The Summer Budget

The old phrase ' cutting your coat according to your cloth' comes to mind.
Expectations are high, too high in many ways.

Welcome to the wearisome, self-congratulatory, Self-Pity Club then GG you are now a fully paid up member

Niggly we didn't go wooding, but we did collect coal washed up on the beach. Trouble was it didn't half spit and throw up red-hot cinders. We also had paraffin heaters in the bedroom. All in all I'm surprised the house didn't burn down .... but then it was probably too damp as this was in the days before we had central heating.

not joking - before I'm accused of being flippant

Debt has a lot to answer for. I am younger than some of gransnet so have not experienced what a lot of you have on here.
Juliette's post struck a chord. About paying up on a Thursday. It presumably kept a lot of things easier to work on a week to week basis, rather than monthly.

Getting into debt and taking out loans at extortionate rates of interest is a real problem. If only more people knew about Credit Unions.

I think those who tell of tales of hardship and make do and mend are missing the point. During the 50:s 60's and to a certain extent the 70's there were jobs for anyone who wanted to work, economic growth and the expectation that we would do better than our parents, in as much as a house was affordable, higher education was extended to the working classes and life was simply getting better. Our grandchildren are not able to expect any of this, whilst at the same time seeing their grandparents at the very least hardly being touched by this time of austerity. So it is easy to pontificate about the hardship we suffered, whilst ignoring other factors thus giving a very unbalanced picture of life when we were young

[Just want to say that my last post is a bit muddled. But Anya understands it.]

It's a vicious circle S2B. People struggling to make ends meet from one week to the next might just about have managed in the days of cash in envelope, weekly pay, tins on the dresser.

Now that many are paid monthly and most likely into a bank, debt is more likely. Housing benefit which used to go directly to the landlord is now paid to the person on benefit who then has to ensure it's paid on time themselves. Evictions have gone sky high since this was introduced.,

Firstly it's probably harder to budget for a whole month than on a week to week basis.
Secondly it's just too easy to overdraw a bank account. Too easy to max out a credit card.

Then banks start charging £25 (or thereabouts) for everything over a certain agreed limit, and debt slowly rises. Credit cards even worse. So some turn to Pay Day Loans and everything spirals out of control.

I was neither congratulating or pitying myself Anya. What I was objecting to was your assumption that only those who are self-congratulatory, self-pitying and then following through with negative comparisons to the lives of the younger generations lived those lives. Everyone did to a greater or lesser extent at that time but it doesn't mean everyone should therefore share your views or that they didn't have experiences similar to yours and others.

We all lived those years and, yes our experiences were different to past generations and to this, but there are good and bad, hardworking and lazy, thoughtful and thoughtless in about the same proportions in all generations. You seem to feel the need to polish your halo but personally I would rather have had the challenges of our generation than the challenges of this.

Whatever!

I only started on about this to highlight that for the very first time I'd actually done ok with this budget, after years of always being worse off despite always paying taxes,NI etc etc. BTW housing costs most certainly took up the majority of our pay. It wasn't meant to be self congratulatory just to show a different viewpoint and experience. Round and round we go!

Jane ignore them

I'm passing on advice from some Very Wise GNetters .

OK anya

I think having a weekly wage package was easier for the reasons Anya stated, as you knew roughly what expenditure you had to play with till next payday and could budget accordingly. I don't think anyone is polishing their halo, more a trip down memory lane minus the state. The country was in a shocking state financially in the 1970/early 80's, interest rates were skyhigh, the country nearly grinding to a standstill at one point. If we thought too much about it, it was frightening stuff. I don't think at anytime I would have to expected OAP's to be affected by this any more than they absolutely had to be. As young people it was us who 'cooked on an open fire's' not our poor aging parents, they'd done all that, and couldn't be expected to do it again.

After the 'you've never had it so good' days of the 50s and 60s the various depressions of the 70s and 80s were shocking Niggly - three day weeks, power cuts, worker against management against government, repossessions, redundancies, loss of manufacturing such as car building an steel, mines closing, as well as the sky high interest rates.

But these things are cyclical. Most generations will suffer at some point and all will think their experience is worse than anything that went before.

Very true Anya. I wouldn't want a repeat performance of all that so perhaps that's why I and others, feel that in order to have the things we want and need as a country, a healthy economy is extremely important, and the state should only do what it can afford, prioritising where it has to.

My DH and I were quite hard up while my children were young. We did the 'make do' stuff, got clothes at charity shops, didn't have expensive holidays etc.
I have since learned that we were perceived as "poor" by others in the neighbourhood and my DC had comments made to them by teachers and other adults as well as their peers. (I didn't know any of this at the time.)
I think that this sort of pressure is even worse, these days, and any parent would want to avoid it for their child, if they could.

I only started on about this to highlight that for the very first time I'd actually done ok with this budget

I, for one, am very pleased for you Jane10 and can understand why you felt good too. What I was commenting on is the general blame put on others.

Since my last post I have just had an emergency drive over to my mother who appears to have been trying to o/d on high level antibiotics [frighten]. On my way back, and driving without the feeling of urgency, I had a think about this need to blame. I wonder if the national need to blame people for their situation is to do with our old Christian heritage which tended to put all ill luck down to "sins", even, in the historical past, the birth of children with birth defects. I don't know but counting blessings always seems more purposeful to me.

I think one of the worst things Osborne has done in the budget is targeting the under 25s.
No living wage for them, no housing benefit, etc. He's definitely increased the generation gap in this budget, both financially and ideologically.

Yes dj I argued that earlier amongst other stuff. It is definitely all coming clearer now the dust has settled and it has come in for a lot of criticism from the IFS, the Church and economists.
There is no moral justification for not including the young in the minimum wage.

By the time I was 25, we were buying the third property we had lived in. I cannot see that for any of my grandchildren, with all the debts they have, which we did not.

If we are being anecdotal, by the time I was 25 I was expecting my second child, so I had to give up work. DH was just starting up the business (which was to go under 10 years later) we had no money, so we had to sell out first house and move in with my mother.

It's such a cliff edge at 25. Will they all be thrown out of jobs when they reach it? I wouldn't even know where to advise them these day - thank heavens I don't have to.

There is still legislation against unfair dismissal but, of course, it costs quite a bit to go to court about it.

What will become of the young people who leave foster care at sixteen . The Welsh government has already started an appeal for homes for sixteen to twenty one year olds