Looking back on our wedding, everything appears very cheapskate, and I suppose it was, even by 1983 standards. This didn’t matter to us then, and still wouldn’t today. We are both naturally thrifty and we love a bargain and I know that we would both struggle being married to anyone who had a different financial outlook. It is only in recent years that we’ve reached the stage where we can afford better things, but I learned many years ago that having ‘stuff’ doesn’t actually make me happy. However, having quality stuff is important to me, with my definition of quality being ‘fit for purpose’. Therefore, I won’t spend money on something just because it’s expensive; I will look at the underlying value and decide what makes it expensive and whether I’m prepared to pay for that. If I can see where the costs are incurred, I don’t mind paying more for something. Geraldine has a very similar outlook.
I have always sought the financial security that we have now attained, but even today we still seek out cheap holiday breaks, make our cars last 6+ years and hunt for the reduced stickers in supermarkets. It makes us look mean, but neither of us care, and the children will benefit when they come to inherit.
In the early days of my childhood, money was definitely short. My parents never had any spare cash, and I always felt guilty asking for things, even simple, inexpensive items. I can still hear my mum’s answer when I would be perhaps eight years old and feeling peckish mid evening. “Can I have a jam butty, Mum?” I would ask. “If you must”, came the reply, delivered in a disappointed tone that was part sigh, and would make me feel hugely guilty. Very often, this guilt would take the edge off my hunger and I’d go without. Even today, anything I eat between meals tastes of guilt. If asked, my dad always offered an alternative proposal. His recommendation was to go to bed and get up early for breakfast which, he prophesied, I would enjoy all the more through being ready for it. By such things we are formed.
At secondary school, I never asked my parents whether I would be allowed to go away on any trips or holidays, because I knew that they would struggle to afford it, and I didn’t want them doing without because of me. I was happier just telling the teachers and my friends that I didn’t want to go. This was made a little easier because some of my best friends were in the same boat. Mick Sutton was one such friend who shared a similar background. There was one inexpensive trip to which we both signed up, however, and that was the annual sponsored walk around the Three Peaks of Yorkshire. This took place each year during the May half term, and Mick and I first went in 1973. For some reason, I can clearly recall Mick approaching the bus taking us to Yorkshire when a thermos flask fell out of his rucksack and smashed. He looked devastated, but then just shrugged, dropped the flask in a litter bin and boarded the bus saying “Well, that’s less for me to carry”. We set off about 8am travelling in a beat-up school bus (it had a bonnet!) to the Pen-y-Ghent café at Horton-in-Ribblesdale. I remember being very tired the first year, but proud that I’d done it in much fewer than the 12 hour target. I raised sponsorship, and in the first year, this totalled £5.10 from 32 sponsors – an average of 15.5p each! I went on this walk every year from 1973 until 1976, even though I’d left school by then. In the final year, I was walking round in less than eight hours.
When I started at St Mary’s, the school sent out a list of the items that boys would require from day one. These included a blazer, grey or white shirts, grey shorts, socks, a school tie, a school cap, black shoes, an overcoat, a PE kit comprising shorts, vest, socks, and pumps, two football kits (away and home) including boots, a duffle bag to carry the sports kit and a satchel or briefcase for the books. In 1970, the cost of the uniform clothing was £35 7s 6d. My dad might have been earning about £15 per week at that time, so before I could even start school (on a scholarship, note!) my parents had to fork out the equivalent of around £1,200 in 2016 terms.
It didn’t help that my carelessness meant that I managed to lose my football kit during the first term. I’d played perhaps three matches (and hated every one) before I left my duffle bag on the bus coming home and saw neither it nor its contents ever again. Mum couldn’t afford to buy me a new kit, so I’ve never played football since. Instead, whenever there was PE, I had to do something other than football, and the alternative was often a cross-country run. This again moulded my character, because the kids who weren’t good enough for football were often the fat, lazy and uncoordinated ones (I’m probably not allowed to say that now, but I could then!), and so I was initially categorised within this group. It soon became clear to the teachers that I was neither fat, lazy nor uncoordinated, just careless, and this wasn’t an impairment to becoming quite a good runner. I never really enjoyed running, not like I enjoyed cycling, but I found that I could keep up with the fast guys without much effort.
The start of my distance running on the track was due to a prank at school. As a joke, some clown had entered the names of my entire form for the 1500m event in the school’s annual sports day in 1973. Many people simply didn’t bother to start, but I did and finished very creditably. I can’t remember whether I won, or just appeared in the top three. Using modern Olympic-commentator parlance, I ‘medalled’. In my final year at school, as well as taking the 1500m gold medal at sports day (in a time of 4m 50s), I also ran for the Blackburn Town Team at the Lancashire cross country championships. I came 33rd overall, out of (I think) 70 runners. I remember that I was 3rd fastest in Blackburn at that time.
Returning to my football kit for a moment, Mum never actually bought me any football boots. Instead, she came across a pair of leather boots which fit where they touched. I’ve no idea where they came from, but they looked to be of 1950s vintage and probably belonged in a museum even then. I remember my dad buying some new leather studs for them which had to be nailed into position. I was laughed at for wearing these and I certainly wasn’t sorry to see them go.
I received spending money when I was at primary school. Mum gave me two shillings per week (10p) which I would often spend by going to the swimming baths in Brinscall. This was a 6d (2½p) bus ride each way, 6d into the baths with 6d left over. I could have spen all the remainder on sweets at the shop adjacent to the baths, but more often, I would spend just a penny or perhaps even a ha’penny and save the rest. I had a Trustee Savings Bank (TSB) account from my earliest days, and used to deposit money there whenever I could. Thriftiness appeared to be instinctive for me from a very early age.
