It's STILL tough and not getting better - so how are we coping?

JulieGeorgiana

kittie wrote: »

JG
when things got very very tight with us, in the 70s and 80s and with 3 children and one very insecure salary, which dropped to 2/3 overnight I did the following: in the short term I `borrowed` from one account to pay things on another and that enabled a very small breathing space, in which I spent almost nothing just living on what was in my cupboard. At the same time I started a written book of all incomings and outgoings and things had to jolly well balance each month.

I am lucky, this is how I have managed... my spreadsheet may say -£45, but my bank doesn’t!! I will now cut back where I can until my spreadsheet shows a £0 balance!
I also pay for everything on my Tesco credit card during the month (for the points), and although I am strict enough to ALWAYS pay it in full each month (for 4 years now) it means I have until the first week of the next month... which gives me 3 weeks to find the money!

EstherH wrote: »

Hi Julie, do you mean that you have no spare cash until your husband gets paid again and need to pay the vets bill? Is there anything you could sell on Ebay? Maybe borrow money from family until then? Sorry, that's all I can think of atm, will let you know if something else comes to mind.

I have many things on eBay which would help, but won’t sell... ho hum!

charlies-aunt wrote: »

I would second this - I have had some big vet bills over the years - some running into £100's - I used to pay regular manageable amounts to the vet until it was cleared - I found them very understanding and it was a lot less stressful than trying to magick the money from thin air [IMG]file:///C:/Users/Julie/AppData/Local/Temp/msohtmlclip1/01/clip_image001.gif[/IMG]

I think my vets do this also.
To you all... thank you for your help and advice, it’s really nice to know that it’s there when you need it x

littleowl

Whenever did 'baby boomer' become a term of opprobrium? I was born just before that and dimly remember rationing, shortages - even going into the bomb shelter for heaven's sake! I grew up in a safe home but one with only necessities available. My mother worked and cared for we three children and yet managed to provide a stable and satisfying life for us, albeit with very few luxuries - which we did not miss. How she managed to provide me with the extensive uniform demanded for my entry to Grammar School I will never know - she worked wonders without ever getting into debt.
I brought up two children and undertook a four year degree course as a single mother after divorce which enabled me to work in further education - one of the few jobs which made it possible for me to have, more or less, the same school holidays as my children.
I am now a pensioner managing on a small teacher's pension plus state pension. I do not own a property any longer. I have no complaints.
I do, however, get a little fed up with later generations seeming to think that they are hard done by. Why do they blame people of my generation? But then, it is always easier to find a reason to blame others than to take responsibility.Whoever said life is easy? On reflection, if I had gone into banking or some other parasitic profession I might be much better off!
Sorry this is a bit of a rant but the prevailing notion that those of my generation have somehow had it all at the expense of later generations really makes my angry.

EstherH

I am late 40's so think fall just outside the baby boomer generation - not exactly sure when the dates for that are. My parents were little during the war and remember as does the poster above the rationing etc. They are in a better financial position than me and hubby are due to my poor health and being on benefits but they worked hard and were thrifty (still are in many ways) and deserve the comfortable retirement they now have. I don't think that we can blame anyone in particular for the situation we are in now. Except government/banking institutes etc. They encouraged house price rises and debt. Individuals greed has a lot to do with it but we just have to make the best of where we are at now rather than looking for someone to blame and being bitter about it. Being poor didn't harm my parents and wont harm the next generation if they have the right attitude.

ceridwen

Well - i can only speak for myself and I certainly assumed (for quite some time) that it was perfectly fair enough for us to go to University (if we could) with the aid of full grants and our fees paid for us and then expect a decent career if we did so. I certainly assumed that of course we would all buy our own houses. I assumed that of course we would all retire "on the dot" of retirement age. There was many many things we just "assumed" and, with that, we automatically assumed that succeeding generations to our own would have the same as we "assumed" for ourselves. We had read our history of the last 100 years or so and seen the battles that the Trade Union Movement and Womens Movement had fought and thought "Our forebears fought for us to have a 40 hour workweek - instead of working all the hours God sends - and that battle has now been won". We thought "Our forebears fought for women to have the vote/equal pay/the choice about whether and when to have children and the right to make a conscious decision about whether to get married or no - and that battle has now been won".

Some of us (yep me for one) took pride in the fact that we had "done our bit" to help consolidate those achievements. The thought didnt occur to us - for a LONG time - that there would even be any attempted backtracking on those major achievements....

I guess we should have read longer-term historical accounts than just the last 100 years or so. I know I should have. I'm reading them now...I'm reading history for the last few thousand years now - and going pale at the implications of the major thing I have picked up from that - ie that Societies don't go in a straight line from "very basic" to "very enlightened" - nope...more like "round in circles" and now we've got that high level of over-population to cope with too....

The point is - WE DIDNT KNOW - and the other point is many people STILL dont know/dont care or both.

If someone KNOWS they are acting wrongly - then they ARE responsible. If they dont and have no way realistically of knowing - then things are a bit different. Personally - I'd rather NOT know at a personal level - but I do - so that particular Pandora's Box HAS been opened in my own case...darn it:cool:. It takes us all varying amounts of time for our "eyes to snap open" - and many are still wandering round with those rose-tinted glasses on (of ALL generations). There are always going to be people of all shades of "awareness" in any generation.

