Do you remember what it was like during the 2008 crisis?

[bushproblems]

I’ve seen a few comparisons of today’s economical situation and the 2008 crash. I was in high school at the time so heard a lot about “the credit crunch” but didnt really know what it meant.

Are we in a worse or better position job wise, cost of living etc than my parents were? How were you affected?

Im at risk of redundancy so I’m freaking out about the job market and the astronomical cost of basically being alive!

Must admit I'm a glass half full person and in 2008 I had just started looking into buying stocks and shares. I know that when there's a crisis like the UK (& the rest) were having it's a time to buy. I made a heck of a lot of money when the market recovered.

I split up with my partner and suddenly had to pay the mortgage on my own. But lmwas on a variable rate and the monthly payments almost halved so l was OK but it was tough for a lot of people.

I was on mat leave so it coincided with me going part time and nursery costs so we would have been financially worse off anyway. Our roles were in public and voluntary sectors so redundancies came a bit further down the line with austerity.

Took ages to sell our flat, market was dead, we were buying in the same area so didn’t lose out on decrease in values. The housing market slowly recovered and then heated up again.

2011 onwards was years of pay freezes and below inflation rises. In 2008 interest rates went very low and food etc was a lot cheaper than now so lower wages were more manageable.
We’ve always been relatively sensible with money but I think since then have always felt like another redundancy could be around the corner.

Something else I keep remembering from about 20 years ago (so before the crash)

There was a politician who caused a lot of anger by saying "you've never had it so good". I can't remember who it was. But I keep having this horrible feeling that he was right....

Yes. We were incredibly, incredibly lucky. We bought our house at the peak in 2007, but we both had secure employment in a growth industry and received pay rises over the following 3 years. We were on a tracker mortgage so our payments went down massively, so I overpaid the mortgage. As it turned out we had (totally by accident, didn’t have DC) bought a house within walking distance of a top rated state primary school and we sold it in 2011 for a profit. Could have been very different.

I purchased my first house a month before the crash. Thankfully we had a good financial advisor. Our mortgage was £980/m interest only mortgage but crucially on a tracker and not fixed. It went down to £250/m literally overnight so we could then over pay.

we bought it for £174k but sold for £195k 7 years later. We were lucky as it was the height of the shabby chic craze so quaint little cottages with a wood burner were in high demand. Others lost money. I looked it up recently and it’s not worth much more now than it was then!!

And the destruction by the Tory government

Oh god and another memory from 2008! (Sorry this is my third post!)

My lovely father in law struggling to pay his mortgage. So when we moved to London we sold our car for about £3,000 and gave it to him to help him out.

He often brings it up. He's still so grateful. I don't think I actually realised how scary it was for him back then as we were so young & didn't have a clue but just knowing we had to help in some way.

It was horrible, really hard time. I was lucky in that I kept my job but bills went up by around 60% and my landlord quickly put the house on the market to sell, my next place which I luckily found quickly the rent before bills was over half my salary. Conservatives came in & put VAT up to 20% and suddenly food seemed really expensive, meals steadily declined to be stuff like smart price all bran with water for dinner or cup-a-soup. Re-using teabags. Grapes seemed like the poshest luxury. I couldn’t afford to heat my home, I was sleeping in hat and coat & it felt like we had 3 freezing winters back to back that were incredibly long. I’d walk around the town centre for something to do at weekends and shops were closing down, same as restaurants and bars and clubs.
At the same time I did enjoy parts of it, I’d been the most hedonistic in my early 20s and was out 3 or 4 nights a week in clubs or pubs. So this time was a chance to read lots of books, and I had a model thin body from not really eating. I taught myself to sew so my old clothes would fit my new figure, and how to paint, I learned how to upcycle furniture. It was good for my hair too where I couldn’t afford highlights, I learned how to cut it myself and got good with applying box dye. I think my friendships were better because we were seeing each other in our houses and having conversations over cups of tea, before we’d just been people that got steaming drunk together and it was more superficial.

We didn’t have the same kind of inflation back then so those who still had jobs were still spending. If I remember correctly lots of things were actually pretty cheap, flights especially.

