Old Finances (back in the day)

ALIBOBSY

As this is my 40th year :eek:. I was a kid in the 70's, but I remember how mum and dad lived.
I remember an enormous victorian suite they got second hand. It was solid as a rock and had massive padded arms that made brilliant "horses" for me and my sister lol. They finally bought a brand new suite when we moved to a bigger house and Dad's wage jumped up at the start of the 80's and the suite went to the local scouts/cubs who used it for years afterwards.

Mum still says she wishes she had just had the old one recovered and restuffed professionally and kept it, but at the time it was the thing to have new and of course there were fire issues.

To save costs instead of getting the gap under the stairs blocked in with a wall, and so she could use it as a cupboard and hide things away lol. Mum used her sewing skills to put up a set of curtains across. Of course for us kids it was like a stage with curtains-brilliant!

Tv wise I remember a few second hand ones going bang, literally. Dad was an electrical engineer so plenty of stuff came in cheap cos it was second hand and/or needed fixing so Dad could sort that.

I thought push starting cars was a normal family activity rofl. We had a fab vauxhall veva (sp) which was a big estate car and us kids loved it as he would let us play house in it and it seemed massive inside. It was hand painted (yes really) and you could see the brush marks in the paint, it was always breaking down as well, all good fun (I think).

No videos, no games consoles, no computers, no mobiles. If you went out you told your parents who you would be with and where you were going and had to be back at a pre arranged time.

I remeber a load of us piling around to a mate who was the first to get an atari. I remember brownies teaching us how to use a phonebox for emergencies. No debit cards it was all cash from the atm at the start of the week and it had to last.

When parents got their first credit card (a flexible friend) and she worried sick about using it, it was kept locked up at home for emergencies or large purchases so they could spread the cost over a few months.

My Dad had a reasonable good job, he would be classed as white collar, a professional. But we certainly didn't live the lifestyle presented as what you should "aim" for now. Mum didn't go back to work after having us until I was about 10 (sister was 6 ish) and even then it was part time at our school lol (a dinner lady).

Our food was cooked from scratch and Dad's tea was on the table every night when he walked through the door. Cola/pop etc only came in at christmas or occasionally as a treat.

My mum would include as chrissie pressies a pair of slippers, a new nighty/pj's, clothes etc as presents. One year I got an umbrella (I kid you not), advent callenders were full of glitter and pictures-never chocolate. When I went up to high school we had to have a calculator that did trig calcs for year 3 I think, so christmas the year before that was one of my presents.

I can't recall going out to eat or a takeaway for anything other than a birthday/wedding/christening etc until I was about 10, and then we used to go to a local pub/restaurant who did an early bird set menu.

They had one bank account (joint of course) and an abbey saver 9running along side the abbey mortgage).

Ali x

ALIBOBSY

Opps forgot about the home brewing, all parents seemed to do it. One set of neighbours would do bitter another larger and Dad was the wine man. Lots of gatherings where the parents took turns to host and everyone else brought food/homebrew etc-cheaper than going out to the pub or a restaurant and no baby sitters.

We loved firework nights as we ended up with a big bonfire and loads of fireworks as each family brought a small box each which added up to alot. Later on us kids would scarper upstairs to play-seem to remember there was a quick change into PJ's and some went home in Pj's and coat later on-many carried to the car asleep. Meanwhile the parents would sit around and get sozzled-one year the Dads got drunk around the bonfire and started dragging stuff out of the garages to burn. Next day with sore heads they recalled Dad chopping up his tool cupboard, next door bringing out his bannisters which were just off to revarnish! And one Dad who was a carpenter had cleared out aload of stock eek!

Simple times, sadly my mum has fallen for the whole buy it now brigade and goes on about how naff it all was, but I want that sort of simple life for the kids.

Ali x

Hardup_Hester

Thirty years ago I had a 4 year old & a baby, we lived in a 2up 2down fixer upper, our mortgage was crippling as the rates were very high back then. We had no central heating, just an open fire in the living room that was only lit when hubby came home to make the coal last. My kitchen consisted of a camping cooker with 2 rings & a grill, I had a twin tub washing machine, nappys were soaked in water with an egg cup of domestos in it & then put through the washer. Our garden was 100 feet long & the washing line was the full length & usually full of nappys. When my 4yo out grew his clothes my mum bought him 2 jumpers & I made him some trousers out of my maternity trousers. We didn't go hungry, but the meals got a bit monotonous sometimes.

mardatha

I had 2 kids and a baby, and a husband who worked in the docks and was ALWAYS on strike. One strike went on for 20 weeks, and we lived on £11 social security a week. Strikers didnt get any money.
Didn't have a phone, or any kind of credit, and no car, just the bike. If the bike needed petrol or fixed, then we ate beans until we got it fixed. He needed it to get to work, didn't even have money for bus fares.
Sounds grim but was actually not, we were very happy. I used to make huge pots of soup and rice pudding, and we ate a lot of french toast I made my daughter's summer dresses & cut the kids hair. I used to sit and read The Famous Five books to them and when they got bored I'd read them meself , think I enjoyed them more !
I dreamt about living in a wee cottage far out in the country, in the hills. And now I do - and my 3 kids are all within 20 miles of me, with their families. I've been very lucky in life. And we still got a bloody bike that always needs fixing !:rotfl:

oldtractor

Rates instead of council tax and much much less even in real terms. no VAT but purchase tax instead and it want on everything. decent state pension. private pension only for the well off. mortgages limited to 2 and 3/4 of the mans wage so houses were affordable. married mans tax allowance . infact we were much better off and women could,if they wished,be housewives without being maligned.

