Government mishandling of money

Luckygirl3

I don't think it is necessarily about having life easier but about having vastly different expectations which include eating out, foreign holidays etc.

My contention isn’t about ‘having life easier’. It’s about all the advantages we had from birth until Thatcher really got going with her demolition of ‘the state’. As Wyllow3 has outlined in her excellent post earlier.Advantages which are no longer available.

Another advantage many of us who were able to buy houses (and far more of us were able to do that than the current generation of aspirants to house ownership) is that our houses, in many areas of the country, have rocketed in value over the years without ant particular effort on our part.

Luckygirl3

I don't think it is necessarily about having life easier but about having vastly different expectations which include eating out, foreign holidays etc.

Now that is a relevant point. but huge swathes of our population never had those chances and dont expect them. But its waved in front of their noses. I cant afford those things but it doesnt bother me - why, have people round to eat. the UK has great holidays.

I do blame a "more more more culture" for that.

Do all people expect those things? I doubt it, but dont know, it would make an interesting survey.

Politicians waste money.y and make poor decisions because it is not their money, it is someone else’s ( taxpayers) The brutal truth is it is much easier to spend and ‘justify’ money you have taken from someone else, they just don’t give a rat’s 🐀. Not any political party but the whole rotten lot of them.

DaisyAnneReturns

Allira

MaizieD

QED

No, not QED at all.

Your life may have been comfortably middle-class with all the advantages that brought but it was certainly not the same for everyone.

Are you really suggesting your life has had exactly the same and no more than, the opportunities your parents had Allira?

Have all the people you grew up with missed out on a National Health Service, extended free education, and the growth of council housing and home ownership. I wonder how you missed these things.

Are you really suggesting your life has had exactly the same and no more than, the opportunities your parents had Allira?

That was not the premise, though, was it.

The point was that under 50s have it so much worse than their parents, who may well be in their 80s and I disagreed.

Of course, the experiences of those Gransnetters in the inbetween age bracket of, say 55 to 70, may be quite different from those of 80+ and everyone's experiences of life are different too.

To pigeon hole people and assume what their lifestyles were and are like according to their age group is just plain wrong.

nanna8

Politicians waste money.y and make poor decisions because it is not their money, it is someone else’s ( taxpayers) The brutal truth is it is much easier to spend and ‘justify’ money you have taken from someone else, they just don’t give a rat’s 🐀. Not any political party but the whole rotten lot of them.

If you think that the money is the taxpayers money would you like to tell us where the money they use to pay their taxes originates?

I don't mean 'where they earn it' (or steal it ) I mean what is the source of their money, where does it start off?

MaizieD

Luckygirl3

I don't think it is necessarily about having life easier but about having vastly different expectations which include eating out, foreign holidays etc.

My contention isn’t about ‘having life easier’. It’s about all the advantages we had from birth until Thatcher really got going with her demolition of ‘the state’. As Wyllow3 has outlined in her excellent post earlier.Advantages which are no longer available.

Another advantage many of us who were able to buy houses (and far more of us were able to do that than the current generation of aspirants to house ownership) is that our houses, in many areas of the country, have rocketed in value over the years without ant particular effort on our part.

Another advantage many of us who were able to buy houses (and far more of us were able to do that than the current generation of aspirants to house ownership) is that our houses, in many areas of the country, have rocketed in value over the years without ant particular effort on our part

If so, that should mean, all being well, that our under 50 or 50 something children should be able to inherit a sum of money to help cushion their old age and help their own children.

Most of us did not inherit anything from our own parents, or, if we did, it may have been enough to take our children on holiday for the first time.

Allira

^Inheritance tax on farmers - and thereby hitting many of the wrong people again. (I don't know if anyone saw that harrowing story on Countryfile last night? Devastating)^

I saw that and wept, escaped.

Fair enough charging extremely wealthy landowners who buy IP farms to avoid IHT but a family farm, with all the equipment, livestock, land (some of which is probably being rewilded for ecological reasons) can be worth in excess of £1 million and, if we want future generations of farmers to continue feeding the nation, Ms Reeves needs a rethink and fast.

