Note: All conversions represent relative values in the year cited.
● I started work on Monday August 19, 1951, aged 15 years and 360 days. My weekly pay (cash in a small brown envelope) was £1-10 shillings ($1.95).
● Emerging from RAF national service in 1957 my weekly pay was £5 ($6.55).
● Leaving the UK for work in the USA in late 1965 my annual pay was (I think) £1250 ($3488). In Pittsburgh it zoomed up to $6000 (£2150).
● I left the USA in 1972 when my annual pay was (nominally – I didn’t see all of it at the end; the company was slowly dying) $14,000 (£5479).
● I returned to the UK in 1972 and an annual salary of £2500 ($6388).
● Between 1972 and 1995 I worked for the same company and enjoyed progressive rises, retiring on £31,000 pa ($48,447).
● It’s at this point I become a little shy. The pension scheme I belonged to between 1972 – 1995 was generous though I, like many people still working, was ignorant of this. When it came it was – putting it genteelly – a pleasant surprise. I was unbelievably lucky, luckier still as the ‘oughties rolled on and pensions elsewhere became meaner and qualification periods grew longer. Mustn’t gloat. Our lives changed.
● Between 1995 and 1998, pensioned off, waiting for VR to retire, I wrote freelance, earning annually £12,000 ($20,394). All tax paid.
● Six years in the USA led to a Trump mini-pension: presently £3000 ($3961).
There’s more (regarding investments), but now I feel I need my undies.
Quote from VR: "I read your (ie, this) post. It was quite interesting. But what readers would really like to know is your financial situation. now."
Tis true! An unexpected and gigantic tsunami. Keep on refusing to comment on Tone Deaf and I may feel compelled to tell all.
You started working before I was born. Interesting to hear what the going rates were over the years. I earned minimum wage when I had my first ever job in 1968. I believe I earned $1.60 per hour.
ReplyDeleteColette: Old and frail, gilded, cloistered most days in my study, unstoppably talkative of an evening. What a catch I'd be for some unscrupulous gold-digger were I not coming up to The Big Sixty.
ReplyDeleteIt is fascinating to see what people could live on and earn a living with not really that many Years ago. When moving I found some old paperwork that included some receipts for items and I was astonished at how cheap a lot of things were {necessities}, whereas Luxury items were overpriced back then... so few had them.
ReplyDeleteBohemian: We were only truly poor during 1963 - 1965. Living in London, a recently born daughter, baby-sitting (during the day) for a neighbour. On Sunday evening, as a treat, I used to buy a litre of very cheap red wine costing 10 shillings and sixpence (this was before the UK went metric). Say $1.50. The sole source of heating in our apartment was a paraffin stove; the rooms had high ceilings and were impossible to heat. We slept with pullovers over our PJs. At the end of 1965 I left for a job in Pittsburgh and lived in the Y (at $13.50 a week) for a couple of months before the family could join me. I rented an apartment in the 'burbs, it was centrally heated; we thought we'd died and gone to heaven.
ReplyDeleteI have been Poor and I've been Successful, Successful is better, more Options. *LOL* I've been Homeless once, right after a Divorce, with a Newborn and a Four Year Old in tow... so I am appreciative of Privileges I now enjoy and have a point of reference for those going thru the worst of times. It humbles you to have experienced the lows, knowing it can happen to anyone at any time. I've lived in some sketchy places and I've lived in Luxurious ones... I rather like the areas where Working Class people live, the Affluent tend to be quite pretentious and selfish from my observations and experience. Those who don't have much will typically Share whatever they have. I once heard Mother Teresa say that the difference in India was that a Poor Man with only one Banana would Gracefully Share it, and in America those with all the Bananas want them all for themselves and can never have enough. There is much Truth to that. Having Traveled the World, some of the Countries with the most Gift of Hospitality were the Poorest ones.
DeleteBohemian: I've tried on the whole not to assess myself in terms of wealth, rather in terms of freedom. The worst thing about poverty is that it imprisons. Just recently wealth seems to have accumulated and it's been fun spending it on others. Not forgetting, of course, that this can seem patronising to those who are in receipt of it.
DeleteThe thing that worries me is that our US neighbours in Pittsburgh and Philly were extremely generous then. Now, generosity of spirit as well as of cash, seems in short supply. Of course there are millions of people to be considered, they're not all Trump followers. But so many are bloody well dying.
The numbers feel so curious to us now...
ReplyDeleteI've been remembering how little children had, growing up. A few books and toys and lots of playing outside...
Marly: My 1966 US salary, $6000, seemed like untold wealth. On one occasion I found myself lending money to an American I worked with; he needed it badly and didn't enjoy begging. Nor did my restrictions please him. Instead of handing over a lump sum, I paid off his outstanding bills, perhaps suggesting I didn't trust him. Cash is so often crass, isn't it?
ReplyDeleteThe following year I was head-hunted, offered a salary of $10,000. I should perhaps have felt gratified but I wasn't. It seemed like the sort of that might happen in the USA. As it was it all ended in hilarious tears and I have dined out on the details ever since.
"It is said most male Brits would rather reveal the intimacies of their sex life than their earnings." Same in the states. Rich or poor.
ReplyDeletezzi: Well come on, expand on that a little. There is no virtue in comments that imitate the shortness of your cybername.
ReplyDeleteWhen I lived and worked in Japan right after college, I would shock myself everytime I opened my wallet and found 1000 and 5000 Yen notes staring at me!
ReplyDeleteZu Schwer: Welcome back. I am not entirely sure whether Tone Deaf is formatted in Old Blogger or New Blogger. Tone Deaf Renewed is definitely in New Blogger.
ReplyDeleteIn 1965, before we left for whatever the future held in the USA, we did a grand tour of Europe, including the cluster of countries previously known as Yugoslavia. The exchange was £1 = 3600 dinars and the coinage went right down to a single dinar. Some of the lower-value coins were made of aluminium and we used to skim them out into the harbour as we walked back to the farmhouse in Novi Vinodolski where we staying.
The last thing they want to tell you, is how much they earn. Some might blurt it out on a date, hoping to get lucky, with a little inflation added in. People I know use a % way of talking. Do you remember the Columbo ep. He ask the guy how much was his property tax, to figure the house price.
ReplyDeletegeemail: I suppose Bezos and that other guy who looks like a defrocked priest are presently arm-wrestling each other as to who will be the first trillionaire. Me, I'd take pleasure in writing out all the zeroes.
ReplyDelete