{"id":442896,"date":"2025-09-22T08:48:15","date_gmt":"2025-09-22T08:48:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/442896\/"},"modified":"2025-09-22T08:48:15","modified_gmt":"2025-09-22T08:48:15","slug":"six-ordinary-people-speak-candidly-about-the-cost-of-living-in-britain","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/442896\/","title":{"rendered":"Six ordinary people speak candidly about the cost of living in Britain"},"content":{"rendered":"

Income<\/strong>
\u00a30 salary; \u00a3250,000 a year from investments<\/strong><\/p>\n

Housing costs<\/strong>
renting, about \u00a35,800 a month, all-in<\/strong><\/p>\n

Savings<\/strong>
undisclosed<\/strong><\/p>\n

Biggest expense<\/strong>
\u00a33,000 a month on travel<\/strong><\/p>\n

Donations<\/strong>
\u00a36,000 a year<\/strong><\/p>\n

I have a coffee with Tim Stumpff, 61, at GQ\u2019s offices in central London, in a meeting room overlooking the Thames. \u201cIt feels funny sitting here talking to someone on behalf of GQ, because we don\u2019t spend money on clothes and we\u2019re not fashionistas by any stretch,\u201d he says. Today, Stumpff is wearing a secondhand navy raincoat, with an unflashy blue and white checked shirt. \u201cWe purposely don\u2019t own a house. We don\u2019t own cars. We don\u2019t fly very much at all, trying to keep our carbon footprint down, so there\u2019s no feeling of, \u2018Oh yeah, I\u2019d circle the earth five times in an aeroplane or I\u2019d buy another house.\u2019 I don\u2019t want any of that.\u201d<\/p>\n

Stumpff retired from paid work in asset management four years ago, and he and his wife live on their savings and investments. He says their investments net them about \u00a3250,000 per year at the moment.<\/p>\n

Stumpff was initially hesitant about taking part in this story. \u201cI took a while thinking it through. It\u2019s just one of those things, culturally, you don\u2019t really talk about it,\u201d he says. \u201cIt feels weird to share the specifics, and the thought that it would be out in the public for the world to see. But then you gotta think, well, why should we care about it? One of the benefits of getting older is I\u2019m like, \u2018Someone\u2019s gonna think this is about me? OK, whatever.\u2019 Money gets misidentified as a marker for other stuff, but it\u2019s not a marker of intelligence or the quality of a person, or if they\u2019re hard-working. The wealthy, miserable gits who are leaders of the world, right? They\u2019re not smart, they\u2019re not good people.\u201d<\/p>\n

Stumpff grew up in a small town in Missouri, \u201cdecidedly middle class\u201d, with two teachers for parents. \u201cWe weren\u2019t at risk,\u201d he explains, \u201cbut we didn\u2019t have money to throw around. They were both children of the Depression, very frugal. Never bought a new car, never travelled on a plane. I don\u2019t remember ever eating in a restaurant<\/a>.\u201d He says he attended a local college on a basketball scholarship (he\u2019s 6ft 9in) and has \u201cbumped around\u201d ever since. He went to Harvard Law School and graduated in 1990, he tells me, with about $100,000 of debt. He then lived in Alaska, then a tiny island in Micronesia, then Washington DC<\/a>, Iowa and Oregon, to name a few. Stumpff moved to the UK 11 years ago, partly so his three now-adult children could get a more rounded perspective on life.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn the US, rightly or wrongly, [money] is an 800lb gorilla in the room, economically, culturally,\u201d he says. To his mind, it\u2019s just as sensitive a topic there as it is here. \u201cBut certainly I think it\u2019s more tied in with class issues here, and that seems to be a much more sensitive subject here than in the US.\u201d<\/p>\n

He and his wife now spend their time on philanthropic work, particularly around decarbonisation and assistance for refugees<\/a>. They don\u2019t have to worry about money in the sense of thinking about where the next paycheque is coming from or covering increased costs of living. But Stumpff does worry about money and how it works in the world. \u201cThe big thing for me is the stockpiling of extreme wealth. You can look back 50 years or so, and there\u2019s been a massive shift from public wealth and publicly owned assets to private wealth.\u201d He\u2019s right, and it\u2019s been especially bad recently \u2013 the UK wealth gap widened even further during the Covid crisis. \u201cJust economically, if you want a better, healthier, more active, growing economy, that stockpiling is not good for that,\u201d says Stumpff. \u201cIt ought to get out and get in people\u2019s pockets, who will spend it in their communities. The other impact of this that I worry about is that the number of people that are going to food banks has just ratcheted out of sight, the number of people who can\u2019t afford to heat their homes right now. I\u2019m really quite worried\u2026 if we don\u2019t start fixing it really quickly, we\u2019re going to be relearning some really painful, ugly, miserable lessons.\u201d Stumpff\u2019s parents may have been children of the Depression, but he is decidedly the grandchild of it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Income\u00a30 salary; \u00a3250,000 a year from investments Housing costsrenting, about \u00a35,800 a month, all-in Savingsundisclosed Biggest expense\u00a33,000 a…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":442897,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5018,3,4],"tags":[748,393,149697,4884,388,1144,285,712,16,15,1764],"class_list":{"0":"post-442896","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-britain","8":"category-uk","9":"category-united-kingdom","10":"tag-britain","11":"tag-england","12":"tag-gq-politics","13":"tag-great-britain","14":"tag-lifestyle","15":"tag-northern-ireland","16":"tag-politics","17":"tag-scotland","18":"tag-uk","19":"tag-united-kingdom","20":"tag-wales"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/115247088040487477","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/442896","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=442896"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/442896\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/442897"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=442896"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=442896"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=442896"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}