I agree here.

DaisyAnneReturns

M0nica

There is a certain arrogance in those over 50 when they look back and decide that everything that has been gained for them during their life time, has been down to them, and only them.

We obviously mix with different people over 50 because I have never heard anyone over 50 talk like this, most are very aware of the advantages they had and help from the state that our grandchildren do not receive.

It's often on here Monica. The "I've worked hard all my life" brigade, and the "if they didn't spend all their money on ..." commentators.

Yes, but those people have always existed, it has got nothing to do with the actual circumstances. I have just been reading a novel published in 1860 and there is an older person making just the same complaints about the younger generation then.

People like that are also more likely to be complainers in public. Like that previous generation of writers of letters of complaint to newspapers signed 'Disgusted, Tonbridge Wells'. Now they post on Gransnet and on other social media. But they are not representative of a generation as a whole, just a vociferous subset.

To pigeon hole people and assume what their lifestyles were and are like according to their age group is just plain wrong.

Who is assuming anything about lifestyles?

If you're accusing me of doing that I suggest that you read Wyllow's long post and my attempt at clarifying what I was talking about. I am most emphatically NOT talking about lifestyles.

MaizieD

^To pigeon hole people and assume what their lifestyles were and are like according to their age group is just plain wrong.^

Who is assuming anything about lifestyles?

If you're accusing me of doing that I suggest that you read Wyllow's long post and my attempt at clarifying what I was talking about. I am most emphatically NOT talking about lifestyles.

to quote from Wyllow's post:

In the 1970's you had the choice of jobs, whatever level of society you lived in. There were proper apprenticships.

We ARE the lucky generation - and grumble like mad

That proves my point.
You and Wyllow are a different generation.

Yes, you were luckier, especially young women.

DaisyAnneReturns

There is a certain arrogance in those over 50 when they look back and decide that everything that has been gained for them during their life time, has been down to them, and only them.

Prior to the war capitalism ruled. It didn't matter how hard you worked, the majority earned little more than it took to keep them fed, housed, and if they were lucky, buried at the end of it all. Prior to WWII, especially in Britain, renting was common across all social classes. Many middle and even some upper-middle class families rented private homes, especially in urban areas. Around 80-85% of the working class rented their homes. About 30-40% of middle-class households also rented. Renting was often through private landlords rather than municipal housing, which was less common before the expansion of council housing after WWII. It seems all the pictures we had of slums have disappeared from the minds of the "we did it ourselves" crew.

So pre WWII a large proportion of the population lived in substandard, overcrowded, privately rented housing. We hav been returning to this. The interwar period saw some council housing initiatives, but these were limited.

After the war the government launched a massive public housing program, known as council housing or municipal housing. The Housing Act of 1949 (also called the "Steel Act") aimed to provide affordable homes, with a target of constructing hundreds of thousands of new houses annually. The most iconic development was the construction of new towns (e.g., Stevenage, Harlow) to decongest cities.

By the 1960s, over 30% of the population lived in council housing, a dramatic increase from pre-war levels. The focus was on replacing slum housing, reducing overcrowding, and improving living standards.

Pre war education was less accessible, with significant disparities based on class and region. The 1918 Education Act had begun expanding compulsory schooling but gaps remained. Post war the Education Act of 1944 (also known as the Butler Act) significantly reformed education. It raised the school leaving age from 14 to 15 (later increased further), introduced free secondary education for all children, established a tripartite system: grammar schools, secondary moderns, and technical schools.

Post war the National Health Service (NHS) was established in 1948, providing free healthcare to all. The welfare state was expanded to include social security, unemployment benefits, and pension schemes. The aim was to reduce poverty, improve health, and promote social mobility.

