Old Finances (back in the day)

Going4TheDream

Taplady, OMG I totally forgot about the 'special bath and hairwash nights' , for me and sis it was Sunday night, ready for school Monday and Wednesday night. I even remember when my sis and I were younger we used to share, what arguments that caused, it was either too hot or too cole, then one of us would moan about having to sit at the tap end!!! then we used to have our own bath but only kinda as one day she would get in first and then the next time I would, It was only when we became older that we bathed a little more often and totally on our own!

And I totally agree with you on the 'whole generation who dont know how to budget or make do and mend' - hopefully though if they find their way to this site they will soon learn - necessity is the mother of invention dont forget!

Ida_Notion

I'm so notoriously bad at cooking that my husband does it these days. I can look back and laugh at it now, but school cookery was a bit of an ordeal at the time...

Amongst other incidents too numerous to mention was one that involved this 'biscuit crust pie' thing we had to make - crushed biscuit and melted butter crust (like a cheesecake base), filled with Angel Delight. Not the sort of thing we could usually afford most of the time, but I already had a bit of a track record by then and so the family weren't exactly breathless with anticipation while waiting for me to come home with it. They were right to be wary. The biscuit crust was OK, if a bit solid, but because we used sterilized milk instead of pasteurised the Angel delight refused to form 'light and fluffy peaks' and once it was poured onto the crust, got more and more liquefied as the day went on. Come home time, I discovered that it was standing room only on the bus. Even though I had some kind of cover over my pie effort, every time the driver braked or went round a corner what seemed liked a tidal wave of strawberry Angel Delight would slop down the front of my coat. I can still picture the aghast expression on the face of the woman over the road as she stared speechlessly at me after I got off the bus and walked round the corner into our street, clutching a pie dish and dripping with Angel Delight.

I also remember that whenever we cooked anything involving eggs, I'd turn up to find that my egg had broken on the way in. Fed up with crunching on eggshells on the odd occasion that I produced something remotely edible, my mum thought she'd come up with something really genius when she decided that she'd break my egg in advance and put it into a small tupperware container. Once in class, I found myself struggling to get the lid off and had to put so much force into it that when it did give way it flew straight out of the container, over my shoulder and on to the back of the head of a girl standing behind me.

For some reason, school cookery in the late seventies was regarded by my parents as a bit of a drain on the family finances

Wee_Pilsbury

ani_26 wrote: »

This just reminded me of cremola foam

Me too - I loved Creamola Foam - think you can still get it in some shops today!.

GreyQueen

Oh lordy, those school cookery classes........nightmarish places. They were a drain on our family finances too, particularly the Swiss Roll.. you had to bring your own tin for that one and we didn't own such a thing so that was another purchase.

I can still see Mum and Dad peering dubiously into the Tupperware container which contained my school-cookery lesson macaroni cheese. It was a bit of an unknown object and treated with great suspicion...think that one ended up in the bucket.

And those navy gym knickers and navy cake-frill mini skirts for sports to wear with your white Aertex sports shirt. What deviant thought that was suitable apparel for nubile young girls........well, I suppose the fact that your legs got marbled red and purple in the winter would have quelled unseemly lusts.......:rotfl:

The 1970s; decade of the chillblain. Whatever happened to those, did they go the way of pre-decimal currency and get phased out?

medsdemon

I was born in 1969 so was a child through the 70's/80's. I remember it being a very happy time. My mum & dad ran a post office and grocery shop and we lived in the house at the back sharing it with my gran. We spent a lot of time with her and she always cooked our lunches as M&D were working. Gran had a "lady who does" and she often took us out for walks and i remeber visiting her long after she'd left working for my gran. It was only a short walk to school so we mostly walked ourselves and always came home for lunch. I remember playing in the shop after closing when my dad was doing the PO books just so he got to see us that day. I feel sorry for any customers who bought sweets or anything because we used to play shops and weigh the sweets out in bags then popped them back into the jars:eek:.
Trips out were never expensive. A summer holiday treat for us was a trip to the park with a picnic or a train trip to Lincoln with my mum who would drag 3 girls under 6 on and off trains and up Steep Hill to see the castle. we used to love sunday afternoon trips out berry picking.
Some evenings in the summer as a treat we would go out to the fens for a walk ( and maybe even get to paddle in the creeks and mud collecting samphire) and then get a treat of a bag of chips on the way home or a soft drink and a bag of crisps in the pub garden.

