Preparedness for when

moneyistooshorttomention

I've long thought that the future does not look promising, to say the least, for people exactly like myself but a generation or two younger.

In my generation - it was all I could do, one way and another, to manage to buy a house and to hold onto an office job with standard office hours until retirement (ie because of it becoming outdated).

If I were a member of a younger generation, then I would tend to see my choice as being between scratching for whatever living I could get (involving a lot of NMW jobs/zero hours contracts/antisocial hours/etc/etc) and never ever owning a place of my own regardless of my own "personal" circumstances on the hand OR "going back to the land" with a group of like-minded people and getting together whatever more "unconventional" form of accommodation I could to own the roof over my head (be it yurt, caravan or whatever) and trying to earn my living by growing food/making things and...errrm...yes...being subsidised by the State to whatever extent I needed.

Put like that - ie as Hobsons Choice - and I wouldn't be charmed by either alternative but would probably pick the "back to the land" option.

I do think its very much the "people in the middle" (ie who are used to the idea of having skilled and/or office type jobs) - rather than unskilled or professional jobs - that are in the most difficult situation these days.

I would say that much of the reason for all the "extra" people going to University these days is from ones who are used to the idea of having a "job in the middle" and can see that those types of job are much more difficult to get one way and another (and, if you can get one, then even a standard office job might well involve antisocial hours/targets/etc these days) and sit down and think "Well - it doesn't seem to be possible to get a Job In The Middle" and hence decide on professional jobs.

thriftwizard

The choice many of our younger people are thinking of is further afield - not Oz or NZ or the oilfields of Alberta (where a year or two ago, they were taking virtually anyone who applied; lack of relevant qualifications just meant it'd take longer) but the wilds of Eastern & far Western Europe, where the locals take one look at the actual drudgery involved in the back-to-the-land thing and run a mile! It's still possible to pick up a dilapidated house with a few acres and a well for under £20K in parts of, say, Portugal, but it may well be 10 miles from the nearest shop that sells screws, for example, as my neighbour (who bought herself a 5-acre quinta with her redundancy money, which she's trying to turn into a holistic retreat) has found at the cost of her gearbox! And just as many miles in the opposite direction to one that sells nails...

So on the one hand we have a flood of well-qualified & motivated immigrants coming in, and on the other, we have a bunch of healthy, fit, intelligent and motivated youngsters moving out to become a generation of "well-educated" peasant farmers in the far-flung reaches of Europe... I wonder if we will regret losing them one day, or whether they're just the restless types who would have gone off to administer the Empire back in the olden days?

moneyistooshorttomention

..and the thought of doing something "holistic" for a living (eg running a holistic retreat) isn't so easy either....as everyone and their dog is also thinking along similar lines and the amount of competition is pretty high accordingly.

I recall that, back before I retired, I wondered at one point about getting myself trained and set-up as an alternative therapist - but the biggest snag to that was that so many other people were also thinking along the same lines and there IS only so much demand for this and I could soon see the income to be earned from it was starting to go down pretty rapidly (as everyone undercut everyone else and it went into a vicious circle spiralling downwards - so it would have proven difficult to earn a reasonable income from it, even if fully "booked" by customers).

Many people are trying so hard to avoid "scraping for a living" that the amount of competition in anything more "comfortable-looking" is absolutely huge from what I can see.

[Deleted User]

I think we're coming to a point in the world where we 'll all have to start to 'do' for ourselves and if my girls were still going through thier education I'd really encourage them to think outside the 'advanced education/university' box and follow any natural talents they have to see if they had a future in any of the practical fields rather than relying on expensive academic qualifications for a living. I was talking to a friend on the bus home yesterday and her eldest son has a degree but not being able to find work in his field (he's middle 50s) some 30 years ago he found his way to leatherwork and is now the only 'Bespoke Saddle maker' in this part of the world. He and his wife have a smallholding too and are living a very self sufficient life in perfect contentment. I'm not sure that spending all those thousands of pounds a year for a degree is worth it these days anyway, my nephew graduated last summer and has just this summer picked up 3 weeks temporary work, £27,000 for that doesn't seem a very good return for his cash!!!