All these gave the over 50s better opportunities yhan had been previously available.. All these areas have been slowly receeding since circa 1970. Sometimes this has been deliberate, sometimes accidental but those under 50 simply haven't had the same support or massive changes to their potential lives that those over 50 had.

I don’t entirely agree.

I’m 67, I bought my first property when I was 25, with saved money, a small one bed flat. I had two jobs to pay my mortgage, no car, no foreign holidays and little luxuries.

I sold at a very modest profit and bought a terraced house, where I still live, mortgage interest rates were 17% and at one point, for several years, I was in negative equity.

I worked all the way through raising four children and it was just as hard, in its own way, as it is now.

Between us we have five adult children, two own their own homes (mortgaged) two have deposits, saved by living at home, and will be moving out next year. Number 5 is a musician…. 🤷🏻‍♀️🤷🏻‍♀️🤷🏻‍♀️

Allira

MaizieD

To pigeon hole people and assume what their lifestyles were and are like according to their age group is just plain wrong.

Who is assuming anything about lifestyles?

If you're accusing me of doing that I suggest that you read Wyllow's long post and my attempt at clarifying what I was talking about. I am most emphatically NOT talking about lifestyles.

to quote from Wyllow's post:

In the 1970's you had the choice of jobs, whatever level of society you lived in. There were proper apprenticships.

We ARE the lucky generation - and grumble like mad

That proves my point.
You and Wyllow are a different generation.

Yes, you were luckier, especially young women.

I don't know about the 1970s even actually. I came out of school in 1971 personally - having finished a secretarial course. I didn't have the qualifications for a career - so it had to be a "job" and that was it then in my case (ie secretarial job - rather than a career).

The easy availability of jobs didn't last long into the 1970s - if the type of job I did is anything to go by. I walked straight into the first job I asked for (ie a shorthand-typist one) and thought nothing of doing so in 1971. But just a year or two out from that and then coming back into mainstream work in the mid-1970s again and there was "competition" to factor into it. By the end of the 1970s I was sometimes not getting "my" jobs for no good reason I could see. By the early 1980s I was gobsmacked to get hit by redundancy (it wasnt "genuine redundancy" - it was "unfair selection for redundancy" a couple of times and "unfair dismissal" for what I was doing in my own time one time - ie being a political activist).

So the easy "jobs climate" of the early 1970s lasted about two seconds. I'd say there was a "normal" jobs climate (that "out of one job Friday and into another one Monday") probably only really lasted from late 1940s to very early 1970s from what I can see.

By the time I retired at my own retirement age (ie 60 on the dot) in the early 2010's I'd had to "fight tooth and nail" to hang onto my job being "an office job in office hours" - rather than getting shoved over to a callcentre job with variable working hours (not under my control). I was only too glad I'd started making my own arrangements - as I could "see the writing on the wall" to ensure I could cling onto retiring at my own retirement age - as otherwise it would have been my "revised State Pension Age" (which was about 3 years later). To be more accurate I would have been made redundant only a few months after my own retirement age anyway and counted as unemployed (and having to lie and say I was) - even though I would have been retired really/in actual fact.

So things really started changing pretty darn early in our worklife and were only really "normal" for the generation before us imo.

A lot more young women went to University from the 1970s onwards than was possible for those in previous generations, despite many girls Grammar and High schools in the 1950s

That was excellent for those of that generation.

“If so, that should mean, all being well, that our under 50 or 50 something children should be able to inherit a sum of money to help cushion their old age and help their own children.”

If we would get on with it and die sooner there wouldn’t be a problem.

The real issue that many/most are retiring before they inherit anything and don’t need an inheritance it’s our GC that need help.

If we would get on with it and die sooner there wouldn’t be a problem.
We keep trying our best to avoid it but you never know!

I'll probably be heading for 100 before my children reach retirement age.
Keep taking the tablets.

That brings up a whole other issue David. The thought hadnt really crossed my mind re inheritance - as I'm from SUCH a heavy duty heart attack family on both sides that I thought my parents would both go in their 50's and then that I'd go in my 50's after them. In the event "modern medicine" meant they both lived into their 90's (though I don't think either of them wanted to - and it wasnt a life worth living for sure) - so I did still need inheritance or I'd never have been financially straight (as I'm single/always have been).