Dad had an ancient car that he drove at such a slow speed and I remember ripping my best dress on the rusty bit around the tyre arches:rotfl::rotfl:.

At weekends we went to the coast for the day and we had our own beach hut so we would always eat tinned tomato soup for lunch and take home a fresh crab for tea. Mum never set foot on the beach, she would just sit in the garden of the beach hut and we were just left to our own devices to swim, make sandcastles etc. i think it would have been a pretty cheap day out.

Holidays were often in the early years just in a holiday camp type place with mum and gran and then dad would drive through at a weekend as he couldn't get cover for the PO. Once he retired we went to holiday cottages in Norfolk and i have awfully fond memories of these holiday...I can't remember missing my friends or getting bored like my DD does if she comes away with us

Christmas we always had a stocking but it was full of really cheapy bit and things like sellotape:D and we never had huge expensive presents. One year we all got bikes and they were all second hand but we never seemed to care.

My dad had to take early retirement because of his health when he was in his early 50's and I was 11 in 1980 and we moved to a biggish terraced house with no central heating, and my gran had the front room as her room/bedroom. I think it cost about £9.000 to buy, and he bought it outright and eventually we had central heating installed that was run by a coal burner.

I presume telephone calls were really expensive then as we were never allowed to phone our friends and once a year we called our relatives in Australia for a little chat.

I started working p/t at 13 with a saterday job at a grocers up the road and I got paid cash in hand £8 for the day. If I wsa lucky in the school holidays I got extra days to work and by the time I was 16 I had 3 jobs- this saterday one, a paperround 6 days a week and an evening job at the supermarket on a wed, thurs & friday. I paid all my own clothes, make-up & toiletries, going out and even tampons:). It would shock my daughter but i just took it for granted if I wanted to make my own choices then I had to pay.

We never went without but I always thought we were quite poor till my dad died and found he owned 2 other houses and had quite alot of savings. Just shows you you don't need to spend alot of money to give your children happy memories and it meant he had left his family with enough money to survive without him.

scaredy_cat

I think the reason life was simpler back then was that there was limited chioce. Though things might have been a bit tight sometimes, we didn't have the pressure to buy the latest gadget, people took responisbility for themselves and their possessions. I think the media and advertising has a lot to do with this, making out in the adverts a 'fantasy life' that everything will be wonderfull if you get the latests iphone, or 82 in flatscreen telly, or if you get a £35k car you will automatically be a man/woman magnet'.

Working and saving for things made you value it more. I bought my first tv - 14in - when i was 18 for £100. Products are a thow away item now, you can get a tv for less than £100 and it's not expected to last more than 5 yrs.

We have become a wasteful generation, less thoughtful and mroe self centered.

seraphina

GreyQueen wrote: »

That was the last gasp of maintenance grants, got a princely £800 per year which would have been laughable for 1 term never mind 3 but we 1980s students failed in all our efforts to stop the Tories introducing student fees, and we collectively tried really hard.

It was New Labour that introduced tuition fees, not the Tories.

3v3

scaredy_cat wrote: »

... we didn't have the pressure to buy the latest gadget ..

Not so sure I agree with that statement, I think the adage "keeping up with the Jones' " predates the '80's

scaredy_cat wrote: »

... I think the media and advertising has a lot to do with this, making out in the adverts a 'fantasy life' that everything will be wonderfull if you get the latests iphone, or 82 in flatscreen telly, or if you get a £35k car you will automatically be a man/woman magnet'..

Ah, so no-one has a mind of their own, or, the intelligence to see through the shallowness that a TV/Car/Perfume/deodrant can't really give you a wonderful, fulfilled, contented life?? :rotfl::rotfl: Maybe for children that could be true, but surely "grown-ups" aren't quite so gullible or dilusional? Or, perhaps it is easier to blame an external source for an internal weakness? Media "brainwashing" vs greed?

When I was growing up it was a straightforward case of: if we can't afford it, we can't have it! More recent generations, it's a case of I-want! It's-my-right! Why-"can't/shouldn't"-I have it!?

Media/advertising brings to your thoughts all those items you didn't realise you wanted/could have. But then, that is simply a product of an economy where you can afford all your basic needs, have a bit of surplus cash and tempts you into spending that surplus (Just think how many items/gadgets you've bought but only use once?)

