact point of view) and ftwn leads to people supporting children in more than one household , paying towards homes for those children etc which all has an impact.
Great analysis and summary of the current mess btw

Partly. They also own all the assets (the buildings you work in, the house you rent, the factories, land etc etc) so make money constantly off the backs of everyone else passively.