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.

1. Financial Independence Retire Early. [↩]

What caught my eye this week.

With the price of Bitcoin surpassing $120,000 and US regulators doing some very crypto-friendly regulating, the digital tokens look on the cusp of becoming fully institutional.

For good or ill, I’ll add – and not just because most of you remain sceptical.

My own feelings over the past decade have gone from somewhat cautious to cautiously accepting. Of Bitcoin, I should stress. Not of the thousands of other ephemeral digital tokens that bloom and die like so many bluebottles above a rubbish dump.1

Yet even as only a soft believer, it’s hard not to be concerned that once again the UK has failed to keep up with the US. This despite us having had a far more advanced fintech ecosystem a decade ago.

In just this week’s news from across The Pond:

• BlackRock’s Bitcoin ETF became the fastest-ever to hit $80bn in assets
• US crypto firms are looking to secure banking licenses, the Financial Times reports
• Polymarket is the latest in a string of crypto-adjacent outfits who’ve seen legal probes dropped by the Trump administration
• Crypto giant Grayscale has filed to go public…
• …and no wonder, when another, Circle Internet, is now valued at more than $50bn – having multiplied six-fold since its IPO less than two months ago

It looks pretty frothy for sure, but who knows? People said the same thing when Bitcoin first breached $10,000 in 2017 and again when screenshots of apes sold for $3m in 2021.

And yet here we in 2025, with the bubble/revolution going stronger than ever.

Slowly does it on British Bitcoin ETFs

Again for good or ill, here in the UK things are spectacularly less vibrant.

The FCA announced in early June that it proposed to lift the ban on crypto exchange-traded products for retail investors. That would pave the way for holding Bitcoin assets in your ISA or SIPP – instead of having to invest in sub-optimal proxies such as the US Bitcoin hoarding company Strategy, or one of the herd of emerging and even more over-valued UK copycats.

However I’ve yet to see a date for when the FCA will do this. Some have speculated 2026.

Why such a long delay? Bitcoin ETFs have been available in the US for 18 months and they already hold over $100bn in assets. What is the FCA going to learn that the US doesn’t know between now and 2026?

I appreciate crypto might be unpalatable to regulators – and many Monevator readers – but if you’re going to do it, get on with it.

This isn’t the sleepy 1970s anymore.

They boom, we bust

Elsewhere, the once-promising UK crypto platform Ziglu has gone into administration.

Coin Telegraph reports:

Thousands of savers face the grim prospect of losing their investments after administrators uncovered a two million pounds ($2.7 million) shortfall at Ziglu, a British cryptocurrency fintech that collapsed earlier this year.

Ziglu customers aren’t the only ones with sad faces. I was one of thousands of small investors who together invested millions when Ziglu crowdfunded on Seedrs a few years ago.

Like most such failures, it looks a terrible investment in hindsight. But at the time there was lots to be hopeful about.

Ziglu was the brainchild of Mark Hipperson, a co-founder of already-successful startup Starling Bank. Its customer count was quadrupling year-over-year by 2021. Even after crypto retraced thereafter, an acquisition of Ziglu was agreed with the US fintech giant Robin Hood.

Alas the takeover collapsed following the 2022 downturn. And so here we are.

Talking of Robin Hood, that 12-year old company is now valued at $93bn!

Sadly the UK equivalent – Freetrade – was sold to IG Group for £160m in January.

A reach for the stars

Perhaps it’s not surprising that the UK fintech winners – including the self same Starling, incidentally – are mulling US stock market listings. It would be yet another blow for UK markets.

Going by the comments on TA’s Revolut review this week, some readers seem to think the likes of Revolut and Monzo are still fly-by-nights in the Ziglu mould.

This is far from the case.

With 12 million customers, Monzo recently raised funds at a valuation of around $5bn and it’s reportedly on-track for a £6bn IPO. (Disclosure: I’m a Monzo shareholder).

And with more than 50m customers, Revolut recently raised money from Schroders at a $48bn valuation.

Such numbers dwarf the equivalents at most investing-only platforms.

To me, the idea that these UK-founded growth stars aren’t automatically looking at an LSE-listing is yet another inditement of how far Britain has fallen since 2016 .

This increasingly-endemic national lack of dynamism will hurt us all.

I know I’m a stuck record on this and it’s not joyous reading. I’m generally an optimistic person and the first ten years of this blog’s life reflected that. I can only call it as I see it.

I did have high hopes this time last year, but so far there’s been little acknowledgement of why we’re in this state, and only pointless conflicts as we fiddle around the margins.

At least the FTSE 100 is hitting all-time highs. Perhaps that’ll spark something.

Personally I just see an ongoing liquidation sale. The family silver being sold to US private equity at a 30% discount.

Still, up is up. And we can all make decisions to improve our own financial situation, whatever the backdrop. Being naughtily active, I’ve been overweight the UK for a couple of years now, simply on account of the value on offer.

This isn’t contradictory. The grim environment is exactly what creates the downbeat pricing and attracts the takeout offers.

My new side, side-hustle: a London property newsletter

Finally and on a completely different note, a quick plug for a new hobby of mine that will interest most of you even less than Bitcoin.

I’ve started a new London-focussed property newsletter – Propegator – over on SubStack.

Propegator is Weekend Reading but for houses. It’s London-centred because I live here, not because I’m a member of the metropolitan elite. And while I won’t totally ignore the reality of Britain’s broken property market, I will lean into a property pornographer’s take on the loveliest listings.

Which is to say: this will not be home-from-home for the frugalistas among you.

What can I say? In the two decades of pushing my nose up against the glass before I finally bought my own flat, I became a property addict. Call it Stockholm Syndrome.

Also, in another life I’d have been an architect. (How’s that for a post-FIRE aspiration?)

I guess I outed myself with my South Kensington speculations the other week anyway.

Like and subscribe

About a quarter of Monevator readers live in and around the capital. Hence why I’m flagging this property newsletter here. I hope some of you enjoy it and subscribe.

Propegator won’t grow into a Monevator 2.0. It’s more that I read so many stories to compile these links each week that I hope I can almost bolt on another almost effortlessly.

Well, that and a newsletter helps me justify all the time I spend on The Modern House.

Have a great weekend.

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1. For what it’s worth, like most pundits I think Ethereum and perhaps Solana have a future, and a few stablecoins look like they are going to make it. I have zero conviction about – and presently little interest in – everything else. [↩]