Grandparents

headcone

vivatifosi wrote: »

My granddad was a footballer for a then major club in the pre-Matthews days and his win bonus was a chicken, so I doubt he would recognise anything of the world today.

Having said that, my mum as a kid remembers doing the "moonlight flit" to leave the house where they were living when his business went down with a string of bills unpaid, so I daresay there have always been people with financial problems.

So there`s scum in every class?

Not just benefit recipients.

phil_b_2

Most grandparents think anything more than a grand for a house is mindblowingly expensive and that 30k should buy you a small island. Not the most open-minded of audiences to pose financial questions to.

PasturesNew

My dad seems to have been brought up in a wealthy lifestyle, with private schooling and a brand new fabulous clifftop large detached house that was cutting edge design at the time. No idea how much it'd be worth today (not in England), but I'm figuring £3-5million as a pure guess. They lost everything in the war though. We were poor.

LilacPixie

Mine are all dead. Maternal side, grandfather in the army moved about alot germany/belgium/malta mostly then settled in Scotland in a council house, he died in mid 80's at only 56 Cancer, my gran died a few years after still young emphysema. I think they were quite typically poor army wage + 7 kids, alcohol and cigerettes seemed to feature high on their lists of priorities though. I imagine in modern terms they would be in the 80 inch plasma tv brigade.

Paternal side. owned a 3 bed bungalow, had 3 kids. grandmother didn't work grandad did in a factory something to do with weaving (jute was big in Dundee). They had a car in the late 50's which according to my dad was very rare for the area and he sometimes got picked up from school in it. I think they would be horrified at the levels of debt this country has. They paid everything cash I can remember being about 3 and being taken to toymaster to pick a swing set for the garden of our house and it was all cash. My dad says it cost roughly an average mans weekly wage at the time but I guess it was good value as the swing has needed new rope and seat but it is still in my parents and my kids play on it now.

ash28

Well, my maternal grandparents had debt but no mortgage. My grandmother had a weekly visit from the "tick" man. She got her household stuff and clothing from him. They lived in a village, my grandfather was miner and they lived in tied housing all of their lives. The tick man visited loads of people in the village, usually on Fridays. Big purchases came from the Coop, partly paid for through the dividend they received, the Coop was the only place for miles they could shop for food or anything else.

I'm not sure if there was debt on the paternal side, my grandfather (chief engineer) died at sea when my father was 12. When children were leaving school at 14 my father was able to stay on until he was 16 and take his school certificate or whatever it was called, where as my mother, who although she passed her 11 plus had to go to the local secondary school because her parents' couldn't afford the books, uniform or bus fares for her to go the grammar school. The difference between middle and working class I imagine.

What people forget is that "debt" as we know it wasn't available to people. You couldn't release equity in your house - you could only add to your mortgage if you were having work done, like an extension and then the money was released to you in stages through the build. That changed in Mrs Thatcher's time to where the bank/building society gave you the money with really no interest on what it was to be spent on.

Credit cards weren't readily available, Barclays launched the Barclaycard in 1967, in 1972 Lloyds and several other banks introduced Access (that was our first credit card when we got married 1975) and you couldn't use it overseas. Even when it merged with Mastercard you still couldn't use it overseas.

If you wanted a car loan you had to have a deposit, personal loans for ordinary people were rare, if you wanted a large purchase you had hire purchase, where you paid a deposit and you didn't own the stuff until you'd paid for it - if you didn't pay it could be taken from you.

It wasn't until financial deregulation in the 1980s that the credit we have now started to become available to ordinary people.

So who knows what level of debt people would have had if it had been available to them - from what I know of my maternal grandmother she would have been right up there with the best of them.

vivatifosi

headcone wrote: »

So there`s scum in every class?

Not just benefit recipients.

I think you'll find that there were no benefits then, which is why people had to do moonlight flits. My family then as now were working class and back then lived a hand to mouth existence.

This is a debating board, not a bile spewing board. Perhaps you should remember that when attacking other posters. It makes you look childish and incapable of structuring a sound argument.

chucknorris

macaque wrote: »

What if the value of your house fell? There is a world of difference between a £30k secured debt and a £30k unsecured debt.

Earlier generations were brought up with a healthy suspicion of debt. What would your grandparents say to you now?





http://www.bestadvice.net/story.php?id=18660

I don't know about my grandparents as they died when I was quite young, I can remember my mother however saying to me 'why on earth are you sellling your nice semi (in Newcastle) and buying a terraced house in London and taking on so much extra debt?'.

The thing is though that now I live in Dorking in a detached house which is mortgage free, far better than my semi in Newcastle. The moral of the story is don't take on bad debt take on considered well managed debt, I accept though that some will not understand the difference, that is the way of the world.

Out,_Vile_Jelly

My grandad left school at 14 and cycled 12 miles to work everyday as a teaboy in a nearby factory. 50 years later he retired from the Board of Directors after working his way up to the top. At some point he and my nan entered the lowest levels of the middle classes, voted Tory and spent their hard earned on holidays, good food, good booze and bought a nice house to retire in.

They've never been so vulgar as to comment on my personal finances or talk about the value of their home.

chucky

chucknorris wrote: »

The moral of the story is don't take on bad debt take on considered well managed debt, I accept though that some will not understand the difference, that is the way of the world.

that paragraph is very, very true - the highlighted bit is even more important.

you will always find the ones that are most critical are the ones that least understand...

macaque_2

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xe1a1wHxTyo