To get some perspective, here is a 1981 Argo catalogue, to show you what you could buy back then for that sort of money…. 🙂

Argos 1981

edit: love looking at these old catalogues. You play £300+ for a 20″ TV (in 1981 prices) and have to stump up and extra 60p to buy a plug for it 🙂

1985 YTS at Vickers in York, £27.50 a week, gave me mam a tenner out of it for my Kawasaki AR50. Always seemed to have money, how!

YTS money in ’88 made up to £50 a week (37 hours) as an apprentice steelwork draughtsman.
From memory statutory sick pay meant more money if you were off I’ll

1979 Apprentice joiner on the dizzy sum of £24 per week. Folks took £16 per week for digs.

Started on £9.5K in 1987.

Previous summer job was a computer programmer for the princely sum of £2/hr.

1st weeks wage for me as an apprentice plant/vehicle mechanic for (then) Durham Rural District Council in February 1972 was £7.26. My Mum let me keep it all.

First proper job started in October 1985 at £ 150 per week. Slightly more than doubled my take-home compared with the postgrad student grant I’d been on before.

1984 – the YTS paid £24.00 per week except the agricultural trades equivalent I was on was £15.00 iirc. Folks had £7.00 for house keeping.

1997 cushy civil service job – £15k per year
Minimal rent and living it up in Edinburgh – happy days

Worked a Saturday job at Marks & Spencers in MCR from 1979.£13 a day.Canteen lunch time M&S meal was a subsidised 5p with a staff voucher!
A pint of OB’s bitter at my local was 28p.My beer to wages ratio hasn’t really improved that much 🙁

£1.94 p/hr stacking shelves in Morrison’s at 15 in 1995. A year later I got a job in the hospital laundry paying £3.47, I couldn’t believe my luck! (If I didn’t get that job, I probably wouldn’t be where I am today, so more lucky than I realised at the time.)