*******************************

Anyways - back to base here - and Kittie - if you wish to come back to the "bed I've been keeping warm" on your behalf as regards this thread - then you would be welcome to do so if you wish....'tis your "baby" originally arter all...:rotfl:

I think that is where I am not happy with comments that imply that we all knew and didnt care - most of us honestly didnt...

maryb

One further thought - I hear the juniors in the office complaining that they will never be able to get on the housing ladder because it's so much more difficult these days. And it turns out they expect to be able to buy somewhere three years after leaving university. They think we had it easy.

But looking back, I think we were all in our late 20s/pushing 30 before we could even think of buying somewhere. And in the meantime we lived in some really squalid rented places. When we did scrape together enough money for a building society to deign to look at us, it took every spare penny to pay the mortgage. I couldn't run a car and neither could most of my contemporaries - we all had to hope we would get promoted and get a company car (much more common in those days).

Maybe it has always been hard but in different ways. And maybe it isn't actually that much harder these days in monetary terms. What has changed is that we had every reason to believe that once we were established in our careers then things would gradually improve and we were relatively safe.

I do feel sorry for the young ones now, not having that feeling of certainty when they are taking on these huge commitments. And I worry like anything about what it will be like for the DDs

mardatha

The safe jobs for life arent any more. Teaching, nursing, council, postmen. Nothing safe any more.But we still got too many MPs - they seem to be ok !

dreaming

I am a "tailend" baby boomer and can honestly say that life was not that easy for me & mine. My exH & I saved for a couple of years for a deposit for our first house (no 100% mortgages then and only 2x man's wage + 1x woman's), and furnished that mainly with cast-offs/2nd hand which was replaced bit by bit (by saving). Our wedding was lovely but not at all lavish and our honeymoon was a week at Butlins. When I had DS&DD (after 3 years marriage) I became a SAHM. Kids had 2nd pram/cot etc and lots of hand me downs, and I cooked everything from scratch. Our holidays were mainly camping (yuk) or caravan in this country but not every year. When interest rates went up in the 80s we got behind with mortgage and sold car to help pay arrears. It was only as kids became teens and I started part-time work (then later full-time) that we started to have better clothes, holidays etc. although looking back I think we paid as a family in loss of time. Now am divorced and kids grown - life is not too bad for me although I have just heard at work that our pension scheme (yes it is final salary) is in trouble and of course I don't now have the time to make alternative arrangements before retirement (although that seems to get further & further away). Yes it is hard for people starting out now, but only because expectations were raised to unsustainable heights in the last 20 years or so. Blame does need to be laid at bankers door with their 5x salary mortgage advances/handing out credit cards to all and sundry, BUT I also think some responsibility needs to be taken by a lot of people who, IMO, got plain greedy and saw house buying as a way to make money quick rather than making a home. I know Ceridwen and others have posted on the forums (not sure if this one) about how we need to return to looking out for others rather than just thinking "what can I get", and this credit crunch has been one almighty wakeup call for many. Unfortunately there are a lot of people who are paying a very high price for the excesses of the past couple of decades - quite often those who frankly don't deserve it. However, I believe these things are cyclical - whether over a short/long term - and unless there is a radical shift in society (at all levels) a similar scenario will likely occur again in the future. The credit crunch really isn't 1 person's, or 1 group of people's fault - just a combination of factors in which many people played their part, and although many people say they saw it coming - well, hindsight is a wonderful thing.
However,one of the things that cheers me up is how helpful everyone is here on the forums - helping others in adversity (despite their own problems) with advice and support. Long may that continue!

penelopedee_2

We are both just around our forties. When we got together we had nothing. Living in a village the wages were ok but not brilliant. We were extremely lucky in that house prices were still ok ish but even from the start the mortgage repayments took a big percentage of our wages. Even without children and with my dad paying for our small wedding, we didn't have a honeymoon or a holiday for years. In fact we had our honeymoon on our fifth wedding aniversary and it was our first holiday together. We ran one old second hand car and still do.

Over the years we've gone through 3 redundancies, some serious health problems but we've found jobs, kept going and paid the bills and mortgage. Clothes are the sort of thing we save for, holidays are cheap caravan deals, both of us can cook from scratch and we can disguise any value food going!

We didn't over extend ourselves with a bigger house because I can't live with not being able to pay for it. I've always worked things out on one wage only just in case.

I think we live our lives to the full and it kind of suits us being skint because we know how to laugh and make the best of things. Nobody needs money to do that.

thriftmonster

And there are some of us who aren't "baby boomers" but have always tried. Dh and I are in our very early 40s. But what we did:

• moved to NI when house prices were cheaper (1995), leaving behind family, friends and (apparently) career
• didn't go on any holiday for 12 years except to my Mum's (thank you Mum)
• cooked everything from scratch and kept the temp in the house down
• only saved up for and paid cash for every thing done to the house
• in the days of low interest rates overpaid the mortgage - instead of many of our friends who remortgaged, released cash and a) went on holiday; b) bought cars; c) got big extensions
• never bought the kids big pressies
• etc etc etc - that all of you OSers do anyway........

but I do get tired now of being told how lucky we are compared with our friends - when they did all the spending earlier

penelopedee_2

thriftmonster wrote: »

but I do get tired now of being told how lucky we are compared with our friends - when they did all the spending earlier

Ditto. We do have debt due to a failed family business but over the years I have got upset about friends commenting on the lack of holidays or not having flat screen TV or the sofa being donkeys years old. The Jones' can do what they want cos I am certainly not going to try and keep up with them.

I can just imagine my mum and dad now discussing this about their brothers and sisters. I think 'in those days' mum and day were a bit OS too