I have owned a car since I was 17, and my first one was a 7-year-old Vauxhall Viva, bought for £500 from my brother. I probably paid far too much for it, but it ran well, was as reliable as cars were in those days, and is still a very attractive car. I sold it privately two years later. My desire for value for money let me down for the next two car purchases. I bought cheap cars which had had, shall we say, a chequered history. They were reasonably new, but I’d have been far better off buying an older, more reliable vehicle. It took several years for me to realise that the cheapest option isn’t always the most inexpensive long term. It was about 25 years ago when I first heard the phrase “The quality is remembered long after the price is forgotten” and I thought then, as I do now, that it makes absolute sense. Since then, this philosophy has acted as my guide whenever I make any capital purchase, so that I now only buy good quality things that will last.
Geraldine and I have always considered our house as the main item on which we don’t mind spending money. My dad had always owned his own home, and advised his children to do the same, and never pay rent. He told me from a very early age that I would need a 10% deposit for a house, and saving up for this was a goal of mine from when I first started work. I fancied owning a semi-detached house, never a terrace. Three-bedroomed semis in Chorley were going for about £18k – £20k in 1982, so I knew that I needed a £2000 deposit. By 1982 I had managed to save more than this amount, so when we started house hunting, our budget was actually £22,000, the value being limited by the size of mortgage the banks were prepared to offer. The house at 21 Carleton Road was link detached (it was detached, but linked to the next house by a carport) and had initially been offered at £28,000, well out of our range. The building company who had taken it in part exchange for a new house decided they wanted a swift sale and so the price was reduced to £21,950. We moved quickly and were offered a mortgage of £18,750 which, with my savings, meant it could be ours. From that moment on, I had every reason to thank Dad for his sound advice. We were mortgaged to the limit, had very little savings left, but were both working and were on our way to owning our very our own detached house at the ages of just 23 and 22.
Good financial husbandry and inexpensive holidays over the next five years, coupled with significant pay increases, meant that we were looking to move again in 1987. We were very happy at Carleton Road, but all our friends seemed to be moving houses and changing jobs, and we found ourselves being swept along on the tide of materialism prevalent at the time. We weren’t ‘yuppies’ (young urban professionals) who were grabbing the headlines at the time with their excesses, but we were happy to be classed as ‘dinky’s’ (double income, no kids yet), and moving up the housing market was what we were expected to do.
We had a near miss with one property after we had sold our own house in 1987. We were about to make an offer for a bungalow on Town Lane (very close to Gee’s parents) and had paid several hundred pounds for a full structural survey. My face fell when I read the report. There were serious problems with the roof and several other aspects meaning that we would need to reduce our offer by £5k to cover the repair costs if we were to proceed. I was dead against this option, never really liking the location, it being too close to the M61 motorway, so we pulled out of the sale, and urgently began house hunting once more.
We found a suitable property in Brindle, and we were very enthusiastic about it, but before we could act, our own sale fell through, and so we had to re-market our property. It was with a heavy heart that I flipped off the ‘sold’ sign from the board in front of the house late one evening. As luck would have it, that very same night, a police officer patrolling the estate noticed that our house was once more up for sale, and so she and her partner (also a police officer) visited the following weekend, and made us an acceptable offer. The house we liked in Brindle had been sold by then, but three others had come up for sale on the same estate, and the cheapest one was almost within our price range. A bit of cheeky bargaining reduced the price by £2,000 to make 30, Smithy Close affordable, and by March 1988, we had moved to our new home.
Geraldine and I always look with puzzlement at people who live in tiny properties and yet have large, expensive cars sitting on the drive that are out of proportion to the value of the property. In extreme cases, the cars cost almost as much as the house, which we feel is crazy. Our view is that the house should be where your money goes, not on fancy cars which just depreciate. We spend the greatest proportion of our waking hours in the house, not in the car, and even the cheapest cars now are supremely reliable and luxurious compared to what we were used to. Consequently, we have spent quite a lot of money upgrading and improving our house over the years. Whether the costs have increased the value to the same amount is debatable, but we aren’t improving the house for anyone but ourselves, so unless and until we move, this doesn’t matter. In the last 25 years we have watched the value of the property increase and also decline in real terms. For two consecutive years (in 1988 and 1989), our house earned more than I did, its value doubling soon after we purchased it. It’s crazy to think of a piece of real estate as being the primary breadwinner in our family for a short period, but the house price boom in those times was crazy.
Geraldine and I have always worked, being lucky enough never to have been out of a well-paid job. I say ‘well-paid’, although I’m conscious that our salaries were never huge, but I’ve always felt that we were comfortable. The early days saw quite a bit of belt-tightening as we took on large mortgages, and, when the children arrived, their needs took priority, but we were never short of anything important.
I have always been fiercely independent and hate asking others for anything, and so I am especially proud of the fact that everything we own, we’ve paid for ourselves. Occasionally, my parents would lend me a few quid when I was younger, but since I left home, I have fended for myself entirely. Even when we inherited some money from Gee’s relations and later, when our parents passed away, we invested this unearned income and it remains untouched. We paid off our mortgage in September 2007 after the initial 25-year term expired. Additional loans were timed to finish at the same time as the initial mortgage, apart from one which was due to be paid off in 2019. However, the endowment policy we took out in 1982 for the first mortgage was sufficient to pay for all the outstanding loans. Not all endowment policies were bad, you will note.
I am conscious that having said that I have fended for myself all my life, so much of this has been founded on good fortune. I had supportive parents who taught me the value of money; I have been lucky enough to have received a good education and always been in work; I have suffered no major traumas causing serious disruption to my comfortable life. I realise (and appreciate) that in other circumstances, my life would not have been nearly so blessed.