Old Finances (back in the day)

MKS

mardatha wrote: »

MKS, I remember 5/- school dinners too. But I spent mine by Wednesday in the local chippie and then starved all week LOL! My mum went to the tatties as well and I went to the berry picking. It was hard work but good money and I ate most of it anyway. My first job was an office junior in a lawyers firm at £16 a month! I hated it LOL

mardatha, glad I'm not the only one that remembers 5 bob dinners! I went to a school in the village so nowhere to spend it on. Besides, my mum worked in the canteen at school so she would know! On a lighter note, school meals were excellent there apart from mashed orange swede! Still can't eat that vegetable now. We also knew that if money was tight, we would only get bread and pullit later on, so was in our own interest to have school dinners.
When I went to the grammar school, the word chippie was not allowed in our vocabulary!
My first job was a cashier in a jewellers where I had to do book keeping by hand and mental arithmatic! The manager didn't trust those new fangled calculators!

THIRZAH

School dinners were 5 shillings a week when I started school.They were horrible-cooked in the canteen of another school and transported to our school in enormous tins. Things like pastry and roast potatoes were always soggy.

One of the dinner ladies told my mother that she could always tell which children came from "good" homes as they had been brought up properly and would clear their plates. After that my mother insisted that we ate all our school dinner.She never knew how much we sneaked into the waste bucket. The girl who sat next to me and I would stack our plates before anyone came round to check.

I really envied the children who were allowed to bring sandwiches-often in an Oxo tin as lunchboxes were quite rare then.

jessica_rabbit_3

Justamum wrote: »

I had an Alice in Wonderland doll which had those records in. It was based on the film which had Fiona Fullerton playing Alice.

Do you have any more info about this doll?
My sister used to have it (before I was born) and loved it. I'm sure it's the same doll - she always told me it had records in the back. When my mum and her dad got divorced he chucked all my sister's and brother's toys on the skip in spite. She had never got over the loss of this doll and still talks about it today. I'd love to find one for her!

Edit - just found it and the make - Palitoy! The actresses name was the the giveaway, I can't thank you enough for this clue!

Justamum

jessica_rabbit wrote: »

Do you have any more info about this doll?
My sister used to have it (before I was born) and loved it. I'm sure it's the same doll - she always told me it had records in the back. When my mum and her dad got divorced he chucked all my sister's and brother's toys on the skip in spite. She had never got over the loss of this doll and still talks about it today. I'd love to find one for her!

Edit - just found it and the make - Palitoy! The actresses name was the the giveaway, I can't thank you enough for this clue!

Wow! I just went on Ebay and saw that someone has just sold one for £46!

maryb

Just got back from holiday and have had a nostalgia wallow going through the entire thread. I'm a bit older than most of you - I can remember the 1950s and 60s. Mostly I remember it as a harsh time when you were always getting into trouble for things you did not really understand or being slapped by the teacher if you couldn't do mental arithmetic fast enough. And boring Sundays! A lot of people who think of it as a golden age weren't there!!

I have quite fond memories of the 1970s despite all the social and economic upheavals. I suppose you often think back with fondness to the time when you were a young adult. I went up to university the day the Yom Kippur war broke out and things were never the same again. Within weeks the OPEC countries had slapped the oil embargo on and inflation took off. I remember being the coldest I have ever been in my life at college - we were on the top of a hill with not much standing in the way between us and Siberia from what I could tell and the building was 1960s and NOT energy efficient. We had large windows in our rooms which consisted of two panes of glass which slid past each other - the gap between the sheets of glass was about half an inch wide!! When the oil crisis hit they turned the heat down so low it was hardly on!

However because it was a modern college and supposedly cheap to run (girls don't eat much, do they?) it paid into a subvention fund which went towards the upkeep of the older colleges. I bitterly resented that the boys in 'Castle' got good food and we got Mr Mack's Money Saving Mixture - dried egg reconstituted with water and too much of it at that so you had rubbery yellow lumps floating in grey liquid. (Mr Mack was the name of our chef) I was really ill with a bad chest infection that first year and bad food and cold had a lot to do with it.

But it was a good time to be a woman. Things were really opening up. Contraception was becoming available to unmarried women so you didn't have the terror of worrying if you might get pregnant (though if you did it was you who got sent down, not the man). But there wasn't much casual bed hopping. We were at the stage of moving from you didn't sleep with your boyfriend because if you did he wouldn't marry you to where you had to sleep with him otherwise he wouldn't marry you. But mostly a girl still justified it to herself that she really loved him and wanted to get married. Inevitably that led to a lot of heartbreak when she found out he didn't feel the same.