Frugalsod

mardatha wrote: »

Wondering who is the happier generation... the current ones as described by GQ, lying in bed all day and wandering the streets at night and all the time playing on their phones - or the previous ones who might have got hellish low pay and poor working conditions but who were all in paid work from the age of 14 up, keeping busy and happy to go on excursion trains on bank holidays for a day at the seaside.
Up here historically everybody worked in the mills and there were a LOT of mills, unbelievable numbers of them.Where I grew up it was the pits, again many of them. In both areas there were also the farms, with hundreds of people employed and housed and often fed too.
All those jobs gone and what have we got in its place?

Call centres.

daz378

it may feel as if immigrants are putting pressure on infra structure, (hearing foreign voices while waiting in the doctors) but are they visible target to obscure underspending.?... the nhs and our pensions need their input. so ether we are all scratching for zero hour contracts or doing the work of 3 people in a salaried position.... im in work later till nearly 10pm..... but tomorrow i have a living with diabeties seminar lasts all day ... but free of charge by diabetes uk which should be useful.....you all take care

thriftwizard

When it comes down to it, virtually all our ancestors were immigrants, whether 20 years ago or 2,000. I suspect some of them were sitting round here muttering, "Bl**dy Belgae, who do they think they are, coming over here with their ploughs, nicking all our tin..." before being over-run with Romans building "efficient" roads, multi-story forae & centrally-heated villas.

Perplexed_Pineapple

All very depressing but we (as a nation) have been through bad times before and life carries on.

Frugalsod wrote: »

..........The problem is that those jobs will all be part time and minimum wage with everyone qualifying for in work benefits as well. So the welfare savings would be minimal. In the US and Japan their has been no increase in full time employees but all in part timers. I cannot see us being able to avoid that here. So if you do eliminate all the unemployed by getting them jobs the governments finances will be no better off. They will still have to pay lots of in work benefits even though they were working as much as possible.

Does anyone remember those "Tomorrow's World" type programmes from the 70s where there was much enthusiasm for the way in which automation would free up lots of leisure time for ordinary workers, and what a great thing this would be? In a sense it is good, because fewer working hours create more productivity. The problem is the uneven distribution of the spoils - the people who control the means of production take a much bigger slice of the pie than their depleted workforce. On the other hand this slice is redistributed by our progressive tax system - it isn't perfect, but the top 1% of earners pay something like 30% of income tax. It's a funny old world....

[Deleted User]

Progress has a BIG price and so does automation. I wonder if we're really better off? We are undoubtedly healthier because of the NHS but now that is a Frankenstein child of its own creation and has gone way way beyond keeping us healthy and fit for work. Getting rid of class boundaries has been a partial success but has meant there are definitely far fewer people employed in 'service' positions as they are seen as menial and demeaning but were a way of obtaining a pension and being looked after in your old age by your employer if you were a valued employee. Farming? again now we have rid ourselves of heavy horses and hedgerows and have the huge machineries available virtually all the workforce employed on the land including the horsemen are not needed. Industry? automation means fewer and fewer actual people needed to run assembly/packing lines and the need to continually increase profits means that ingredients and compomnents are reduced, changed, bought in as cheap as possible. Perhaps what we actually have is just too many people? surplus to needs as it were. Isn't progress a dubious blessing?

Frugalsod

thriftwizard wrote: »

When it comes down to it, virtually all our ancestors were immigrants, whether 20 years ago or 2,000. I suspect some of them were sitting round here muttering, "Bl**dy Belgae, who do they think they are, coming over here with their ploughs, nicking all our tin..." before being over-run with Romans building "efficient" roads, multi-story forae & centrally-heated villas.

And what have Romans ever done for us? :rotfl: