Working households - Living costs and lifestyles - what is essential?

savingwannabe

QUESTION 5Being a homeowner is so important to me. It means that I wont have to worry about housing when I am retired. If my house is paid for I can leave the world of work and only pay rates rather than paying for rent.

QUESTION 3
Does credit help or hinder you (or family/friends) to improve your standard of living?....how?
In some ways it helps you have access to the banks money for paying bills for a month and I always pay it back. But after so long you can forget that it isn't real money and it does encourage you to spend more. I have only recently realised that my spare income is pretty much only £200 but it felt like much more as I used to use my credit card to top up. Even though I always paid it off I felt much wealthier than I actually was. V sobering.

savingwannabe

QUESTION ONE

Union membership I feel is an essential in my job.

Mrs_Ryan

Question 1)
The two real essential things that I could not do without are my phone bill and Internet. I am a fellow MA student but being chronically ill I have to do a lot of work from home. For this I need the Internet. My phone is a massive priority too as we have no landline and I need it to a) call for help in an emergency and b)to be contacted on as my dad is very unwell.
Question 2)
For just about everything. Mainly for uni- I do my research work remotely and upload it to OneDrive so I can work from anywhere, home, uni or wherever I happen to be.
but also keeping connected, watching TV (our TV is old and the sound is bad on it- I am hard of hearing so it is easier for me to watch TV on my iPad where the sound is very good) I do my grocery shopping online as being disabled it is difficult to do it in person.
I own my phone, laptop and iPad outright- laptop and iPad were gifts and iPad is WiFi only but I can connect it to my iPhone data. I do pay monthly and it is expensive but I do use everything that it comes with. This can be a drain on my budget.
I do not feel increased pressure I would say- I am lucky that I have my gadgets but I did my undergrad distance learning and I was given them as I needed them. I do not online shop for clothes much but things like booking hotels and train tickets it is useful for- i was just able to save myself twenty two pounds on a return ticket home for my nieces 18th birthday party in a couple of weeks by being able to split tickets and match up times etc. I also saved fifteen pounds on a hotel for my partner and I by booking in advance. It is useful for saving money if you know where to look.
Question 3
Being a student credit is a necessary evil. I owe exactly the same on my overdraft and credit card, both a small amount. My partner is, like me always in his overdraft but he has a big overdraft with a lot of fees (mine is interest free) our kitchen is on finance as is the car so I would definitely say without credit we would be in a bit of a mess
Question 4
I would not necessarily say it is that important as things are so different now.
Question 5
To me personally not at all. My family have always lived in council properties but OH (who is an infernal snob) looks down on people who do not own their own property. I have never had any interest in it personally as when things go wrong it can be expensive as we have discovered!
Good luck OP!

Sapphire

stingey wrote: »

Maybe years ago it would be important, jobs were more secure. Today it's a very risky investment, 30 years is a long time for something not to go wrong. I also think attitudes will change, we seem to be the only European country where being a homeowner is a must. Renting properties are more common.

It's interesting what you say (and this is also partly in response to the OP's last question). Until relatively recent times (before the Second World War), the vast majority of people in London (and probably other British cities) rented, and often several families would live in one house, in what would today be considered very cramped conditions of real poverty (several to a room, no hot water, no central heating, outside toilets, often lack of work and so on). That continued into the fifties and sixties, though it diminished. Until then, owning property was generally the preserve of a very wealthy minority.

Possibly, the property obsession had its roots in the period after the war, when lots of new houses (not flats) were built outside London to house many of those who had been bombed out of the city (which did incur massive destruction). Then, everyone aspired to own their own house, with its immaculate garden and so forth.

I think that the property mania really took off, however, in the nineties. There were numerous property shows on TV that encouraged people to decorate their homes in a certain generic way, often for resale purposes. There were also programmes discussing how to go about BTL. Curiously, this was also the period when so many British companies, many of them in existence for a century or more, were sold off to huge corporations; this certainly happened in publishing within a short period. It seemed to occur almost by design, as if it was decided that the country's 'wealth' should focus around property, not made goods, as had been the case for centuries ('Made in Britain' used to be a sign of quality). People appeared to be sold a 'dream', and this has continued to this day, still via advertising on TV and now also on the Internet, with credit (AKA debt) being extended for all sorts of popularised, generally imported gimcracks that are certainly not necessary for decent living.

I suppose this is how the capitalist system is able to continue, but am not sure whether living off 'credit' (AKA debt), as so many people do, is sustainable in the long run.

More food for thought.

Sapphire

Another idea to continue the thoughts above: perhaps the British workforce simply became too expensive to compete with countries where labour is much, much cheaper, and where the populations are very strictly controlled, 'compliant', and won't make waves about pay and conditions? There was a time, in the seventies in particular, when strikes massively disrupted the economy and people's lives in Britain. In the seventies, also, the standards of some types of goods manufactured in Britain may have deteriorated somewhat (probably connected to the last points): one hears stories of car doors falling off new car bodies and such like. The actions taken, as described in the last post, may have been partly as a reaction to such events.

But I bought two or three handbags made in the forties and fifties, in Britain, by named British companies. The standard of workmanship is astonishing, and far superior to the branded new imported handbags now selling for hundreds or thousands of pounds (but probably made very cheaply in workshops that do not pay the workers very much, by our standards). And I remember my aunt used to fly in from wherever she was working (Africa, Australia and so on), and specifically go to M&S to buy work suits (made in factories in Britain) because they were of such good quality.

Nebulous2

RR4353 wrote: »

QUESTION 6
Is there anything that I have not asked about or that has not been brought up so far that you feel is particularly important/of concern in relation to living costs in the UK today, either on a personal level or more widely?
Thanks again

An awful lot of people go with the flow and make assumptions about what is and isn't possible. When in fact a lot of 'needs' are lifestyle choices. I've twice changed direction careerwise and taken a big drop in income. The first time we had two cars, two foreign holidays a year and spent a lot on food. We went to one car, holidayed at home and cut back on food. It was much easier than we expected it to be and we didn't feel deprived.



Equally my wife talked to a lot of women who were on maternity leave and didn't really want to go back to work, but felt they had no choice. They had no choice while paying the big house, both cars and holidays. Not working for a few years or going part-time would be entirely possible if they made different choices elsewhere. We've bought into the consumer lifestyle and see a need for a lot of things. Many of those are 'wants' and not needs. Going without them can be quite liberating, as it allows an escape from the hamster wheel.

RR4353

Thanks so much again everyone for your contributions, they're very useful
Unfortunately I have to have a cut-off point for my research so I'm going to make that here but I'll leave the post open for now and will return in due course to post a short a summary of my findings.