I almost can’t believe it, sitting here in my abundantly-provisioned London home in 2025, but my dad once told me that when he was a kid they’d sometimes run out of food.
There would be bread maybe, but little else. At least not for the children.
“Sometimes I’d have salt and pepper sandwiches,” my dad confided.
Was his story credible? Honestly I’ve no idea.
My dad is long gone and my grandmother rustled up those spartan provisions either during or right after World War 2. Rationing was still in effect, and my dad’s claim sounds both plausible and like the punchline to an old joke.
What I don’t doubt though was that life could be tough for them. The family lived in the poorer part of town and both parents did various physical jobs.
My dad and his sister grew up fine, but the risk of being spoiled never troubled them.
From salt and pepper to the spice of life
My dad was frugal all his life. My grandmother, too. When I think back to the money she’d share with us grandchildren while she wore the same clothes for a decade, my heart aches. Though I was oblivious to it at the time, of course.
Back in the late 1940s, my dad and my grandmother were going without. There were essentials that they should have had – but sometimes they didn’t have them.
By the 1990s though they were at most doing without.
Not that either seemed to mind.
My dad had a good job, and he’d got us into a semi-detached house in a fancier postcode.
My grandmother marvelled at it when she was brought over for dinner on Friday evenings – while cooing over the professional-looking Wendy Houses, trellises, and fences my dad crafted from discarded shipping pallets he’d scavenged from industrial estates.
For her part, I suspect saving versus spending brought my grandmother a lot of comfort, and perhaps a sense of agency. Not that she would have put it that way.
Going without versus doing without in 2025
People who’ve had no money don’t scoff at those who hold too much as if it’s magical.
Compared to having no money, it is.
But almost nobody who reads this blog will fit that description. I’d wager we’ll know very few people like it in our wider circles, too.
That doesn’t mean there aren’t some going without in Britain today. Of course there are.
But that hasn’t got much to do with the lives of you and me. Even when we think we’re making big sacrifices, we’re pretty much always doing without, not going without.
I’ll define going without as trying to live without the essentials most people take for granted.
In contrast, doing without means you’re missing something – again usually something most others have and value, sure – but not something essential.
Going without: the essentials of modern life
- Around 2,000 calories a day
- Fruit, vegetables, and a healthy protein
- Somewhere safe, warm, and dry to sleep in and store your things
- Sufficient clothes to look tidy in social situations
- A straightforward way to get to and from work
- Access to electricity, cooking, and washing facilities
- A mobile number and an Internet connection
- Either a smartphone or a computer
Doing without: stuff you can sacrifice but you don’t want to
- Your own transport
- Furniture that’s not secondhand or from IKEA
- Netflix, Disney, Spotify, games consoles, and other entertainment platforms
- Holidays, whether at home or abroad
- New clothes, unless bought from TK Maxx or similar
- Buying meals, whether eating out or takeaways
- A home occupied only by you and your immediate family
- Anything made by Apple
- Bitcoin (I’m joking! Mostly)
These lists are clearly not exhaustive. They’re just an attempt to divvy up the non-negotiables of modern life.
That won’t stop the disagreements, of course. Perhaps a few of you old-timers will still argue you don’t need a mobile phone or the Internet? (Really?)
On the other side, maybe you live far from public transport and you say your car is a must. You either can’t or won’t move somewhere more convenient.
But mostly these are edge cases. There’s a pretty clear distinction between needs and wants these days – yet conversations about living standards often talk as if there isn’t.
Your margin is their opportunity
A few days ago I fell down a YouTube rabbit hole and binged a certain kind of FIRE video1, though the speakers didn’t always use that lingo.
The algorithm sent me instance after instance of videos that followed the same template.
Essentially, a 50-something white- or grey-haired man with a working class accent, apparently single, said he’d had enough of the grind and so he was going to quit and move onto a boat / live in Spain / sell his house and rent a studio / travel the world / sleep in a van.
Their message wasn’t that they’d scrimped and saved and run the numbers and worked out they could retire.
It was that they knew they weren’t rich, as they put it – and that they knew they’d never be rich.
But they’d decided to anyway call time on trying to change things, and instead accepted their fate.
The videos often referred to comments on earlier videos that scolded them for not having sufficient money to retire. Mostly, such feedback seemed to ignore the retiree’s aspirations, and reflected instead the commenter’s own vision of a happy life.
Goodbye to all that
I’d link to a video but I don’t want to call out anyone in particular – I’m not criticising their decisions, but it could be perceived that way coming from a blog like Monevator.