I left university in 1976 and got a job with a big City accountancy firm - which would have been all but impossible without the Sex Discrimination Act. My intake was 10% women up from about 2% before the Act was passed. It wasn't many years before it was 50%. I needed a credit card for work (travel expenses - which we lived off) and at first they wouldn't give me one because I hadn't been working for at least 6 months but there was no sex discrimination involved.

I got my first flat in 1977 with my small inheritance from my parents and I got a loan to rewire and install a bathroom without too much trouble. (It was an old Victorian maisonette, and still had gas lighting!) I had to buy a fixer up because I couldn't get a mortgage, but again it wasn't because I was a woman it was because mortgages were rationed and you had to have been saving with a building society for a minimum of 2 years - it didn't matter that I had a substantial deposit, they wanted to see evidence of steady prudence.

Money was horribly tight because the government was trying to hold down inflation with a Prices and Incomes policy which meant that you still had massive inflation (it touched 25% per annum at its height) but your pay didn't go up except when you got promoted. So employers used to pay all sorts of benefits to get round the cap. Those were the years of suit leasing where you rented a good suit from your employer for peanuts. And we were expected to make money from our expenses. On an away job you would all claim the standard allowance and chip in for the cost of petrol for the one person who actually drove. Arbitrary and unfair, if you didn't get many away jobs but not considered in the least bit corrupt at the time - it was the only way of giving us enough money to live on. Once the cap on earnings came off employers cleaned up the system. (In some ways the MPs expenses system worked in the same way - because the Government didn't want the political flak of giving MPs pay rises, they allowed MPs to make money on expenses. I recognise it from their complaints that they were only doing what everyone was expected to do.)

Although we didn't earn huge amounts our jobs were totally safe if you worked in finance. And you did get pay rises with each promotion which happened pretty frequently - creating lots of additional grades was another way of getting round the pay rise ban, so inflation took care of your mortgage after a couple of years, plus, of course, interest rates started to come down from the mid 1980s on. I remember being told 'pens down' several times during the 1981 recession when yet another manufacturing client went into receivership but it never seemed to affect people working in the City. That all changed big time in the 19991 recession.

Income tax rates were very high in the 1970s. You paid up to 83% on the top slice of your earnings plus there was a 15% 'unearned income surcharge' on investment income ie savings with all the connotations that it was somehow undeserved. (squeezing the rich until the pips squeaked).You didn't have to be earning all that much to hit high rates of tax - I remember paying 45% when I was in my late 20s and I was a pretty junior manager at the time. It was a real disincentive to people to work harder if they only took home an extra £2 for every £100. And that was the time when qualified scientists, engineers and doctors started leaving the country in droves. (Having seen what high tax rates do in practice I'm in agreement with keeping them as low as necessary. The rich actually pay more tax that way). There wasn't as much greed in the City in those days. Directors earned a lot more, of course, but not the obscene pay differences you get now. That started with Big Bang when the big American investment banks came on the scene. Before that we had merchant banks. The difference was more than just in the name. Merchant banks acted for companies which needed access to capital. Investment banks are much more focused on the 'investors' and they are not in it for the long term these days, which is why companies are much more focused on short term profit and cost savings.

It was a better time to be starting out. We were able to find our feet in our jobs and there was room for individuals who didn't immediately fit the mould whereas these days you have to 'hit the ground running' (loathsome term). And employers seem to want high achieving clones. It's not enough to be clever, you have to have a well rounded CV. A friend who works in graduate recruitment and sees a lot of these CVs coming across her desk looks at most of them and thinks 'either you're lying about all your extra curricular activities or you did burger all work at university'.

It wasn't a good time to retire, however. Lots of people retired round about then with pensions which were adequate at the time but which were destroyed by inflation and high taxation in a few years. That is one thing that terrifies me about our forthcoming retirement, it's impossible at the moment to get a real net return on savings with low risk even if you are prepared to settle for 2-3% real return which is what the average rate always used to be over the long term.

I'm the tail end of the baby boom and we seem to have just missed out on a lot that people just 5-10 years older enjoyed. But we are still so much better off than our children will be. So much so that I think in some ways the upcoming generation are giving up on the idea of equalling our standard of living. They are focusing on the idea of 'enough'. I hope so. I've learned over the years that the secret to being content is to know what constitutes 'enough' for you personally. Once you do decide this and attain it, you don't hanker after what might have been. I never reached the top in my career because I wanted a work life balance and I have never regretted that. Happiness comes from family and friends once you have 'enough'.

nobodyspecial

Brilliant post maryb :T:T

lightisfading

Absolutely loving this thread, despite being a relative baby (born 1983). That said, a lot of this seems familiar still - we weren't well off.

