Old Finances (back in the day)

rose28454

Thirty years ago I had just got married and was happily working for National Westminster Bank. I remember my oh wanted a pair of walking boots ( he loved the outdoors) that we could not afford so when he got paid each week he went to the climbing shop and paid £1.00 each week until he had paid for them ( I think they were £12.00)
Fast forward 30 years and we have been apart for 3 and a half years and are just about to sell our home to pay off large mortgage and debts. Due to his alcoholism ( now in recovery for past 3 years ) have never had a normal financial life and hence all the debt. However now I am on my own I am getting the hang of actually having money to pay bills and being able to budget. Thanks to Mr Tesco's DTD have just had three months with barely any food bills so nearly all bills up to date. Also OH now in charge of his own money and now no booze he is managing well too.
A bit sad but although we are apart we are still friends and will celebrate 30 years in September with our two brilliant children!

maganan

rose28454 wrote: »

Thirty years ago I had just got married and was happily working for National Westminster Bank. I remember my oh wanted a pair of walking boots ( he loved the outdoors) that we could not afford so when he got paid each week he went to the climbing shop and paid £1.00 each week until he had paid for them ( I think they were £12.00)
Fast forward 30 years and we have been apart for 3 and a half years and are just about to sell our home to pay off large mortgage and debts. Due to his alcoholism ( now in recovery for past 3 years ) have never had a normal financial life and hence all the debt. However now I am on my own I am getting the hang of actually having money to pay bills and being able to budget. Thanks to Mr Tesco's DTD have just had three months with barely any food bills so nearly all bills up to date. Also OH now in charge of his own money and now no booze he is managing well too.
A bit sad but although we are apart we are still friends and will celebrate 30 years in September with our two brilliant children!

:T well done on being a survivor, hope that doesn't sound patronising not meant to x

Justamum

Janeryan wrote: »

My Dad was paid weekly in cash and on pay day Mum & Dad sat down together at the table and divided the money up into jars and various other receptacles to pay the bills-

Although my DH doesn't get paid weekly in cash, the benefits system here is different from over there and we get a 'top-up' because our income isn't sufficient. This is paid weekly as a cheque. When I cash it I divide it up into various tins to cover various non-DD things such as tv licence, car tax, children's activities, haircuts, etc.

On a different topic, I remember when it was announced in 1969 I think it was, that tv was going to be broadcast in colour from a certain date. I was very excited about it. But when we switched on the tv on the date in question we still only got tv in black and white. I didn't understand that it would require a different (and probably much more expensive to rent) tv. It was quite a few years before we got colour.

paulus_the_woodland_gnome

Butterfly_Brain wrote: »

I have a VHS of pogles wood I used to love it

Am I in that?

GreyQueen

paulus_the_woodland_gnome wrote: »

Am I in that?

Hi there, you're user name is co-incidentally our family's nickname for my kid brother, another sixties-spawn like me.

Err, you're not my kid brother, I hope?!

3v3

culpepper wrote: »

Does anyone remember Tinker and Tucker with Auntie Jean? They were Koala puppets a bit like pinky and perky but cuter.
Also Rolf Harris had a TV series with a Koala puppet called Coochie bear.
Pogles Wood with the squirrel called Tog or was that just part of the wooden tops?
We used to watch Captain Scarlet at the weekend and thunderbirds then straight out into the garden to re-enact it all.
All those TV progs did have toys associated with them so I suppose we were still quite materialistic even then.

Yes!!! :T I used to love that.

"Watch With Mother" - I think it was on around 1.45pm, weekdays - but, that pre-dates the '80's

The '80's were very much "Dallas", "Dynasty" inspired.
Music: Dexys Midnight Runners; Adam and the Ants; Spandau Ballet

The '80's recession was the first "credit card" hit - people had just started on the credit card bandwagon and that recession was the first time people were being hit hard by not being able to make the minimum payment. You would have thought that would have been a good "wake-up" call into how easy it could be to fall into the credit trap. But no, when things picked up again, so was the credit card (or rather, anther credit card because the original one wasn't usable and still being paid off).

The '90's recession: when people first learned the term "negative equity". Crippled some people. Benefitted the more prudent, who now learned the term "mortgate snatch back" and bought them at auction. Did we learn? Some did; not many.

The circles of life

icelandic_queen

I'm loving this thread as I was a child of the 70's. We had Romper Room here in NI and the lady was called Miss Helen. If your name was mentioned you thought you'd won the lottery you were that delighted!! I had a Tiny Tears which I loved but one of my own kids broke her!! I was devestated. My Mum has always been good with money and like many Mums mentioned here she had to be as there were no credit cards. I do remember her paying things off every week and when the item was brought home was well looked after and expected to last more than a year or two.

ani_26

3v3 wrote: »

Yes!!! :T I used to love that.

"Watch With Mother" - I think it was on around 1.45pm, weekdays - but, that pre-dates the '80's

The '80's were very much "Dallas", "Dynasty" inspired.
Music: Dexys Midnight Runners; Adam and the Ants; Spandau Ballet

The '80's recession was the first "credit card" hit - people had just started on the credit card bandwagon and that recession was the first time people were being hit hard by not being able to make the minimum payment. You would have thought that would have been a good "wake-up" call into how easy it could be to fall into the credit trap. But no, when things picked up again, so was the credit card (or rather, anther credit card because the original one wasn't usable and still being paid off).

The '90's recession: when people first learned the term "negative equity". Crippled some people. Benefitted the more prudent, who now learned the term "mortgate snatch back" and bought them at auction. Did we learn? Some did; not many.