The truth is I’ve no idea if their plans are right or wrong. But I understand their motivations.
I do think many of their critics in the comments were wrong though. They’d list things these people were giving up, which they deemed unacceptable. But it often wasn’t even clear the would-be quitter had those things to give up anyway. And they all admitted life would be spartan.
Would these underfunded escapees be going without? I don’t think so, based on the information they presented. At least not anytime soon.
They’d be doing without, certainly. And they were probably condemning themselves to a pretty tight old age.
But they seemed resigned to that fate anyway. Life was getting too expensive, work wasn’t worth it anymore, and they wanted to live differently while they could.
Most Monevator readers can empathise with that – even if we’d far rather get out with an arsenal of financial assets at our back.
You get what you pay for
I recently heard a property developer on a podcast recount some tough times on his journey to a ten-figure real estate portfolio.
He said that he and his wife would share a meal when they went to a restaurant. As in one would get the plate first and eat most of it, and then the other would mop up what was left.
It seems outlandish. Why not cook for two at home or at least go somewhere cheaper, rather than suffer through this baroque ritual?
But then I thought perhaps they truly loved fancy restaurants? Maybe it was motivating for them to eat out – to help them focus on what they’d once enjoyed and were striving to get back? Or maybe they just really missed the experience?
They could do without a full plate each, but maybe they could not go without eating out?
Another example – a friend of mine takes her dog to be professionally groomed every fortnight. My girlfriend – who hasn’t got a dog but wants one badly – guessed the treatment cost £25. I’d flukily estimated correctly that it cost £80 but I was still astonished.
It adds up to £2,000 a year. My friend is not Lord Sugar. It must be 5% of her post-tax pay.
Of course she says this grooming is essential, whereas I think it’s a luxury. We had dogs growing up and I can’t remember them even getting a bath. Maybe a hose if they splashed in the mud.
It’s 2025 though and dogs must be fluffy and allowed onto the furniture and even to sleep on the bed at night. My friend kisses hers on the snout. I hope it has a good dentist, too.
Some young people will tell you that their expensive gym membership is essential. I say get a £25 chin-up bar that fits over a doorframe. They say working out in public is for them what clubbing and partying was for my generation.
Talking about my generation, many consider a few bottles of good red wine a week a must. But the young adults I know barely drink, and almost none wine.
It’s all personal, then. Not a newsflash I know.
Your future self wants a word
My co-blogger The Accumulator covered this ground years ago, writing:
Regular reflection upon and discussion of our true values are necessary counter-measures to materialistic pressures. This strategy can make a big difference to your saving while maintaining your quality of life.
But first you have to work out the difference between what makes you happy, and what you’re told makes you happy.
TA wrote that in the midst of his journey to becoming financially independent. His thinking was all about doing without today in order to have more tomorrow.
That’s the usual way to think about doing without. But those guys on YouTube who are forsaking many of life’s luxuries remind us that there’s another way.
Which is to give up more tomorrow in order to live the way you want today.
In recent years the Retirement Living Standards Survey has emerged as a touchstone for understanding the level of income you’ll need to achieve different standards of living.
This year’s updated figures look like this:
Source: Pensions UK’s R.L.S. website
The figures look reasonable to me, yet they always cause controversy. Readers invariably debate this or that aspect of the spending as either too lavish or too stingy.
For instance here’s a single-person’s food budget – from Minimum to Moderate to Comfortable:
In a fanciful violation of the laws of physics, I can almost hear furious keyboards being bashed even before the results appear in the comments below.
What’s clear though is nobody is eating salt and pepper sarnies on these budgets.
With or without you
Rising markets have fattened our portfolios for a decade.
But inflation has put up the price of our appetites, too.
Work doesn’t pay like it did – frozen tax thresholds and a stagnant economy have seen to that – which makes pulling the ripcord ever more attractive even for those who maybe shouldn’t.
There’s never been more publicity about FIRE. Yet relatively few people have substantial savings or assets to put towards achieving it.
Given all this, it’s not surprising that if more people catch the getting-out bug, then it can only entail more frugality for them – either now or in the future, and probably both.
But I’m not convinced this needs to be a sob story.
My father and my grandmother went from what would now be seen as near-poverty conditions post-War to modest middle-class comfort by the early 1990s.
Yet the comfort of those decades would seem frugal by today’s standards.
Are people really being reckless if they choose to accept that previous level of lifestyle in exchange for more time and freedom in 2025?
I don’t think so.
