It's getting tough out there. Feeling the pinch?

tooldle

I'm planning on going early at 54. We've been working towards our target for some years now. My folks retired at state pension age as did their respective fathers (mothers didn't work as was the norm for the time). 
I too think some structure will be necessary. By the time i finish i'll have done 28 years of full time work in my professional role with a 3.5 month break for maternity leave. The routine of being at my desk for 7am ish will be hard to break. Although i love my job i often find myself asking why i'm bothering. I've seen restructure after restructure, and the old rejected ideas now coming back full circle as new ideas. I'm feeling tired and jaded and ready to go.

-taff

Cheesephetamine said:

Brambling said:In many cases they don't! Average rent prices here for three bedroom house is £1550...

I live in a decent sized two bedroom semidetached house In the south/east, 45 mins away from the city by train, with a HUGE garden and pay £850 for rent. Where are those prices at??? London??? 

I have a friend who was paying that or slightly more living in Watford, which is part of London I suppose, but millions live in London so that's thousands of children who can't buy where they live. Which means moving away from family and friends and losing a support network for cheaper housing.

London_1

tooldle said:

  The routine of being at my desk for 7am ish will be hard to break. Although i love my job I often find myself asking why i'm bothering. I've seen restructure after restructure, and the old rejected ideas now coming back full circle as new ideas. I'm feeling tired and jaded and ready to go.

I worked the last 22 years of my working life before retirement at getting up daily, weekends as well at 05.30 a.m. every day .Wnen I retired in 1995 it took me almost two years to stop automatically waking at the same time every day .even today in 2022 I still wake at 06.30 in the morning and I'm one of those early birds who when my eyes are open I'm up. No matter what time I go to bed I'm always up out of bed by 06.30 a.m. I wish I could lie in but I just find it very difficult  

Re the reductions , perhaps the big supermarkets are finding that folk just aren't buying the trolleyfuls they used to. I know last week when talking to the till assistant she said she had noticed that folk were being far more frugal in their shopping, and not impuse buying quite as much as they used to.
I know I stick fairly close to buying on need and not want, but then I've always been a fairly frugal shopper if possible. I'm similar to YorksLass , perhaps its a generational thing. 

JackieO xx

QueenJess

-taff said:

Cheesephetamine said:

Brambling said:In many cases they don't! Average rent prices here for three bedroom house is £1550...

I live in a decent sized two bedroom semidetached house In the south/east, 45 mins away from the city by train, with a HUGE garden and pay £850 for rent. Where are those prices at??? London??? 

I have a friend who was paying that or slightly more living in Watford, which is part of London I suppose, but millions live in London so that's thousands of children who can't buy where they live. Which means moving away from family and friends and losing a support network for cheaper housing.

I live in the south east (not in London) and a two double bedroom house with titchy garden is more than that a month in rent. More like £1,200+ a month.

Brambling

QueenJess said:

-taff said:

Cheesephetamine said:

Brambling said:In many cases they don't! Average rent prices here for three bedroom house is £1550...

I live in a decent sized two bedroom semidetached house In the south/east, 45 mins away from the city by train, with a HUGE garden and pay £850 for rent. Where are those prices at??? London??? 

I have a friend who was paying that or slightly more living in Watford, which is part of London I suppose, but millions live in London so that's thousands of children who can't buy where they live. Which means moving away from family and friends and losing a support network for cheaper housing.

I live in the south east (not in London) and a two double bedroom house with titchy garden is more than that a month in rent. More like £1,200+ a month.

Nope I  live in West Sussex not London but at only a 40 minute train journey to London Bridge it has always been desirable for commuters.  I know 2 bedroom flats with shared gardens are renting for over £1000 here.  Unfortunately we are a desirable small town to live in!!

.

Doom_and_Gloom

We live about 30~35 mins by train to London Bridge depending on the train.
1 bed rentals can't be found for less than £850 (I found a tiny studio for around that though) and indeed usually start at around £920~£950+ for a 1 bed, forget 2 beds.

Thankfully we moved into the area nearly 8 years ago and our rent is not that high for our 1 bed flat; we know our neighbours that used to live next to us paid nearly £300 more than us (over 1k a month for a one bed😱) and although it was done up a bit nicer, paint, new x, y and z, in my opinion the difference in rent was mental. They were getting charged simular to the new builds near us for their 1 beds all because of a few modifications and paint!