The circles of life

Its odd, i seem to have a block on the 80's and 90's, i don't remember too much about them .They obviously weren't memorable enough to me personally.

GreyQueen

3v3 wrote: »

Yes!!! :T I used to love that.

"Watch With Mother" - I think it was on around 1.45pm, weekdays - but, that pre-dates the '80's

The '80's were very much "Dallas", "Dynasty" inspired.
Music: Dexys Midnight Runners; Adam and the Ants; Spandau Ballet

The '80's recession was the first "credit card" hit - people had just started on the credit card bandwagon and that recession was the first time people were being hit hard by not being able to make the minimum payment. You would have thought that would have been a good "wake-up" call into how easy it could be to fall into the credit trap. But no, when things picked up again, so was the credit card (or rather, anther credit card because the original one wasn't usable and still being paid off).

The '90's recession: when people first learned the term "negative equity". Crippled some people. Benefitted the more prudent, who now learned the term "mortgate snatch back" and bought them at auction. Did we learn? Some did; not many.

The circles of life

Yeah, that's the downside of the late 1980s-early 1990s. My peers were young graduates earning thruppence in the late 1980s but there was a level of housing market hysteria which I've never seen since. All the talk was of house price increases and getting on the ladder and the feeling was that if you didn't buy a house RIGHT NOW you'd be doomed to spending the rest of your life in a cardboard box in an underpass.

It was a culture-wide hysteria and some people on low wages and/or with insecure jobs bought houses which they couldn't afford for more that they were worth. My cousin's small 2-bed in a market town co-incidentally at a reasonable commute from a big city was suddenly increasing in value by over a thousand pounds a week. A lot of people got badly burned and some people I know were in negative equity from that time until well into the Noughties and lived like paupers so that they could pay the mortgage.

Cousin had a nervous breakdown over all the stress and had her house repo'd. She wasn't the only person I know who this happened to and there were several people of my acquaintanceship whose marriages/ long-term partnerships failed as a result of losing the house.

My own adult life encompasses the whole of 1980s, 1990s, the Noughties and whatever handle ends up being applied to this one. I feel that I've personally witnessed an incredible cultural shift in that time regarding how people spend their money, their expectations of what their lives should be like, and what they and their children are "entitled" to have.

In my work life, I get a lot of this; people who are parents on income support but figure that their council home is uninhabitable because it isn't carpeted and they have children and many such foolishnesses. You have to be polite and professional at all times but you honestly feel like smacking people upside the head and giving them some useful advice such as to put a couple of quid aside every week then head off to the remnant section of the carpet shop to get a room-sized remant for £20 or even a large area rug from the bootsale with change from a fiver. Fer crying out loud, it's what a lot of us in work are doing.

OK, rant over, but this the world owes me...(insert luxury consumer item) attitude is something I encounter a lot.

I personally think that easy access to credit has enslaved a lot of people and that student loans are effectively a training ground for this for that section of the population. Saving up for stuff came to be regarded as very quaint and old-fashioned when you can get a credit card, a store card, buy-now-pay-later terms etc etc.

People of my grandparents' generation and prior were very afraid of credit and having something on "tick" or the "never-never" was sometimes necessary but it was something to be ashamed of. People were fearful of falling out of work, of having a health problem that meant they couldn't work, and not being able to pay back what they owed.

It was the commonplace thing among working-class families like my own for the man to hand over his unopened paypacket to the missus and she'd give him back a small amount of beer and baccy money for his personal consumption and allocated the rest to household expenditures. The humourous columnist Lucy Mangan (the Guardian) was once riffing on this in one of her columns, about how she'd come Dahn Sarth from Ooop North as a young woman and been deeply-shocked at how southern wimmin let their menfolk control their own money...some of these men even had their own chequebooks....:rotfl:

I was first paid (weekly) as a young worker in cash. Imagine a small manilla envelope with bank notes and coins and your payslip inside; how quaint that sounds. Once BACS technology came in, it broke the very visual linkage between what you got paid and what you could spend and made it barely possible to live without a bank account.

I think that when the tangible money, your pay-cheque (or your giro-cheque/ order book encashed at the Post Office if you were on the social) became mere figures on your bank statement, it had a profound affect on how people viewed their money and made it a lot easier to get into an overspending situation.

In a spendaholic, wasteful society, you can live pretty comfortably on other people's leavings sold for a fraction of their value secondhand or even given away, and I do. I think almost everyone up here could say the same.

It would be great if the increase in material standards of living which we've enjoyed in my lifetime had been matched with a parallel rise in personal happiness and overall well-being.

Sadly, that hasn't been the case and the psychological well-being in western-style countries peaked about 1971 and its downhill since then.

One of the best quotes I ever heard, in the context of de-cluttering, was this: "Don't love anything which can't love you back!" Simple if you thinks about it; yes to people, yes to pets, no to inanimate objects.

I think we've been loving too much stuff and not keeping focussed on what is really important in this life, as a culture, and maybe if this changes as a result of the current economic doldrums, some good will come out of the hardships.

Justamum

GreyQueen wrote: »

It was the commonplace thing among working-class families like my own for the man to hand over his unopened paypacket to the missus and she'd give him back a small amount of beer and baccy money for his personal consumption and allocated the rest to household expenditures.

My mum told me recently that she's never known in her whole life how much my dad earned. He would give her housekeeping every week and pay the bills etc (but not usually on time!) out of the rest. Whatever was left over he felt was his to spend on what he wanted, so he never went short of fags. My mum often had no money for the launderette - he had clean clothes every day and never bothered to find out how they were washed. More often than not she'd be scrubbing clothes in the bath.