Old Finances (back in the day)

culpepper

My mother had a strategy for getting on buses with the pushchair. She would climb on ,hauling the thing behind her and hand the toddler to the conductor while she collapsed it and put it in the luggage space. This was because the conductor in those days would stand and watch the struggle without lifting a finger to help.
I got my first full time wages in 1978 and they were £20,£8 of which was given to mum,£8 was spent on fares to work and the other was mine. However previously I had worked a paper round which was £2.20 a week and so even £4 to myself seemed like a fortune in riches. Friends at work started to give me a lift in and I would give them £1 for petrol every week (about the cost of a gallon)so then I put the other £7 aside to save for a bicycle. The trip was only 6 miles each way but it was London and the buses took ages to go that distance.
We got two pay raises a year as juniors,one Annual rise that I think was negotiated by the Union and the other was a birthday rise until you reached 21.
One thing that was valuable about having almost no money back then was the value that you place on things after you had worked so long and saved so hard to obtain them. I think that has got lost for some people with todays credit facilities ,as they see it as easy come,easy go.

salome

I was a hairdresser apprentice in 1974. My first wage packet was £6. When I left due to bad morning, that went on all day, sickness, 3yrs later, my wages had risen to £18 a week. My employer was naughty as well. He fast tracked his apprentices, so had us as improver stylists within 18mths. By the time I left, I had a full clientel still paid apprentice wages though. lol.

x

onesixfive

30 Years ago...we'd just got married (it's our 30th Anniversay later this year).
We set up in the 2up 2down which we still live in. (Its now paid for,and we've since bought mum n dad's house) - but the 10 grand mortgage we took out when we set up worried me sick. We had to find a £1,000 deposit - there was no such thing as 100% + mortgages. It was based on my husbands wage alone.
It certainly cramped our style when we were courting - not going out - stopping in, Offering our services for paid babysitting!
We both had reasonable jobs, (although my husband didnt learn to drive for another 5 years - we couldnt afford the lessons or the car), so we went everywhere on foot or by bus.
Although we bought the house we couldnt afford much furniture - we bought a posh new G Plan suite "on the weekly" in the run up to the wedding, and the store kept it for us till it was paid for, and until the decorating was finished after we'd had to pay for some re-wiring. I made some curtains from some crushed velvet - yuk - on mum's old sewing machine.
Mum n Dad gave us my old brown 3 piece bedroom suite for our bedroom & I painted it up white. We bought a cheap bed (that the leg dropped off! & propped it on old books), and we had a new dining room suite instead of a honeymoon. We had nothing in the front room only a bit of 2nd hand furniture off relatives. I had a 2nd hand twin tub washer, some old kitchen units, we'd salvaged from a relative and a 2nd hand cooker.
We had a 2nd hand telly (no video or sky), our old record player - brought from the bedroom at home.
Meals were cheap but home cooked - I had no freezer - only the top of the fridge - First time I asked for mince at the butchers I asked for 2lb - they piled it on the scales, saw my look of horror and realised I'd asked for too much - he asked how much I wanted - I said "a handful" - thereafter it was a standing joke with the butcher "she's here for a handful of mince" - you dont get that at the supermarkets!
Our first holiday abroad was 18 months after the wedding with some bonus money. A real treat (Ibiza - Dexys Midnight Runners C'mon Eileen 24/7!)
5 years down the line, & after a payrise each, we borrowed a further 5 grand on our mortgage & had central heating & a fitted kitchen installed. That was REAL luxury!
We were no different to any of our mates - everyone did the same. This was the basic standard of living in "the north" late 70's early 80's.

EstherH

I've read some more now. Still got pages to go though. I keep reading the last pages and trying to catch up on the others.

I started work in 1978, and I earned £20 a week. I thought I was rich because my mum only wanted £5 and my friends who were earning £18 a week had to give their mums £6.
I opened a building society account to put £1 a week in but it was a bit hit and miss. It was wonderful to go to Chelsea Girl and buy clothes each week.
However getting married in 1982 meant I had to save and cut back.
I remember my mum saying that she didn't want an automatic washing machine as they took an hour to do one load. She did eventually get one but I don't know which year it would be. It was definitely well before I got married though.
We had a small fridge freezer, mainly fridge with one shelf freezer but bigger than the ice box in a fridge. I do remember buying birds eye stew and dumplings, boil in the bag ones. They were probably quite expensive though and we would eat a four pack between the two of us as there wasn't much in them. I think we bought the fridge freezer second hand off someone we knew although they could have given it to us I can't remember. The cooker for the first year was my mums old one and so was our three piece suite. The curtains were left by the previous owners and were brown striped. The carpet in the main room was orange/brown swirls I think, and also left by the previous owners. We couldn't afford to replace it. We didn't have a hall stair and landing carpet for a while until we had saved up and then it was only a cheap one. We had a new bed and bedroom suite and a new carpet in the bedroom which we paid £2.99 a square yard for. My husband and his father re decorated before we moved in when we got married.
I'll post more as I remember. I'm loving this thread.