Buying here is unattainable for most of my generation, renting is horrifically expensive and trying to get a council or housing association place is very difficult. 

tooldle

West Sussex is hellishly expensive. My parents moved out of Portsmouth to live in the south western part of West Sussex which is fairly expensive. As you get further up the Victoria line, and the commute into London shortens the prices get even more bonkers. Around Chichester you'd be looking at roughly £1200 for a two bed place and the commute is around 90 mins to Victoria.

EssexHebridean

Cheesephetamine said:

Brambling said:

Rosa_Damascena said:

Average monthly rent is over £1k, how do people on the national minimum wage manage?!

In many cases they don't! Average rent prices here for three bedroom house is £1550 making it impossible to save to buy and social housing as scarce as hen's teeth.  TBH I've heard trying to buy here is almost impossible too with EA only arranging open houses and some asking for sealed bids within two hours of viewing and then giving you one chance to increase your bid even if you are the highest bidder

I've worked from home since March 2020 additional household bills aren't covered by what I'm saving on petrol it's just as well I have a supply of thick woolies!  Unfortunately as a single person household some bills are always going to be the same as multiple households.

I live in a decent sized two bedroom semidetached house In the south/east, 45 mins away from the city by train, with a HUGE garden and pay £850 for rent. Where are those prices at??? London??? 

Could be an awful lot of places - the area I work in is outskirts of London and would be well above that level for a 3 bed house. I just did a Zoopla search for similar sort of properties in oxford - that indicates that the lowest you're likely to find is around £1400 and most are in the £1700 - £1800 range as a minimum, Chelmsford is slightly lower than Brambling remarked on, but once you start looking down in places like Kent you're edging nearer to £2k a month. Even in the area I live in which is generally on the low side of the property market price wise, you're not going to get a house of any description for below £1k a month - not a chance!

@OrkneyStar I believe the Orkney co-ops are on the "special system" the same as the Hebrides ones are - this means they have differing reductions policies to the mainland stores as they are expected to price items to sell almost at all costs, rather than the mainland stores not dropping below a certain level. This system can sometimes meet with issues when someone new starts looking after the ordering side - some years ago with a new person at the helm at the co-op head office the order from the Barra store for Turkeys ahead of Christmas flagged up as being incorrect - it's a little teeny tiny store, smaller than most areas "convenience" type model, so when the order for something like 100+ turkeys was seen, the assumption was that it was incorrect and someone had mistyped....thankfully the alteration down to something like 10% of the originally requested amount was picked up on ahead of the vehicle being loaded at the warehouse - it would have caused chaos otherwise and left the majority of the islanders with no christmas dinner! 

thriftwizard

My DDiL spotted a tiny 2-bed house with a little "yard" (not big enough to call a garden) round the corner from them & thought it might do for DD1 & boyfriend, so she looked it up. They could possibly just afford £850 pcm whilst he's still training,  at uni 2 days a week & working the other 3. But it was £1500... and we're 2 hours away from London, on the south coast, but a good mile from the actual sea. TBH that's fairly typical round here; even a 1-bed flat will be around £1000. Silly money...😢

EssexHebridean

I just looked out of interest at the area we live - £850 a month will "just" get you a one bed flat now - and not a ground floor one with any sort of outside space either. We're 19 miles out of London so theoretically "close" to it, but on one of the most expensive rail lines for commuting - put it this way, the whole reason MrEH has a car is that it was cheaper to buy a second car for him allowing him to drive part way then hop on the tube for the remaining commute distance than it was to continuing paying the train fares for the full journey. The £2000 spend on his original car paid for itself in savings inside the first 18 months...! If he was to buy a monthly ticket again now it would be over £500, and we'd still have the cost of MY travel on top which realistically would be done by car, still.  Currently we car share 4 days a week - and use a bit under a gallon of diesel a day - fuel cost is probably in the region of £6 a day currently. Then I cycle from where we park to my office, and MrEH walks to the tube and uses the Central Line the rest of the way in - he tops up his Oyster a couple of times a month, £50 a time.