Money. Ugh.
If you’re still crying over my lack of newsletter last Friday, I can explain. The thing is, I was living the high life, reviewing an uber-swanky hotel in St Moritz, Switzerland. It’s where the 1% go to ski, and the hotel was suitably luxurious. My bedroom, for example, had not one but two dressing rooms attached, and everyone was heading to the slopes in new-season Moncler. So far, so fancy.
The weird thing about journalism is that you occasionally get to test out a lifestyle you could never actually afford. I spent two days swanning around a five-star hotel, helping myself to the same pastry selection as my millionaire neighbours at breakfast, and then I landed back in London where I decided that I’d wait an extra 20 minutes for the tube home because I couldn’t justify forking out for the Heathrow Express.
Money is on the brain for most of us right now, and it’s undoubtedly a contentious issue. In fact, at Christmas the only mini bust-up I had with my mum was over money. I was sighing over the fact I’ll never be able to afford a house within easy commuting distance of work (impossible to move far out and still do nursery pick-ups/drop-offs). It was one of those whinges you just need to get out of your system, because in reality I know I’m ludicrously lucky to have a nice flat and not be scratching around to pay for food right now. Still, I was annoyed when my mum suggested that my careless spending was to blame for lack of said house, telling me that if she was in my position she would simply “do less things”.
How dare she, I thought, stomping upstairs to have a sulk. Compared to many people I know, who get their lunch Deliveroo-ed five times a week and take Ubers willy-nilly, I think I’m pretty sensible with money. Mortgage aside, I’ve never got into debt. But from my mum’s perspective, I can’t possibly complain about money when I spend mine on things she considers wildly extravagant: gel manicures, coffee, yoga classes.
In the past, I’ve always assumed this generational difference in attitude was down to my parents being raised by wartime folk. But a chat I had with Money Box’s Paul Lewis this week made me think differently. While we were talking about how hard it is for millennials to afford a house/kids (a topic I’ll be covering for YOU magazine in the coming months), and Paul gave an interesting explanation as to why my mum and I have such different attitudes to spending:
“Your generation have been very lucky to have lived through a time where you haven’t known inflation. Your parents will have known it. You have never known inflation at 10.5% as it is now. You’ve never known energy bills treble, as they have since two or three winters ago. And you’ve never known food prices going up by, well, over 16% a year now. You’ve never known those things, and I think it’s perfectly understandable that because you’ve never had to think or worry about them, you have spent your money as if that kind of stability was going to go on forever. And it’s stopped. It’s now being brought home to your generation in a way it was brought home to your parents in the 1970s, when prices were going up by 20% a year. Now the middle group of people, who traditionally thought they weren’t badly off, are realising they’ve got to watch the pennies, not just the £10 notes”.
It's an interesting perspective, because while I would point that my generation as seen rampant inflation for many of life’s big expenses – houses, nursery fees, university – we haven’t really known a time where our ‘leftover’ money suddenly affords us so much less. This explanation helped me understand why my mum thinks I’m frivolous beyond belief for not carrying a Thermos everywhere, while I can’t see the point in cancelling my Pret subscription when I’d have to save that chunk of money for 1,666 years to afford a house in my area.
This, I think, is the crux of the matter. For my parents, taking homemade sandwiches everywhere and gifting each other the new dishwasher for Christmas meant that they could afford a massive house and three kids. Nowadays, it feels so preposterously out of reach that sacrificing all life’s joys to save one-millionth of a house deposit seems pointless. Everything is too far out of whack. Boomers thinking younger people are shockingly profligate with money, and Millennials thinking ‘it’s alright for them, they had it so easy’. I think I’ve realised that there’s probably an ounce of truth and a slice of unfairness in both stances.
The good news is, my mum and I made friends again pretty quickly. Neither of us could really be arsed to have a feud, and ultimately having a nice relationship with your mum is even more valuable than a house in zone 3. Plus, I need to be friends with her so I can use her enormous loft to store all the crap I can’t squeeze into my flat. There’s got to be some penalty for those big Boomer houses, right?