By doing without – without having to go without – maybe more of us can find a compromise that works for us.
- Financial Independence Retire Early. [↩]
Interesting post. I’d sum up the choices those guys are having to make as This is what decline looks like.. Living standards are falling in the UK for people in the lower parts of the income bracket. Both due to the cost of essentials (housing, power) increasing faster than their wages, and the invisible problem of less of a supportive human network – people move more for work.
> doing without – without having to go without
It took me a while to parse what the difference was 😉 IMO you’re wrong. Living like your father or grandfather did is easier coming from more strapped times into better times as they did. It’s harder doing it coming down from better times. I left the middle class for three years to save enough to get out, no holidays and relatively frugal eating, and drinking homebrew FFS, never again. It was a worse experience than doing similar earlier in my working life when I had less but the direction of travel was up. I was an anomaly, everyone around was living well on their pay without saving hard, and it stuck out. Plus I was doing without, in your terminology, but it felt more like going without, because I had the recent comparison of more sunlit uplands.
I’d also counsel against some of the presumptions of locking in frugality, because as you get older you get less inclined to do some of the rufty-tufty stuff that saves money. I am fortunate enough to still be in decent health, but I am seeing that hit an increasing number of my peer group. Even for me, I used to chop my own firewood, I pay someone to do that and bring it in a tipper truck now. Our days of camping together are gone because Mrs Ermine sleeps more lightly nowadays. I am still happy to use the campervan on my tod, but as a couple we do AirBnB and eat out.
More people are opting out, it is true. You see more people living in vans – the diagnostic is the heat stove vent pipe. I guess in London you will be seeing more rough sleeping.
> a 50-something white- or grey-haired man with a working class accent, apparently single
There’s a hidden diagnostic in those videos. I put you in your 50s, is your hair white? I am a fair few years older, most of my hair is still its original colour. What you are seeing are the results of stress. Could be working like that, could be divorce, could be finding themselves on the scrapheap at 50, I was that guy, but had the grace of God to have enough resource and tail winds to fly the damaged craft to a safe landing. Not everybody gets those breaks.
I wish these guys well, but it will probably be a tough life as they get older.
I think I’m familiar with the YouTube channel you’re referring to. I watch it with a car crash rubber necking fascination. Fair play to them. Living in a camper van at 54 might seem ok but that’ll soon get old at 64 never mind 74.
Of course they’ll be looking to claim pension and income top ups from those who worked when they get there.
There’s a certain sadness about it that probably speaks to the current labour market and the fact that many over the age of 50 can’t find a role that brings satisfaction and a reasonable salary. The UK Govt of any colour think that they can tinker with pensions whilst not making commensurate changes to the labour market. The two are tied. When the French recently changed their pension law they made offsetting changes to their labour market.
It seems if you’re under 25 or over 50 in the UK you’re out of the employer Goldilocks zone.
Funnily enough one can go the opposite way and over save, ending up with more cashflow than one needs…….reminds me, must buy another toy to entertain me in my early retirement *sigh*
(but) Seriously, not everyone is wired the same way to be a serious saver/passive investor….are we like parents obsessing about the academic record of their children, and often the children end up doing ok anyway – despite their parents.
I’ve been pondering this with housing: could opt for more house and x more years of work, or go for something modest (or relocate) and be FI tomorrow
Great article, but I would argue that getting your dog groomed is more essential nowadays due to more designer breeds being commonplace now.
Traditional breeds such as labs, greyhounds, bulldogs, boxers etc don’t really need grooming due to their short hair (although benefit from getting their nails clipped and shed hair brushed out).
Crossbreeds such as cockapoos, golden doodles or cavachons absolutely need regular 6-8 weekly grooming or their wool coat ends up horribly matted causing them discomfort and even pain. In extreme cases their eyes can be matted shut, or their genitals matted to their legs.
I am a dog groomer and these breeds make up around 60% of my client base. They’re getting even more common.
Even collies and cocker spaniels can get matted and require professional grooming. I imagine there were a lot of neglected dogs that could have benefited from grooming before professional groomers were a thing.
If you are considering getting a dog and don’t fancy spending £45-100 every 2 months grooming it, please avoid anything with a wool coat! Get yourself a labrador instead!
“In general, survival is the only road to riches. Let me say that again: Survival is the only road to riches.” Peter L Bernstein, financial historian, economist, educator and populariser of the EMH.
Sometimes you have to go without to have the luxury of choosing subsequently to do without.