Ballymackeonan

30 years ago I'd just bought my house - I was working for a building society then, so it was affordable on a staff mortgage rate of 4%. I remember the valuation was for about £28.000, not bad for a 1950s semi with a large garden near a park, even if prices were depressed in N Ireland then (tho it didn't have central heating or any insulation!) If I hadn't been an employee, I'd have been limited to about 2 times salary for the mortgage, and would have gone on a waiting list until my local branch had enough "quota" from Head Office.

While petrol was cheap compared to now, cars were a lot more expensive relative to salaries - and cost a lot more than modern ones to maintain, a combination of poor reliability/build quality (like my Mini where the heating wouldn't go off, even in high summer, unless I disconnected it in the engine!) and short service intervals - full service every 5,000 miles. I travelled often to UK mainland in the job, just as well I was on expenses as flights were much more expensive - British Airways or British Midland, no Easyjet or Ryanair..

I have a stash of magazines from the late 1970s and early 1980s, I'll have a look at them and see what prices were like for clothes etc.

Ida_Notion

butterflylady131 wrote: »

Hi,
These are great. The main thing I'm picking up is that purchases had to be saved up for, and credit was for the wealthy. Love the story about the phone handset being taken out of the house to prevent phone calls. A bit radical, but I guess if it works.....
Rates? Is that the same as Council tax?

My mum and dad put a lock on our phone - it was a sort of metal cylindrical thing that fitted in one of the holes on the dial. Dial? How quaint I was twelve when we first went 'on the phone' - you would not believe the excitement:rotfl: It did drive us nuts during the entire course of one weekend though when it would not stop ringing, but every time we answered there'd be nobody there. An engineer came out after we reported this 'crank caller', and it transpired that our clematis outside had grown to the point where it had become wrapped around the overhead phone cable, causing the phone to ring whenever a gust of wind blew

I'd forgotten about the 'rented telly' thing. Ours was always rented when I was a kid (black and white), and as soon as I could afford to I rented a colour telly for a few years after I left home. I don't think too many people had their own tellys then, and I certainly can't remember a household that had more than one TV.

Rates were similar to Council Tax, and my mum would moan about them a lot, just as you'd expect. Periodically she would go through the box she kept her bills in, and at the same time she would pull out all the Green Shield stamps she'd been stuffing in there and get the rest of us to stick them in the books. Green Shield stamps were given away in supermarkets, much like loyalty points (Boots etc), and you had to collect them a few at a time over a period spanning forever, fill a book with zillions of them (or so it felt to us) and then exchange several books for something like... a casserole dish.

I can also remember having to be quiet every week while the pools results were on and my mum checked her coupon. Most weeks she'd just sigh and say 'Not this week, kids', but she did once win a fiver which resulted in sweets and comics for all of us, among other things. This was very exciting because we didn't get a lot of that kind of thing.

We didn't get pocket money either, although that sort of changed one day when we came back from a family outing to see the milkman disappearing up the street. Never one to get into debt and horrified that she'd missed paying him, my mum gave us the money and told us to run up the road after him. He was so pleased with our efforts that he gave the three of us five pence each (this was MASSIVE! :rotfl:), and gave rise to a scenario where every week two of us would distract our mum and dad for long enough for them to miss the milkman when he called, while the other would 'just happen to notice' that he was disappearing up the road and then we'd rush off to pay him and claim our 15p. I'm fairly sure he knew what we were up to because after a few weeks of this he'd positively creep up the path and knock just loudly enough for the woodworm in the door to hear, but fortunately for us he was not a 'lollipops and dirty mac' type with a hidden agenda.

tinktinktinkerbell

butterflylady131 wrote: »

In particular, what was necessary, , sky tv,

sky TV is never necessary

grumpybear_3

Hmm - Carry on Doctor came out in '67 - when I was -13!! so not sure I can add very much personally!

A lot of the time the basics haven't changed,

We all need security; a loving family, somewhere to live, a job to go to, some way of getting there, food on the table and something to do in the evenings - and it doesn't take a lot to keep us happy if we have these.

butterflylady131

These are the posts I was after. Remembrances about how things were paid, priorites, memories. It does seem that no matter how little money there was, nobody seemed to suffer. There were hardships, but no one actually suffered.
I guess my whole point for starting this is to question what people's priorities were back then, and to measure how they've changed.
A friend I used to work with was married to a guy who had been made redundant. The mortgage insurance was only paid for 12 months, and they were struggling. He was unable to find another job, and was deeply affected by depression. When I offered to help look at ways in which she could cut her outgoings, I mentioned that she should look at her sky package, and if things were so dire, she should look at getting it cut off, and just have freeview tv. She looked at me horrified and said "But it's my only pleasure in life!".
I just thought about when my dad had to support and look after us when my mum was terminally ill in hospital. He had 4 of us kids to look after, and went picking stones in a field for a farmer for £10 a day in order to keep us fed. And this was 1990!!!!
Just interested to hear everyone's stories. I think people's priorities have changed and not for the better. Its great that everyone is sharing, keep the stories coming, loving them!