So - yep inheritance going straight past the noses of our generation and onto grandchildren can be profoundly unfair to our generation (as "better late than never" in that respect). A lot of what I was due for went straight through to their grandchildren in the event - and hence I refer to my "erstwhile brother" and my "erstwhile nephews" - as I'd always known what my brother was like and he confirmed it then....and I told him where to go and not heard a peep since out of him.

It leaves a very nasty taste in mouth if that happens - not so much about the money itself as in what it leaves one with emotionally - in my case "But I thought my father loved me and he went along with my mother changing things - so there's no-one/but no-one then for me", "I knew what my mother was like - my brother was her favourite...she even admitted it one time" and "Oh well - I'd always expected to have to cut off my brother and his family - as I've always seen what he's like and he just confirmed it" and got out those virtual "scissors" and did so.

It happens to a lot of people - and I take some comfort in not being the only one this has happened to by any manner of means...lots of other people confirmed they'd had that happen to them too (ie siblings and their family getting favoured and them being thrown out "into the cold"). The only fair way it can go straight through to grandchildren is if the children have an equal number of children and the parents are all financially straight themselves already. Then it can - because it will be going 50/50 to "one sibling and their family" and "the other sibling and their family".

I did need an inheritance personally (that being single factor meant I was far from financially straight - even at my late 60's). Lots of people in our agegroup aren't going to be financially straight even at quite a late age.....and gawdhelp those who aren't financially straight and have little/if any more pension than State Pension level.

So one can't just say- "Oh well our generation is financially straight" - as so many of us arent still/will never be if not for that. I'm very very aware indeed personally that I would have got all the way through to retirement age and beyond not even being a home-owner if I wasn't pretty savvy with money and (very occasionally) intuition/The Universe has helped me out to see a way through unsolvable problems to get the home-owner status I'd taken from birth I was going to have. Without my intuition and without inheritance money = I'd still be living in rented accommodation (if I was still alive that is).

So - yep...I still needed some help when it turned up. Yep....I was thoroughly disillusioned with them all come the time and out came a bottle of brandy for "draining sorrows" in one hand and a pair of scissors to cut up the family photos I had in the other hand. Very much "Well if that's what they think of me - my own family!"....so the photo album is gone, what actually came through of my mothers jewellery (some of it had mysteriously vanished) went straight out the door to the nearest charity shops for them to sell on and use the money for their causes (apart from a ring I gave to my mothers favourite niece - who had turned out to be my auntie, rather than my cousin in the event). I finished my house off (thankfully there was enough to finish the renovation - despite my erstwhile brother) - but would have liked to have had the chance to decide whether to move back from Wales to (more expensive) England that had vanished.

It makes my blood boil to read that £15b has been spent on housing migrants. What other country puts them up in comfy hotels with free this, that and the other? No wonder so many of them beat a path to our door, forever open to all and sundry.

Agree Agree 100%
spend our money only on those who have paid taxes all their lives
Taking money from farmers who try to hold on to family farms passing on to next gerneration so we can have produce grown in UK
just shockingly mis managed by our Govenments now and previous voted in but never to they keep promises made to get us to vote for them Not voting ever again its a waste of time !!!!!!!!!!

That was not the premise, though, was it. But it was the argument I was putting forward Allira. I dont think there are any limitations on our aproach to the OP ... are there?

My mother would be 105 now, she was 99 when she died. Her life, after the war, was one of improvements being available, so were those of my generation and of my children's (in their 50s) although it was showing signs of some reversal for them as they grew up.

However, I was talking about the overall improvements available not individual lives. There is no reason why, having seen improvements in opportunity in generations since the war, that those growing up now should not expect the same or at least no worse.

