Yes the escalation around wedding, honeymoon, holidays and general events costs should not be underestimated. The "gift giving" culture seems to be very social medier/influener driven and not for the better.

When we bought our first house we had enough money left over to either buy some decent furniture or an E-Type jag.

That Jag was a lovely car.

The wife is long gone but I still love E-Types

Money is a funny thing. When you have it, it's background noise. if you don't it's a huge problem.

Looking back, remembering where we found money to pay for life events is lost in time. I suppose if I added it all together, the cars (not that many), two houses (only two), daughter through Uni, wedding costs, and helping with the mortgage, would be a sizable chunk. And yet we don't "miss it".

Our original handed down sofa & chair went to a family of Vietnamese boat people back in the eighties. Delivered on the roof of a Hillman Avenger. Sofa on the roof, chair in the boot.

How true. Well said.

I don't think anyone has suggested that, I know that to afford a house when I did took a great deal of sacrifice and the mortgage payments consumed most of my earnings. If I hadn't bought when I did, the house that we did buy and sold on TWO years later had nearly doubled in price, and we had done nothing to it. And the second house we did buy within FIVE years had more than doubled in price. These were the days when the building society determined how much equity you kept, they kept all my equity from the move so I had to pay the estate agent and solicitor's fees out of my own funds.

This was a time when well paying jobs in the UK were gone, and I had to work for a US Corporation travelling the world, taking the next 10 years of my life living in hotels most of the time rarely home. So please don't tell me the baby boomers had it easy, all the jobs disappeared overnight in the Midlands my home as the industrial heart collapsed and like many of my school friends who either moved south or abroad to find work, having to leave friends, family and their home towns behind. Many people that stayed behind with now redundant skills sets eg machinists, tool setters, lathe operators have not faired so well in the intervening years.

What I think gets forgotten when talking about the past is how tax was designed to allow simple living easy and luxuries more expensive.
Purchase tax had different levels and/or was not applied to basics. So a colour TV was a very expensive item but a washing machine wasn't. Similarly with rates (council tax).
It wasn't anything like the level today. Similarly with eating. Bread was cheap. Basic foods were cheap.
Similarly with direct taxation. Higher personal allowances (relatively speaking), tax advantages for marriage, lower fees for first time housebuyers (stamp duty levels).
So it was entirely possible for a young couple to live a simple life affordably. Now, not so much. They have to pay more for basics and, weirdly, less for luxuries. Phones, TVs are all cheap now. But the basics are not. We've (as a society) somehow reversed the old order of things.
Nick

Still the case - except current salaries have been driven down. I too spent many years schlepping around on aeroplanes and living in hotels. During that period (Late '90s/early '00s) my company was trying to recruit Business Analysts and was offering £45k a year for graduates prepared to travel. The equivalent salary today would be nearly £90k but the same company is only offering £65k for the same role today.

This has potential to bring out the grumpy old man in those of us Baby Boomers (BB`s) who shared similar lifestyles as young married couples, my first married home was in a 100 year old tenement bought with a mortgage for £1200 and just like others, initially furnished with hand me downs from family.... I did a lot of upgrades on that old house, sold it three years later for £3250, and bought a three bedroom early 70`s semi bought for £9k with a £7k a 25 year mortgage... I did a fair bit of work on that house and sold it circa three years later for £14 k, to buy the house I currently live in and modernised and enlarged over a period of more than forty years doubling it`s size in time... Quite how smart that was...???

Yeah when it comes to criticising the young.... It was our generation that "spoiled" them by providing access to excess and raising their expectations to exceed that which they and the country could afford, all paid for by the easy moneygoround imported from the US in the 70`s, as seems to be backed up with the growth in debt both private and country in terms of GDP to the extent that we are in the situation we find ourselves today... it seems the warnings of the last banking crisis were not enough..?

Back to the point... It seems the sons and daughters of the baby boomers expected their first car to be a new one, their weddings to be the equivalent of that of movie stars, their first flat or house to come fully furnished... OK so such was the earnings to house price ratio that those kind folks in the financial services industry adjusted things to ALLOW kids to self asses their incomes on their mortgage applications and arrange for up to 50 year mortgage terms, in order that the kids could buy the houses they thought they deserved..? Paying mortgage interest rates for 50 years and for a dishwasher, tumble dryer, washing machine, cookers and microwaves that would have been scrapped decades previously... seems less than smart..?

Baby boomers have helped the kids by using their home`s increase in value to remortgage it for new cars over the years, two, three or more holidays a year, and to buy the kids cars, assist with the kids mortgage down payment. etc.etc.etc. all of which equates to the the dept to GDP ratio here and elsewhere in the West. All of which seems to ammount to a long expected slow down of the moneygoround....?

I would really hope to think I have got that all so very wrong, now that I am pension and savings dependant and less able to earn a coin through the hard work that provided for me up till now... As for dependance on those in parliament regardless of the colour of their politics.... was it not them who lead us here over all those decades... Hmm..?

As for the image Morgan might have for their product.... That sure ain`t me..

Rant over...

Many of the same aspects here.

First home was a three bedroom shoebox with two mates renting the other rooms to allow me to pay the mortgage. Even with my fixation around tech the video came from radio rentals!
Furniture was donated from the extended family. Bean bags are cheap!
I was leveraged to the hilt and could barely make the payments but it was what you did, many now don't have that choice.
Way too many years travelling for US businesses but it paid off in fiscal terms. It is interesting to look back and say was it the right thing to do?

I agree re the impact of inflation being a hand granade on all of these things compared to salary increases. I was lucky that IT allowed me to move jobs and increase salary during that phase. Many other industries do not have the same flexibility I guess?

I'm sure every generation thinks they were the most hard done by.

I'm Gen X, and like most have lived on boxes and survived eating beans on toast for months at a time, but I can tell you for nothing that I wouldn't want to be a 20/30 something trying to make my way in the world today.