I remember hand me downs and jumble sales ... some of this okay, some was not. I was bullied pretty horrendously for not having the money to buy new trainers when mine fell apart.

Gas and electricity were on the meter, which regularly used to run out - sunday night by candlelight not that uncommon!

Me and my brother both did jobs as soon as we could - paper rounds, washing cars etc. I feel so sorry that my mum regularly had to ask her kids to 'borrow' paper round money to make ends meet (by that I mean put food on the table) ... that can't have been easy... or having to borrow a tenner off a friend to survive the week - I definitely don't look back on that fondly, how horrendous having to beg from friends (regularly) to buy some milk and bread to feed your kids.

We played out in the street every night, used to zoom down the hill on an old little tricycle and a skateboard, narrowly missing traffic at the bottom I got smacked by my dad once for climbing a tree in my school clothes and ripping my trousers - no money for new ones. Used to spend hours playing board games on a sunday as a family and I really miss that now.

Feeding us was a never ending battle with little money to do it. Meal plan and shopping list made every week, mum used to walk to the shops and back almost daily. Distinctly remember canned 'Happy Shopper' carrots and peas (my god I hate tinned veg now!), and the little local shop sold toilet rolls and eggs individually! I was often sent to the shop for 3 eggs to make a little flan (quiche) for dinner because it was cheap, or 1 toilet roll! Many instances of just having no money and no food in the house - mum making a rice pud the night before for breakfast in the morning before school! (or even bananas and custard!). Milk came from the milkman so we always had that.

Whoever it was that mentioned Woodcraft Folk, those are some of my happiest memories of childhood My mum had to scrape together the money to buy me a sleeping bag and rucksack for their camping trips when I was about 12 and I still have them to this day (in good condition too!!).

TwelveStopsThenHome

I have to say, I have loved reading this thread. It's interesting how we've lived throughout the decades.

I was born in 1984 so I'm a youngster compared to some. Life was a struggle. My Dad was in and out of work in the butchering trade. The bonus with his job was all the good cuts of meat we had every week and for Christmas

Mum was mainly a housewife, but did work as a dinner lady when I was around 14/15. She mainly looked after the home and us kids.

We had a lot of support from my grandparents (Dad's side) with money, food and childcare arrangements in holidays etc as my great grandmother would help and my Dad's aunt.

We didn't have all these fancy gadgets, even the ones in the 1990s! I had a Super Nintendo when I was 10 which my parents and my Nan saved up for with about two/three games. I had this until we had our first PC when I was 15! Provided hours of fun in rainy days. I did read a lot, and was at the library every week! Used to love my books, still do today.

We mainly played out in the garden, go to parks, or my Nan used to take us to museums and historical sites of interest during the holidays when she could get the time off. I was more fascinated by these places then watching telly or staying in.

Food was mainly bought at Aldi or Farmfoods as they were the nearest and cheapest super markets we could afford. Dad being the cook he is, would make a meal even out of the simplest of ingreidents!

We couldn't be allowed to stay out and roam the streets til late. I was always set a time to come back, even if it was to spend an afternoon with town. In the pre-mobile days, I was given 20p for a payphone to say I was on my way home. This went on until I was about 17. I was in bed by 9.00 on a schoolnight from the age of 8 to 11, this rose til 10.00 when I got into Year 7. Even when I was older 15-17, it was 10.00-10.30 apart from holidays and weekends.

After my parents divorced when I was nearly 19, me and my Dad were just scraping by. We had a lot of debts, and just scraped on our wages. Granted, there was a lot of freedom but the best thing was learning to stand on my own two feet in where I learnt to cook, and did all the housework etc.

Even now in adulthood, coming up to 27, I still budget my money and scrimp and save. In these days of recessions with redundancies flying about everywhere, high prices and pay cuts you some money as a back-up when it get worse. I have been used to budgeting and with the help of my partner's money and support we get through it.

This year is the first ever foreign holiday for me to Benidorm. I want to make the experience totally worthwhile and I am looking to save for my 2012 holiday in wherever that will be

Rosanna79

Found this thread absolutely fascinating to read- 30 years ago I was a 32 years old newly wed so am rather more 'vintage' than a lot of you ladies.

Most of the tv from the 195os -70s are lost to me. In addition to growing up on a council estate I was raised in a fundamentalst Christian community as well so : NO TV, cinema, smoking , drinking, dancing, gambling, makeup, earings attending football matches and most definitely no premarital goings on!!!

