One of mine lived for months in a rooming house without having a room, she slept on a landing. A lifestyle one might think economical even by your standards.

<Yorkshire accent>
Luxury...

The blunt truth is that for most of us middle-aged folks, it's not our brains or our hard work that got us whatever we've got, it's inflation. The "curse" that actually made our debts disappear.

Partly true. But brains and/or hard work are usually required to obtain the debt that will vanish.

Cue violins

I left home at 18 and lived in hospital accommodation for 2 and a half years. That's a room and sharing a bathroom and kitchen with umpteen others. I then lived in a bedsit room that measured 8 x 10 feet. Sink and hot plate in the room, metered electricity, no central heating, and bathroom shared with the other residents. After 2 years of working 50 hours a week and still having very little money I moved out of London and bought a flat. My dad gave me the deposit with the proviso that if I ever married he wouldn't have pay for it.
I moved back to London as soon as I could but downsized and upmortgaged to a studio flat.
So no I didn't have it easy but it was certainly easier with help from my parents.
Oh and the only mortgage I was able to get as a single woman was at a higher interest rate than that that a single man would have paid.

You were lucky. We lived for three months in a brown paper bag in a septic tank. We used to have to get up at six o'clock in the morning, clean the bag, eat a crust of stale bread, go to work down mill for fourteen hours a day week in-week out. When we got home, our Dad would thrash us to sleep with his belt!

You must have lived in the south to have afforded a septic tank, and paper bags... we had to save up for two years to afford a paper bag. But life was good, we got a helping of turd cake twice a week and three times at christmas when the vicar cleaned out the pig sty. Getting up at six in the morning? Luxury, we never slept, worked 24 hour days resting when we could on the furnace slag heap having to dodge the fires when the furnace tapped. We were paid tuppence 'alfpenny a fortnight and at the end of the month, if the gods were good, we had a farthing left over to squander at the local wher it bought an half pint of vinegar.

It's pansy southerners like you that give the working man a bad name.

That was luxury.
When I was a bit older we used to have to get out of the lake at three o'clock in the morning, clean the lake, eat a handful of hot gravel, go to work at the mill every day for tuppence a month, come home, and Dad would beat us around the head and neck with a broken bottle, if we were LUCKY!

Lucky.. We couldn't afford luck. and your lake, at least it was water. We had to chew the slag on the heap and spit out the metal that'd escaped. It wore our teeth to the bone and we had to hammer shards of flint into our cheekbones to keep going or we'd starve. It was cold in the winter and summer up north, and sometimes our flint teeth froze freeze to the heap, hot gravel never got further north than Grantham. .

OK you win

We were so poor we couldn't afford a Dad

Superb, both of you !

I started it... post 92. It's almost as if you're not familiar with Python's sketch.

Very familiar with it. But I think Danny & Dave deserve the Blue Parrot award for taking it to the next level!

From today's Guardian.
My daughter blew through £1,200 in two weeks at university
Shocked that her student daughter seemed to need an income of £600 a week, Anthea Rowan decided to turn off the money tap and lay down some home truths about entitlement and growing up

"Should have helped her out." Ma obviously has a wealthy set of friends.