How much will a lifetime cost you?

This is Money Podcast

This is Money

Business News, Business, Investing, News

4.1 • 650 Ratings

🗓️ 3 December 2021

⏱️ 61 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

We’ve all felt it, that moment when you look at your bank balance and think ‘I’ve spent how much?’

But what if you looked at an entire lifetime’s worth of spending? What would the damage be and how painful would that number feel?

According to a recent piece of research by Atom Bank, the cost of living an entire near 81-year lifetime in 2021 would be a whopping £1,543,834.

That includes £169,159 spent on children, £266,742 on buying the average house and £69,793 on Christmases.

The bank compared the figures to what the same lifetime would have cost at a 1971 snapshot, with £14,738 on children, £2,371 on the average house, and £4,177 on Christmases.

Beyond highlighting just how much house prices have skyrocketed in 50 years – if they had only kept pace with standard inflation the average home would cost £38,000 – what does this tell us?

On this week’s podcast, Georgie Frost, Lee Boyce and Simon Lambert discuss that and why a snapshot like this – vaguely precise as it may be – can help us understand how inflation works and how it can drive up prices.

Lee picks out the inflation across each decade to show that and Atom’s figures that see the cost of the average lifetime rise to £19.2million by 2071 sharpen the mind.

Inflation is looking large again, but Omicron has made it look like a Bank of England interest rate hike may be back off the table this month.

The team discuss that and whether the variant and restrictions to tackle it will cause more economic problems and what those with travel plans can do.

Next up is the Great Resignation – another phenomenon thrust to the foreground by the pandemic – what’s going on, why are people quitting and should you stay or go to get a pay rise and better working conditions?

And finally, is your home hotter than Lanzarote? It’s cold and frosty outside, but inside a surprising number of British homes it’s shorts and t-shirt weather.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to This is Money Podcast. I'm Georgie Frost and joining me and editor Simon Lambert today is Deputy Editor Lee Boyce.
0:06.7	And coming up, how much will you spend during your lifetime? Will Omicron derail a potential pre-Christmas interest rate hike?
0:15.1	Will it derail Christmas altogether? We talk travel restrictions and PCRs and what's happened to shares.
0:21.4	Tempt to join the Great Resignation, or is it wiser to stay put for better pay, conditions and
0:26.8	flexibility? And is your home hotter than Lanzarotti? Don't be getting set up to date with all the
0:31.9	latest breaking money news. Just go to this ismoney.com.uk or download the app at first. We know life is expensive.
0:41.0	But have you ever thought about exactly how much? When you todded all up, how much do you reckon
0:46.8	you will spend during your lifetime on things like buying a home, raising kids, holidays,
0:51.8	going to the pub, going out to the restaurants, whatever you spend your money on.
0:55.7	Well, Attenbank has done a little bit of number currently, and they've come up with a figure
0:58.9	£1.5 million during an average lifetime now.
1:06.2	And they've done so to show the impact of the rising cost of living.
1:14.6	So in 1971, that figure would have been 80,000. But if you think 1.5 million is a lot, feel sorry for our grandkids.
1:19.6	Because if inflation carries on the way it is, by 2017, that figure would be 19 million pounds.
1:30.0	Lee, what is this research about?
1:32.9	19 million pounds said in Dr. Evil Voice.
1:37.5	It's research that Atom Bank have done here,
1:40.1	and I'm going to say this,
1:41.5	I would take this research of probably a silo of salt rather than a pinch of salt because it's very difficult to really ascertain how much you're going to spend over a lifetime.
1:51.2	There's so many variables.
1:52.8	I mean, it's just an incredible amount of variables really.
1:55.5	But they've looked at the average UK life expectancy of 80.7 years and they've tried to top up looking at everything that you're
	...

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