ALIBOBSY

Justamum wrote: »

I remember in Guides we were inspected every week and had to have in our pocket a piece of string(?!) and a 2p piece for the phone!

Didn't they check your fingernails if I remeber rightly lol.

Even in the late 70's early 80's alot of the badges revolved around household chores lol.

ali x

Justamum

ALIBOBSY wrote: »

Didn't they check your fingernails if I remeber rightly lol.

Even in the late 70's early 80's alot of the badges revolved around household chores lol.

ali x

I don't remember the fingernails being checked, but you might be right. I didn't do any badges as I wasn't in long enough. We moved to the Isle of Man when I was 12 and the Guides here was, quite frankly, rubbish compared to the one I went to in Cheadle Hulme. All they seemed to do every week was play games, and there were a couple of the girls who were real b*tches. I was bored so left.

Before I joined the Guides my sister and I were in something called Junos. A similar thing to Guides.

THIRZAH

mardatha wrote: »

Oh god I loved sweetie tobacco!

So did I and also the coconut strips that were covered with pink or white sugar.

I bought some of the tobacco ( I think it was called something else ) from an old fashioned sweet shop a few years ago and DDs didn't like it at all

snookey

Hi Id like to join in so here goes. I moved out in 1988 aged 18 to work as a live in carer stayed six months. Got a flat with my mate which had warped floor boards. It even had a 1940s cooker. 1989 got my first council flat costing 15.00 a week. Had an old sofa and chairs bought twin beds from my mother ,brother sold me his fridge freezer which I had up until a couple of years ago. Had a washing machine that was a top loader. Had to save for my first carpet in the livingroom .
My wages were really low at the time but I still managed to go clubbing a few times a week. I remember having to live on next to nothing as I got into bother with the council tax and the rent. Taught me a lesson on paying my bills.
When I had my first child we were still living in the flat and by then my wages combined with my partners meant we were well off until we bought our present house for 38,000. From there on in its been up and down.

mopsy57

Fascinating read and I can't resist joining in! I remember the power cuts in the 70s, and I was a student in Newcastle from 1976 where four of us in a flat contributed £5 each a week for food and it had to last. A treat was 20p worth of chips on the way home. We were fortunate to live in a new Uni flat which had gas and electric included in the rent (but it did cost more than other places) so we missed out on the experience of burst pipes and ice in the loo! We usually walked places, and a car was a rarity in the student world. We used payphones, but mostly wrote letters (yes, letters!!) home. I was fortunate to have a grant and no tuition fees then, but was still frugal with money. How do today's students run up such huge overdrafts even with jobs? Happy to say my student son chooses to live within his means, which do not include regular handouts from me - a good lesson to learn for life. In 1981 I was paying £60 a week rent not including bills, and in 1982 managed to buy a house with an enormous £18,500 mortgage - it did seem a fortune then. No credit card debt- I have always believed in saving first. So many of today's "essentials" perhaps really aren't. People still think I am odd as I choose not to have TV, but there are many other things I would rather be doing, though I admit to being a radio addict and I do watch iplayer occasionally!

recovering_spendaholic

I was born in the early 60's and remember that we had no central heating, or any heating at all upstairs and a coal fire in the living room was the only heat in the whole house, plus it had a damper in which would heat the water. In the mornings in the very cold winter there would be ice on the INSIDE of the windows and the nets would be stuck to it!

We had a telly with a slot on the back which you put two shillings into and the man came and emptied it every so often. My Mum put 2 shillings in every day, even though she didn't need to so that when the man came to empty it we always got loads of rebate - it was her way of saving, and meant that my Dad couldn't get at it! We didn't get a colour TV until the late 70's and there was such excitement when we did get one!

Until I was about 12 my Mum used a washing machine with a mangle on top of it and I used to love helping to mangle the washing with her. Then she got a twin tub and only moved onto an automatic in about 1992 and she always used to say that it didn't wash the way the twin tub did.

I went to an all girls secondary school and it had a large house in the grounds called the housecraft house. We would go there for housecraft lessons and also needlework and cookery. We learned how to make beds, clean and dust, lay the table, how to work out a seating plan if you were having guests (!), how to polish stuff and also how to change a lightbulb and do washing.
We also learned how to change a nappy, bath a baby, make basic clothes, knit and crochet, and do a budget for a house - electricity, gas, food etc. - it is funny to think that there would be an outcry today if schools tried to do this!

In cookery we learned how to plan meals and how to cook basic stuff and also some more adventurous stuff - I still have the Stork margarine and BeRo cookbooks which we were given in cookery class!

I remember that I used to sew my tights if they had runs in them and I also used to sew leather patches on the sleeves of my school jumper and blazer when they wore thin. Until I was about 14 my Navy school coat was my "good" coat too, and my school blazer was my "good" coat for the summer. We weren't especially poor - I seem to remember most of my friends doing this too. I wore my navy sixth form duffle coat until I was about 30 (although by this time I did have others lol!).