Throughout all but the most recent sliver of history, the great mass of humanity has had to go without. And even now, in a world that overall produces 50% more calories than needed, many have to go without due to wars and misgovernance.
As for the choice of doing without in the future to enjoy the present, rather than doing without now to enjoy the future, well you can’t live other peoples’ lives. As the Levellers put it, there’s only one way of life, and that’s your own. At the end of the day, you just gotta be grateful for what you’ve got and the experiences you’ve had.
Good article, it is astonishing how living standards have changed within the course of our lifetimes. I remember in primary school doing a survey of the school car park as a project, the teachers cars were all Ladas, Polski Fiats and similar. I live next to a primary school now and the car park is full of SUVs.
I was well into my 20s before I lived in centrally heated accommodation (except for the first year halls at uni – luxury…) As a child we went out for food maybe a few times a year, though we did always have a holiday, either camping or self-catering, and we always had a car because my dad needed one for work. And I would have said we had quite a middle class upbringing, though as I am reminded often in these pages, the term middle class appears to cover a lot of ground.
The RLS figures do always seem high to me, but maybe its good that way to encourage people to save? I know our figure for the last FY as a couple was £26k, of which £6k was holiday/ travel and £3k charity/gifts to family.
There’s an argument that the average American today is richer than Rockefeller in 1913 who was then the richest man in the world.
But expectations naturally shift over time. Air travel is a good example where people agonise about which class they travel in, seat pitch, window vs aisle etc when the real miracle is that you can travel at 550mph in an aluminium tube at 35,000ft.
If you’re grateful for that then you don’t care about the rest but it’s easy not to see it, like the fish asking what water is, or not realising that you’re licking the earth.
Limitations can also create abundance. Limitations in sport create games of infinite depth.
My point is whether something is lower or higher depends on where you choose to stand and that even then, aiming down can be a way of aiming up. That doing without doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re missing something but gaining something.
“To be given everything, give everything up” – Lao Tzu
Great article and great comments.
Surprised no one has mentioned the glaring error – did you mean Tesco rather than TK. max? Looking at their website:
“TK Maxx’s mission is to provide customers with a constantly changing selection of branded and designer merchandise at prices up to 60% less than the Recommended Retail Price (RRP)”
It’s clearly a luxury establishment – and is excellent for men’s Holidays shirts and everyday clothing. OR, possibly, I’m a cheapskate!
Having said that I have progressed to £10 wine
With the exception of our beds all our best furniture is second hand. We can remember where we got it too: this came from Aunt Betty, that came from our favourite scrapyard, while the other came from a university sale of surplus furniture, and our greatest favourite we bought from a young couple whose flat had been compulsory purchased by an arm of government. (Naturally it then stood unoccupied for a decade. The bastards!)
A couple of useful bookcases came from the kerb, having been put out for anyone or the rubbish men to collect.
We don’t have “Netflix, Disney, Spotify, games consoles, and other entertainment platforms” nor have I bought new clothes in years apart from knickers and socks. I’m losing weight so old clothes now fit me again.
With age come new expenditures: many jobs we used to do ourselves are now physically beyond us. We pay for help with cleaning and gardening, a handyman, a decorator, a window cleaner … I’ve done nothing to the car in years but happily we use a good garage though that business will become vulnerable if Weird Ed gets his way.
People you relied on retire or die: GP, dentist, vet, plumber, builder, electrician,… Just you wait, young man!
@ Larson
> the term middle class appears to cover a lot of ground.
I find the definition between middle class and upper class a bit meaningless. I have always considered myself middle class, but I can’t quite work out what would need to happen to mean that my children were upper class. Buy a castle, get made a Lord and have £100m worth of land perhaps. I’m not sure even then we would be an upper class family, just a middle class family faking it.
Not sure about the salt n pepper sandwiches, perhaps he was “middle class”. I certainly remember “bread n dripping”, where the fat from the Sunday joint, if you were lucky enough to have one, was collected, poured into a basin, where it semi hardened, (no fridges), with the jellified gravy underneath. This was spread on bread, with perhaps a sprinkling of salt. I know that some used to have sugar sandwiches too.
In most local “Caff’s”, around 10am, visiting trades would call in for “tea n two of dripping”.
It was deadly for the cardio system, but superior to the rock hard margarine that had to be put under the grill to soften it, sold by the Good Ole USA, but banned by the US FDA for home use. Oh, and buying half a cooked sheep’s head in Hoxton market for 10d / 4p.