So what did we do? Well initially we lived in a village with an outside loo, tin bath and cess pit at the bottom of the garden. It was a private, rented house built from condemned materials. My mother being somewhat of a driving force in family finally got us a council house on a new estate when I was 6 years old.

With only the radio for company we listened to radio plays, went to the local library regularly- my dad gave me a great love of books and I've always been grateful for that. I had a bike from the age of 6 and he took me everywhere he could cycling and when not cycling I used to ride or scoot on a large scooter.
When I learned to swim I would supplement my pocket money bt cleaning family shoes at 2d a pair (Dad hated that job) and so I'd get into the local 'baths' as we called it.

Does anyone remember playingTwo Ball games? it was something I could play for hours on my own , even a Sunday when I wasn't allowed out to play.

My parents relented re having a tv 6 months before I left home in 1967. I recall the Forsyte Saga being a favourite drama but one swear word in any programme Mother would turn off the offending programme!!! Never mind if we were 'in' to it.

Rosanna79

Sorry had to come off quickly due to the LINK facility ( local library having to shut down and reboot). Great facility to have so near to home when one's own internet is off I must say.

Anyway as I was saying I left home the day before my 18th birthday to train as a nurse in a London teaching hospital.. Mother agreed as my brother lived just a mile away and would 'look after me'

He'd been born blind and had been educated at a special boarding school which in those days was the norm so he wasn't at all affected by the fundamentalist regime as was I and yes he did look after me... He took me for regular meals out, to the pub and taught me to drink...!

When I started student nurse training in March 1967 we received Board and Lodge plus the princely sum of £13 PER MONTH! We were always getting free tickets for things like Hammersmith Palais. My return rail fare home to North Lincolnshire was £5 so I often found my mother passing me the cost of my rail fare when I visited. Holidays in childhood were largely 2 weeks visiting Mother's family in Sunderland and as a student nurse I travelled to rural South west Ireland with my friend, a fellow student nurse to her family's farm It was as the Irish say great craic and started my lifelong love of the people, the country and their music.

When the ' Pay as you go' came out when we had more pay but had to pay for our meals it was an exercise in budgeting I can tell you. As a newly qualified staff nurse in 1970 I earned £45 per month so it was only when I started Full time agency nursing for 6 months after my midwifery training a couple of years later I found myself earning £30 PER WEEK.

Whenever our pay went up the Board and Lodge seemed to go up more so we seemed to be worse off. Anyway as time passed I decided to take a few years out of my nursing career to take a degree in middle East languages at a Northern University.

Although I'd attended the local grammar school, having to attend 6 church services /week and run the house when Mother went back to work I found keeping all the balls in the air a bit challenging. We were a family unit, Dad worked shift work at the local steelworks, mother the same at the local cottage hospital. My brother was blind and anyway in the early 1960s the daughter of the house was expected to get on with it. Even though the times were tough I feel it gave me good time management skills and served me well for adult life.

Dad wasn't in sympathy with my wish to do A levels but did all he could to encourage ne to complete my SRN nursing qualification. Said I'd never be out of work even if I married and had 6 kids! He proved right even though I subsequently gained 2 degrees in different disciplines. I didn't have any kids but when OH was subsequently out of work I was easily able to do agency nursing to supplement my full time job. At least our mortgage on our East london house continued to be paid.

We once tried to buy a tallboy but they would only accept credit cards which we didn't have at the time but subsequently obtained. It was the worst day's work we ever did.

Prior to that when we were living in a flat tied to my job and saving for a house deposit, we saved my salary which was paid monthly into our bank whilst OH at the time was paid weekly in cash. We lived on his pay and if we wanted to go out we packed lunch and used our bus passes to travel around the capital on the top deck of buses . We would see areas we were interested in moving to as well as have a cheap day out. In a year we'd saved the deposit on our first house and were managing well. It was only the credit card that started all the problem and got us into debt.


Fortunately we wanted to leave London and as my Dad had said, once we 'pulled up our tent pegs' we would, theoretically, make a killing if we moved back to my hometown. We eventually did this, paid off our mortgage and credit card debts and still had money in the bank.. It was a very hard lesson, it really can happen to anyone and we now find the old ways of only buying what you can afford makes for a much simpler life - and we sleep at night.

It seems very hard for parents today... trying to teach good, solid OS values to the younger generation. I feel sure that the examples of showing a younster what they're really paying when credit is offered are the way to go. However if you've never known the hardship earlier generations suffered HOW can you possibly understand? Surely it's the parenting that's at fault.

Has anyone seen the tv programme ' Young, Dumb and living off Mum? Incredible. It made me so angry I felt like banging their heads together - It, however only down to their parenting after all...