I have been having a long read through the debt free diaries on the Moneysavingexpert website.
The main problem for people seems not to have been, being low paid or 'poor', it has been that they haven't decided to live inside their own income.
When I was small, my parents were penniless a lot of the time.
Mum would borrow money to cover Christmas and would pay in all year to a hamper club run by a local shop.
As far as I know, that was the only credit she ever took out.
There were sometimes catalogs knocking about but they weren't the sort you see now.
Her catalogs (and Dads) were for Green Shield stamps which was a loyalty thing that some shops opted into.
You saved the stamps and then used them to buy things from the catalog.
Dads were Embassy Cigarette catalogs.
He would save the vouchers from every packet and they were used to buy each child a nice birthday present and a nice Christmas present so he got 6 redemptions a year from the scheme.
I remember my mum and dad buying a dining room suite which consisted of a fold up table and 4 chairs and the trouble they had in trying to find anywhere to let them pay in installments .
I don't know how they did it in the end but they did manage to scrape the money together after all .
Life these days is all about having it NOW!
Some people even think you are cruel if you say no to something or someone who makes demands.
I definitely thought my parents were mean when I couldn't have nice things as a child .
Sometimes they may have been a little unwise, for example a bicycle would have saved an awful lot of bus fares if one had been provided for me to get to school at age 11.
Mostly though, it showed me that if you really want something,there are ways to save for it and once you have it, it is so much more satisfying than if it had just been handed to you.
Catalogs ,credit cards and pay day loans are a scandal.
Actually thinking about it dad's was a false economy as well as a health hazard that cut his life short.
If only he had not smoked ,he could have used the money to buy presents and had plenty left over for things like dining room suites.
People haven't changed that much! They want their comforts in life and are blinded to the things they are losing out on just by giving in to their own wants.
Of course, dad was a Gambler also and mum mostly survived on money earned from cleaning jobs.
However,if she could have obtained credit back then, she would no doubt be in massive debt even today.
The main problem for people seems not to have been, being low paid or 'poor', it has been that they haven't decided to live inside their own income.
When I was small, my parents were penniless a lot of the time.
Mum would borrow money to cover Christmas and would pay in all year to a hamper club run by a local shop.
As far as I know, that was the only credit she ever took out.
There were sometimes catalogs knocking about but they weren't the sort you see now.
Her catalogs (and Dads) were for Green Shield stamps which was a loyalty thing that some shops opted into.
You saved the stamps and then used them to buy things from the catalog.
Dads were Embassy Cigarette catalogs.
He would save the vouchers from every packet and they were used to buy each child a nice birthday present and a nice Christmas present so he got 6 redemptions a year from the scheme.
I remember my mum and dad buying a dining room suite which consisted of a fold up table and 4 chairs and the trouble they had in trying to find anywhere to let them pay in installments .
I don't know how they did it in the end but they did manage to scrape the money together after all .
Life these days is all about having it NOW!
Some people even think you are cruel if you say no to something or someone who makes demands.
I definitely thought my parents were mean when I couldn't have nice things as a child .
Sometimes they may have been a little unwise, for example a bicycle would have saved an awful lot of bus fares if one had been provided for me to get to school at age 11.
Mostly though, it showed me that if you really want something,there are ways to save for it and once you have it, it is so much more satisfying than if it had just been handed to you.
Catalogs ,credit cards and pay day loans are a scandal.
Actually thinking about it dad's was a false economy as well as a health hazard that cut his life short.
If only he had not smoked ,he could have used the money to buy presents and had plenty left over for things like dining room suites.
People haven't changed that much! They want their comforts in life and are blinded to the things they are losing out on just by giving in to their own wants.
Of course, dad was a Gambler also and mum mostly survived on money earned from cleaning jobs.
However,if she could have obtained credit back then, she would no doubt be in massive debt even today.
2 comments:
Sounds like you had a similar upbringing to me. My dad smoked and drank himself to death, at an early age. Mother wasn't far behind though she didn't drink half as much as dad, and did manage to give up smoking eventually. I think this has moulded me into the person I am now, hating excess in anything. Good post, thank you.
Thankyou MQ for your comment! I have only just discovered it (July 18)LOL
I so rarely get comments that I gave up looking for them long ago.
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