Preparedness for when

thriftwizard

GreyQueen wrote: »

Or people decide that the car will have to do for another year or two, or they learn how to do home repairs, or cook at home from basic ingredients or to grow their own veg, to make do and mend.

Do those things suddenly become forgotten when it suits TPTB to have us all switch back into hyperconsumerism mode? I doubt it! They may well find that The New Austerity has unintended consequences.

One thing they certainly haven't factored into their forecasts is that a number of people may find that make-do-&-mend & grow-your-own are actually fun; there's something empowering about tackling something you don't normally do & mastering it. And nothing from the supermarket can beat those first home-grown tomatoes, or sweetcorn straight off the stalk. The more people who find this out, the less dependent on the "largesse" of TPTB we are. I'm well aware of the mind-set which says firmly that doing such menial tasks is for underlings, not for Life's Achievers (which used to consist of anyone with "O" levels as opposed to GCEs) but it's probably time we got over it.

But it's fairly easy for us; we're all people who can at least access computers & have the nous & a bit of time to try to find out how to do stuff. Much harder for someone who can't afford a computer or fancy phone & doesn't have time to get to the library. One of our local churches has been running not only a food bank, but also cookery & budgeting classes. These are aimed at the young single mums on the estate, but earwigging conversations in the supermarket queues, they're needed just as much by the young couples who are just scraping by with huge mortgages, student loans to repay, 2 cars between them & 2 jobs apiece. They literally do not have the time to cook or mend; one of DS2's friends is staring disaster in the face thanks to an expensive car repair, and is having to negotiate a mortgage holiday with the bank in order to keep his car on the road, which his main job depends on.

With DS2 & TDiL still living under our roof (no sign of them ever being able to afford to move out if they actually want any kind of life) & knowing other parents in the same position, I'm beginning to think there's a huge social shift underway, and that multi-generation living may not be the temporary situation most of us think it is...

COOLTRIKERCHICK

I can remember my parents saying the best times they can remember was when Edward heath ( I think it was him) when prices never went up, everything stayed the same... so when you went to the shops things were the same price week in, week out.


if that happened today... what do you think our economy would do? I know there would be go growth, so no extra taxes from price increases, but do you think in the longer term it would even out, by people being able to budget better, not holding on to any surplus money they do have for future price increases, and have the confidence to start spending again???


hope that made sense..


when I was younger, and first married I bought new furniture etc, then the kids came along, and I haven't bought anything new, except TV's and fridges and freezers since, and that's only because I had a fridge from freecycle, and within hours of plugging it in, there was smoke billowing out of the back of it, so good job I was in the house, otherwise the house could have gone up in smoke...


The government thought we would carry on being a consumer nation... we have, but a lot of us buy secondhand.. which the government didn't think about,


I wouldn't be supprised if the government have thought about scrapping paper money, so we can only do any sort of money transactions/buying etc with our bank cards, so big brother can trace all our spending and sales of our belongings etc

jk0

COOLTRIKERCHICK wrote: »

I can remember my parents saying the best times they can remember was when Edward heath ( I think it was him) when prices never went up, everything stayed the same... so when you went to the shops things were the same price week in, week out.

It wasn't Ted Heath! He was one of the worst.

I think your parents might have been talking about Harold Macmillan. My late father told me that it was he that 'invented' inflation (money printing) as a way of reducing perceived taxes.

greenbee

Thriftwizard - I'm not sure that going back to multi-generational households would be a bad thing. My grandparents lived with us for a while, and it was lovely for us as kids - probably not so easy for my mum, but also easier for everyone when my grandmother died and grandfather had a stroke. A built in community and support network has to be a good thing, and it probably makes people a lot more tolerant and less selfish. As long as everyone can have a bit of space/an outlet for frustration/an ability to get away. And there is a clear understanding of what is/is not acceptable behaviour.

Having said that, I've lived on my own for rather a long time and I'm not sure how well I'd adapt to sharing again!

mardatha

Then the black market and barter would really come into it's own, I think. Like in wartime people who lived in the country and had hens, would swap eggs for things like soap and toothpaste. Or swap a brace of pheasant or a nice fat rabbit for some sugar, make jam with it, and swap the jam for something else.
The one thing we have in our favour is a working brain. The govt haven't got one between the lot of them! We're like a Resistance movement lol.