This may sound 'smug' (although it isn't intended that way), but on a thread about the high cost of food, someone wailed: "What happens when you can't cut back any further?". Well, I hope that the "credit crunch" and the higher prices we face now will bring people and their "fantasy life" aspirations back down to earth; I wish no one any genuine hardship (homelessness/starvation/hyperthermia), but there were too many people who lived the "good life" while credit was readily available and cheap food/clothes/goods in abundance, that it won't hurt to have a touch of reality introduced into their world. All those "cheap" goods and credit were costing another human life somewhere in the globe (who worked for a pitance so we could have it cheap )

mizzbiz

This thread is fab - and isn't it amazing the similarities between how people lived back then. Obviously being 'well off' was not the norm in the late seventies and eighties - the vast majority seemed to live very similar lifestyles indeed.

I'm too young to remember life then as I was born in 1980, but I do remember that we had nowt as my dad's business went out of business, as it were. It took years for my parents to get back on an even keel. Things I remember or was told

That all the furniture in our house was given by my auntie and other family members when we were younger.
We did have a TV and no it wasn't hired (priorities!). My uncle had two video recorders and used to copy videos from the video shop for us (naught naughty lol)
My dad smoked Golden Virginia and had a baccie tin - and smoked in the house too :-O
People smoked on the bus (OMG)
A mars bar was 10p (early 80's)
My bus fare to school I remember going up from 5p to 10p, then 15p up to 20p!!
Dad was under the bangers we had most weekends hoping to 'get them going again' for Monday morning to go to work.
Mam tells me she often turned the sofas inside out hoping to find 50p to buy some potatoes and eggs to eat.
I remember my grandmothers twin tub! And she only ever had a coal fire.
I remember my grandad (he died in the early 90's). Although him and my grandma were poor, he was so dapper. Shoes always polished to within an inch of their shiny life, very smart and clean, hair neat as a pin. I remember staying over their's when I was little nad my grandad coming in and telling me he was going down to light the fire and to give it half an hour before coming down so the living room would warm up.

I remember stories from my grandparents and things my mother has told me about my grandmas life and her early life but that's another generation altogether. And they really were poor.

One thing my dad said made me laugh the other week but it shows how people managed on so little. He told me that he used to dread Thursdays as that was 'Bones and Barley' night for tea. Gross! And he was born in the mid-fifties.

ChocClare

Funnily enough, I would say my family WAS better off in the seventies in many ways. Only my dad worked (he was in the Civil Service) and, although we didn't live anywhere particularly "posh", we always had a chest freezer FULL of food - my mum used to buy half a cow and half a sheep at a time, which seemed to be the done thing then. We also went abroad on holiday, though we did tend to go in our trusty VW camper. My dad would plan the route down through France into Spain. He would spend ages compiling a quiz for us kids - a list of the towns we had to go through (easy in France, because you have the signs as you come into any town and the crossed-out signs as you leave) and we had a competition to see who could be first to spot each one. Plus we used to have the table set up in the back and play games as we went along. I guess if you're going to travel hundreds of miles over the Pyrenees with two small children, you want them to be entertained.

We also had "in-car entertainment" - this consisted of a cassette player attached to a car battery with crocodile clips, on which were recorded various LPs for us to sing along with. I can still do every track on Sergeant Pepper, the White Album, the Beach Boys album with Don Quixote on the front (can't remember the name)*, Sweet Baby James by James Taylor and Blue by Joni Mitchell.

Back at home, I had a Sunday best outfit which was only for church. Other than that, it was school uniform plus maybe two pairs of trousers, two t-shirts and a jumper or a cardigan. No great wardrobe for me!

By the time the eighties came, money didn't seem to stretch so far - probably because that was when housing started to go up? However, I can remember when I was 16 (in 1978), my mum and dad had the opportunity to buy a house nearer my school. The house was £17,500 and their house was worth much the same. We never moved, and my mum told me recently (when the house they wanted to buy went on the market for £450,000) that the reason was that they couldn't get a mortgage - mortgages just weren't "being given" at that time unless you HAD to move. Seems unbelievable now.

Attitudes have also changed out of all recognition, haven't they? When I was in the first year of university, the cleaning lady on my floor once confided to me that, "the way some of the kids here behave, you wouldn't think they was the sons and daughters of gentry." :rotfl::rotfl:Can you imagine anyone saying (or thinking) that now?

* ETA - this annoyed me, so I looked it up - it's Surf's Up, and it's not Don Quixote at all on the front, but an American Indian warrior - blimey, you learn something new every day (and to be fair, I probably was in La Mancha at the time). Anyway, I know none of you could sleep till you knew the name of the album, so there you are