Privileged boomer – to know how to budget
FORTUNATELY, I am one of those lucky 71-year-old “boomers” described by one of your correspondents (“System broken thanks to the baby boomers”, Mailbox, June 23).
I was nine when my father passed away, youngest of four boys aged 14 to nine.
Just child benefit then, available as my mother had to work to try to support us.
The people in the area, especially the two local shops, were a welcome help, with daily milk and bread left on the doorstep.
Nothing like housing or low income benefits, no minimum wage. As Clint Eastwood famously said, “you adapt, you improvise”.
We then move on to the 70s – married with a mortgage and the mortgage rising from 7 per cent in 1970 to 13 per cent in 1980, increasing to 18 per cent in 1984 and not going below 10 per cent for the whole 80s.
Yes, I feel really privileged to have lived through the miners’ strike, power cuts and the three-day working week.
Taking out loans to pay the mortgage, finally paying off the loans 10 years after the mortgage ended when I was 69.
No extra payments then, no government furlough payments to keep you in work, no government £650 or £1,250 whichever benefits you claim, no food banks, no charities falling over each other to help you.
These were not available in the 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s.
Oh yes, we certainly are the privileged ones. We know how to budget and we know what to spend money on and what not to.
Out would go the expensive phone contracts, out would go the cable TV (apparently it is a must-have to keep the children up with their mates) and, according to the travel industry, 75 per cent of all families have booked at least one holiday abroad this year. And that is not counting those having a holiday in the UK.
We used to get one holiday in Skegness or Hunstanton once every four years.
When I hear MPs saying that 50 per cent of children are classed as in poverty, the grumpy old man comes out in me.
I think of poverty as living in a shanty town in the slums of Mumbai or the refugee camps in Libya and
Jordan, African villages with no running water.
That is poverty and the MPs should be ashamed of politicising the word.
It is defined by the WHO based on a nation’s wealth. But that is not poverty. If Saudi Arabia is the world’s richest country, then would poverty be not being able to own a fast car?
Andy Vernon, Leicester