RAS

Re linen; I realised recently that the duvet cover on my bed is 40 years old - ish. The ish being that I bought a duvet in the sale when they first arrived in England and made my own cover from good quality sheeting. Later I bought another cover in a sale. When I moved on from a single student room to a double duvet, I unpicked both and made a slightly oversized double cover. It is still going strong long after the posh stuff given 20 years ago died threadbare.

COOLTRIKERCHICK

talking about braces of pheasants and rabbits,


we went to Hereford livestock market on Saturday, as there was a dressed poultry and produce auction, on the way there, there was a road kill hare/large rabbit, and we joked about stopping and picking it up, on the way back it had gone lol..


There were braces of pheasants in the auction, and they went for £2 a brace. the guy had the option, so bought the whole lot..


I am sure it was a prime minister in the 70's they were talking about.. but I was very young then, and might have confused their conversations with the conversations of my grand parents lol

Frugalsod

GreyQueen wrote: »

Or I buy a litre of shampoo with plenty of change from £1 which will last me 6-8 months. I discover by downbranding that the cheap stuff is no less effective than the expensive stuff. Do I then go back to the more-expensive brand when my personal economy picks up a bit? I don't think so, but it hasn't picked up, so that's still to be discovered.

They use it to actually lower the real inflation rate, they treat everyones dropping of premium to budget alternative as a reduction in inflation even as manufacturers shrink pack sizes for the same money. The problem is that when we little people cannot cut any further we simply do not buy. Then the stores have to offer stupid discounts to get us to buy and that is recorded as deflation. So in reality deflation is when the consumer is at the end of the road. I do not see any prospects for the working class or even the middle class to be able to cope eventually unless there is a change in policy. I suspect that once Christmas is out of the way the average person will be cutting back considerably to pay for Christmas and to get their budgets back under control.

The governments policy is to make us feel wealthier via the housing bubble they are creating in the hope that it will make us feel wealthier and so spend more. Problem is that only effects one segment of the economy and in reality most people will only spend more when they have more in their pockets.

As to VAT this is a massive con on most people. When they switched taxes away from income and collected it via spending it transferred a bigger burden to the lower incomes earners. The same for all the income tax cuts over the last thirty years. They really were unfunded and so now they want to cut spending when they really should be looking at cutting VAT and increasing income taxes, so transferring the burden back to the rich.

Karmacat

nuatha wrote: »

I've assumed my pension will fail - if I'm wrong, then its a bonus,(Both my state and previous employment pensions) the state pension from being pushed back until I'm unlikely to live long enough to collect it, the previous employment pension because it depends on the stock market system) I have some property that might yield a small income or some capital but largely expect to have to continue working to some extent to make ends meet, though I aim to be as self sufficient as possible.
Sorry that's not a particularly optimistic point of view.

No, but its useful, nuatha, thank you. Because of ill health, I think I have to downsize to a flat, so not much self sufficiency possible, though I'll try; and I think I can do online work - writing, copyediting, counselling - to help things along. I'm now at my original retirement age, but still another 6 years to go to get my State pension.

jk0 wrote: »

It wasn't Ted Heath! He was one of the worst.

Agreed! I was a student at polytechnic while Ted Heath was PM, and trying to get used to shopping for myself - I nearly cried when instant coffee went up by 20% overnight

thriftwizard

Agreed! I was a student at polytechnic while Ted Heath was PM, and trying to get used to shopping for myself - I nearly cried when instant coffee went up by 20% overnight

I remember going round the supermarket - which was tiny, by today's standards; they were a very new concept - and seeing the assistants rushing round with price guns, frantically overstamping previous prices, only to be told they'd gone up again before they'd finished that stack... it was scary.

It's worth thinking how we'd respond IF things became that daft again. I remember my mother, widowed with two young children still at home, worrying out loud whether she'd need to get a second job to make ends meet, or whether to leave her job & seek something full-time. But as our home went with her job, which was school-hours only, that really wasn't much of an option. In the end we tightened our belts & tried to use the tiny garden to grow veg (which was delicious) and the gardener helped us out with the odd rabbit (he bred them) or pigeon. I think we were probably a lot luckier than many, but there were probably others who never realised what some of us were up against.

And I refuse to believe that it just couldn't happen again... that's wishful thinking.