The Summer Budget

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

OK anya

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

Jane ignore them

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!

Whatever!

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

Frankly, I don't think there are many people who have completely worry free lives. I for one am very grateful that the state educated my children, ditto grandchildren, has provided free health for all but five years of my life, and provides me with a pension all be it not a full one. Does anyone remember the married woman's stamp?! I paid into that for years only to find, when I finally worked full time, that what I had been squirrelling away wasn't sufficient for pension purposes. I suppose I should feel furious and aggrieved? Actually I feel that I should have checked it out properly at the time!!!
Talking of open fires, does anyone remember going wooding? My childhood memories are of wooding walks, which were continued well into adulthood. When I was first married I can remember cooking on a paraffin stove as it was much cheaper than electric. Not sure it was very safe though and perhaps not to be recommended!!! Cooking on an open fire? If I'd had to I would. Parents of Dutch friends certainly had to, but then they were starving in the real sense of the word! How fortunate we were in more ways than one!

visitors

Do you really think that those who are objecting to the comparisons did not also "go through hard times" Anya or was it just the "poor me" section of this forum; those who condemn the young. Of course we did too. I owned the "101 ways with mince", had my heart sinking moment when my curious small daughter broke half a dozen eggs and wondered how we would feed visitor when they came - by going with out prior to the visit like so many others of course.

But we did get to a point where things were a little easier whereas my daughter, now in her 40s and with both of them working in what once were "good" jobs, both of them running a business too but with no sense of a better future or any sort of retirement on a par with many of those who - from reading some of the posts on here - do not realise how lucky they have been. These posters have not worked harder or paid more but they are better off than future generations will be.

DGS have a very privileged life compared to DS but they still have hand-me down clothes and toys and eat left-overs. Eloethan does rather back up what I was saying; it is an issue of values and our values are hourly under attack from organisations whose purpose is to make us aspire to buy more and more stuff. And not just more, the latest, newest etc.

I am reminded of the saying that a nation which forgets its past is condemned to repeat it. Those with experience of surviving bad times are not condescending and self-congratulatory, their stories are about using your own noddle to find ways to get round it. The state can do a lot, but what is the state? Just other people, that is all.

Leaving the thread for the moment to those who find that those of us who have been through hard times are 'wearisome' and 'self-congratulatory' or dripping 'with condescension'

But of course our experiences are nothing compared to today.

So everything is up to the state to provide? Sorry. Silly me! Where is personal responsibility here? I get the point of the huge marketing industry but do people really need to swallow all that nonsense about what people simply must have? Is there no independent thought? Semi seriously there's a job for old fashioned Grans here. I suppose that fractured families means that there are fewer such conduits to a different style of thinking.