Inflation and the Cost of our Hobby

I shed no tears for those Club members who can afford to buy, operate and use motorhomes costing £75,000, and who then take up space on this forum telling the rest of us that they are finding club site prices expensive. Tough.

Nor do a I grieve for those who can only afford a mere 100 days a year touring and.looking around. Such hardship.

My grandchildren with jobs in London are still paying off student loans and university fees. They live in single rooms in shared houses and walk to work to save money. Cars, houses, marriage and families totally out of the question.

Some retired Club members don’t have too bad a life after all - despite the endless protests about Club site prices which I read on here.

Kj

This was the BBC story  They didn't give figures for the number of people in each group as I don't think that was the point of the exercise? All they were doing was working out three points where you would either possibly just about manage, feel reasonably comfortable and finally really comfortable. As with all things I suspect many don't neatly fit into three categories but many will overlap? 

Wherenext didn't quite understand what you meant by  "I detest the current pricing structure" I assume that refers to the Club's pricing structure but as far as I am aware that has always been in place in the forty odd years I have been a member? 

David

"There speaks a chap with plenty of money (as I have!). However, not everyone has been as fortunate as our generation."

I get a bit annoyed when I hear that last bit.  In my early twenties as I'm sure most of us of a certain age experienced - I wasn't paying 5% interest rate on a mortgage and complaining about it.  It was 16 or 17% for a time. In my former life, we bought a brand new two bedroom bungalow and I was paying out over 50% of my salary in mortgage repayments.  We didn't expect - nor could afford the house to be perfectly furnished with all mod cons etc - until we could afford carpets, I set to and varnished / stained most of the floorboards and made do with that.  No massive flat screen TV on the wall (hadn't been invented anyway!) - we had a second hand ex-rental set for quite a while before we could buy a new one. Our first holiday was a week away in a borrowed ridge tent - not two weeks having flown off to the sun somewhere.

I know I'll probably get shot down but I do feel that the current young generation do expect to have everything - now!

Rant over. 

It’s simply still about the choices one makes early in life. Some of life’s biggest decisions have to be made in late teens and early 20’s, and they do need a lot of thought, foresight as much as possible, hard decisions made. 

Richard

The trouble is that every generation faces different challenges. I remember those mortgage rates, which seem to go up on an almost daily basis and we often joke with the boys about it. I suspect also society wasn't so materialistic in those days? I remember making our first settee from a plan I found in Practical Woodworker and I was very proud of it. I had previously built a boat so the woodwork element was not such a challenge but needs must. I think the big difference is that despite wages for jobs which require certain skills being much higher, mortgages are much higher. When we purchased our house in MK the value was about four times what I was earning but now houses, certainly in the southern half of the country, work out at about six to eight times salary. If interest rates went up to what we paid the housing market would collapse because no one would be able to pay for a mortgage. I appreciate that the market has been impacted by Help to Buy which rather than help people has just sent property values soaring. But where this leaves younger people and our hobby I don't know. It probably won't be until later in life that they have the financial freedom but as most of us started camping at a younger age will they bother?

David