If government spending were strictly limited to individuals who have paid taxes throughout their lives mumstheword86 many people currently receiving pensions, healthcare, and social services might not receive the level of support they do now. A significant portion of the welfare system, including pensions and healthcare, is funded through taxes paid by current and past taxpayers, not solely by the contributions of current beneficiaries. So how about the government reducing your pension?

DaisyAnneReturns

If government spending were strictly limited to individuals who have paid taxes throughout their lives mumstheword86 many people currently receiving pensions, healthcare, and social services might not receive the level of support they do now. A significant portion of the welfare system, including pensions and healthcare, is funded through taxes paid by current and past taxpayers, not solely by the contributions of current beneficiaries. So how about the government reducing your pension?

But it's the case that peoples State Pensions are based on how many years they've contributed for - ie in their NI stamps - despite the Ponzi Scheme mantra we're told of "No - it's not your pension you've paid for. It's for someone in the generation before you". Duh!

But my full State Pension is because I've paid in a full number of years of NI stamps personally (paid in in money each year). The job pension is on the same basis. I don't think there's that much money involved in the extra benefits people on State Pension only can get - ie because that income is so low??

DaisyAnneReturns

If government spending were strictly limited to individuals who have paid taxes throughout their lives mumstheword86 many people currently receiving pensions, healthcare, and social services might not receive the level of support they do now. A significant portion of the welfare system, including pensions and healthcare, is funded through taxes paid by current and past taxpayers, not solely by the contributions of current beneficiaries. So how about the government reducing your pension?

It’s not the state pensions that need reducing, many wealthy pensioners can well afford to contribute to the benefits they receive, much more should be means tested.
This generation has benefitted from house price inflation which has very little taxation, domestic property taxation should be reviewed, at the very least council tax should increased for higher value properties. That would help councils a lot the provide social care.

However I don’t expect any support for that idea there are too many vested interests on this site.

"House price inflation" though doesnt tend to help those who've had that happen on their house imo.

If I sold my house now - I should get about twice as much as I paid for it in 2013. Question 1 - how much of that would come from my time and my money I've spent renovating what was a tatty old-fashioned little dump and how much from house price inflation? I'd need to know that in order to take back my money I've spent on it so to say. I do know the vast majority of the price difference would come from my money I've spent on it and not a lot at all from inflation. £145,000 plus, I think, around £90,000 spent on it would give me some "inflation" money - but not much.

Question 2 - that house price inflation is no good to me - as I'd only have to pay a similar amount again to get a similar house in similar location. So I wouldnt benefit one bit from it.

The only benefit from my house price inflation is what I will leave behind me will be bigger in real terms for what I've stated is to inherit what I've got (in my case - that's a charity then).

So one way or another I'm not due myself for any of the benefit from that ever. If I was leaving it to relatives (which I'm not - as we can gather) they'd have to pay out an equivalent amount for any place they bought.

So - not a "vested interest" thing at all - just "Where would I (and many others) ever get any benefit from that?"

I've no idea just how many wealthy pensioners there are around - as I don't think I know any personally. Not to dispute there will be some - but I don't know how many of us know any in fact....

Remembering now one of my ex-boyfriends I chucked in the end. One of the (quite a few) reasons I did so was he couldnt/wouldnt get the idea out of his head that my house should be grabbed off me and sold if I ever went into a carehome and he regarded that as perfectly fair. Funnily enough - I was the one that had to remind him that at least his house wouldnt get forcibly sold and his money grabbed if he did - because it was a Council house he rented. So he couldnt land up having thousands and thousands of £s of his money potentially grabbed from him - after all that effort. But I could - though I wont be in the event...because I wouldnt go into a home anyway personally. But that's the only thing protecting the money I have tied-up in my house = the fact I personally long back decided I'd never go into a home.

one of my ex-boyfriends I chucked in the end

I haven't heard that expression since I was a teenager! 😁

"Are you still going out with John?"
"No, he was boring so I chucked him."

Sorry, CariadAgain, it just made me smile. 😀