Me and DP both kept our jobs but when we bought our first house in 2010 we made sure we only got a mortgage that I could afford on my own (as the lower earner).

I was a grad.
My main recollections are.

My company close making us stand in the lobby and giving us a grim speech about how we were lucky to keep our jobs. No xmas party one year the mext year was massssively scaled back.
There were still a reasonable amount of entry level grad jobs about. I remember thinking if I get made redundant it'll be fine.
We got no bonus and no payrise in 2008 but I managed to negotiate a small bump in 09?
When I got that I celebrated woth a fucking Starbucks frappacino (how sad - it was 35mins of work if I included my unpaid overtime)

if i went out it was almost always pizza express discount deal thing or 2 for 1 at the cinema that was basically it.
I remember being fucking sick of dough balls.

I remember one guy o worked with's wife turning up hysterical she worked at leman bros. And was fired and didnt know what to do. She has a cardboard box and was just cryong in reception.

People were a bit fearful. The papers were def fear mongering.
The dot com bubble werent people I knew so it was very abstract.

House prices were still going and going...

Then it felt like after 18m / 2 yrs it felt like everyone got bored of being frugal and started spending again and everything was normal.

This feels much more fundamental - there is a permanent change in the employer / employee relationship and not in a good way.

How do I remember it? For me, the biggest financial stress was when the interest rates went nuts in the summer of 2007 and we were over leveraged on an interest only mortgage and with a brand new baby. The crash in 2008 actually marked the start of relief as the base rate dropped away.

Two clear memories/ experiences : I remember the advice being given on the media to move money around if you had more than c80k in any one bank as that was all that would be covered in the event of the bank collapsing. We sold our flat in 2008 and whilst we made no money ( in fact a loss) we went house hunting in a more expensive area and I clearly remember the estate agent telling us that virtually everything on the market would entertain an offer from us as we were cash buyers. Unfortunately the fire sale didn't last long and by the time we were ready to buy again prices were already recovering.
If you want to read a good book about the period I can thoroughly recommend Whoops! by John Lanchester. It's subtitled Why Everyone Owes Everyone and No-One Can Pay and is funny and eye-opening in equal measure. The section about how the Icelandics decided to become bankers is jaw dropping!

I vaguely remember that my mother died during the financial crash and I think it meant that a large chunk of her estate was paid the government in inheritance tax.

My step dad lost 50% of his private pension. He was bordering on being suicidal. A very dark time.

we were much worse off then:

I had a 2 year old and was also pregnant and worked part time
worked in the financial sector, kept my job but pay rises were non existent
moved house and fixed into a mortgage at 5.85% for 5 years just before interest rates plummeted

we are much much better off now than then. Exponentially so. Lower mortgage rate, I work FT, no childcare

In my case it’s all relative. I graduated in 1993 when my home country was experiencing the worst banking crisis in the history. Unemployment was 18% then. There were no jobs at all. I was unemployed for 14 months, when I finally got offered a job, it was zero hours at first. It was very dark time and a lot people lost everything.

So, in that light, 2008 didn’t seem anywhere as bad to me. We were also lucky that we were not selling then and it didn’t affect our jobs at all.

Yes, it was difficult, but it had been difficult before, such as the early 90’s, and it has been difficult since sometimes. We usually survive.

At work the intranet page displayed the bank’s share price at the top. When it went from £5 odd a share to 9p that was removed pretty damn sharpish!

I was a young teen in the early 90s and I remember a lot more hardship and unemployment then. But I hardly ever see anyone talk much about it.

I graduated in 2008 and couldn't find a full time position - but temped in 2 long term roles until I did. We bought a house in 2009 that we them sold in 2016 for a profit. Neither of us were out of employment in that time and we managed to save for a wedding/go on holiday/go out for dinner drinks. It didn't seem THAT bad though the fear mongering in the press was off the charts. It actually seems worse now than it did back then but since then we've basically had a conservative government that has fucked it all so I'm not surprised.

Absolutely, in a sector hit hard by redundancies.

We found out in a taxi coming back from a holiday too. Such a strange feeling.

Harold Macmillan in 1957, speaking about the (perceived) prosperity during the late 1950's.

I was trying to remember the name and it was Kaupthing. What a bloody nightmare it was.