There’s been no mention of the cost of “opting out”. Only yesterday a parliamentary group called for a strategy on pensioner poverty. One such policy asking for more benefit take up of all things. So it begs the question around incentives. If significant numbers of people are choosing to “do without” work or another large group choosing to not “do without” life’s luxuries or the inverse corollary to then “do without” adequate savings provision during their working lives, why should the tax payer then be asked to underwrite these life choices?
The state is creaking at the seams at it is. After a full working life, if people have decided purposefully not to provision for their later years, is it fair that that others should underwrite those choices and if so, where is the incentive for people to provision for themselves? The state pension, whilst not generous, through the NI link, seems to be the only state benefits that tries to incentivise self provision. It seems there are elected representatives working to even undermine that.
Do you not think alot of the issue is an unrealistic expectation of what lifestyle a certain level of wealth provides? I think social media plays a big part of this
I often chuckle at posts extolling the ‘millionaire lifestyle’ when in many parts of the south at least a millionaire lives in a modest semi.
People earning 100k plus have an expectation that they can afford the finer things :- private education for their kids top hotels and business class flights.
The reality is you either need wealth (not income) to afford those things and alot more of it than you think
Perception plays a big part of this and I did read an interesting post the other day that said that how much you have in comparison to your social group matters far more in your perception of how well off you are than the actual number itself.
I see this in myself living in a modest 4 bed 1 bathroom semi in reading . Our friends are generally less wealthy than us and always comment on how nice our house is . By contrast my father comes to visit and comments that as my child gets older we’ll ‘need’ a larger house with a second bathroom for our family of 3!
I know my dad thinks I’m bonkers that we haven’t moved somewhere nicer with our net worth but to me at my level you can either have a nice house or more liquid wealth to spend and invest and I choose the latter
There was plenty of going without in my upbringing as both parents were unemployed for a long spell in the last half of my childhood. It was pretty desperate at times, despite their best efforts. Must have cast a long shadow as finally, as although I was essentially FI a decade ago, I no longer think about every penny or even pound when shopping, or spend time waiting for the bargains to be put out at the reduced section.
There is probably still too much in the doing without category, but also plenty of luxuries too. I don’t see the point in scrimping on a computer, for example. Sure I could do my most of my work and play on a 5 year old and secondhand chromebook or 10 year old PC, but I choose an M4 Macbook Air. Unlike all of my friends, I still fix my own bike – but I’m increasingly aware of the opportunity cost of bodging stuff with unsuitable parts from my parts bin rather than simply buying new good ones. I fix fewer inner tubes these days, for example – partly because the missus uses them to tie up plants in the garden.
I don’t overly object to the distinction between “go without” and “do without” although I’d question whether those in the lower tiers of go without are really getting veg & the right protein or not running up debt to bridge the gap and capture some of the things they could do without.
I have sometimes at my most stressed/unhappy at work reflected on could I walk away now and the answer regardless of my progress to FI was usually yes – I could find contentment in things that didn’t cost much if anything at all. So I can see the Van man attraction – reality is those guys will pivot into something whether it’s monetising socials, handiwork, some form of crafts or casual labour that becomes semi permanent.
There’s many ways to live a life and at the end we’re all weak and powerless just the same. That said I’m next month splashing out on a fairly costly holiday (for me) – while still trying to be sensible on the things that seem somewhat egregiously priced.
@Fatbritabroad – the recent Meaningful Money podcast with Dr Daniel Crosby covered exactly that social benchmarking point you refer to.
& yes while there still seems to be some (popular?) view that being a millionaire is still rich – if that’s in a SIPP it only translates to a SWR of £30-40k pa – maybe enough to get you somewhere comfortable-ish per the RLS tables but not exactly oysters and champagne every day. I’m wondering whether the real aspirational target for FIREers to be futureproof needs to be somewhat more of a stretch.
@Larsen
“ I remember in primary school doing a survey of the school car park as a project, the teachers cars were all Ladas, Polski Fiats and similar. I live next to a primary school now and the car park is full of SUVs.”
I’d hazard that the teachers owned the Ladas etc outright. Leasing is much more prevalent these days, and another great example of wants vs needs. I know plenty of people struggling each month but handing over hundreds to fund their new SUV.
@CF
Indeed there is all sorts of subscription/cashflow based lifestyle that provides no reliable indication of the absolute level of wealth of the person.
I do note however that some of the “that must be proper expensive” houses I pass often have something like a Corsa and an old Volvo in the driveway. I take that as an indicator that the house is largely bought and paid for possibly a long time ago. Late plate Range Rover and M Series not so much though clearly there are exceptions.