Have converted old wages into current day value, how did people survive with such little money? I tried searching for this, seems like a difficult question to search for. Take two examples, (one admittedly from a fiction but still accurate I would think). I seem to remember my grandad told me he got paid £5 a week in ww2 for being a messenger, this comes to  about £600 a month in today's value. Then in a tv series I was watching called peaky blinders (based in 1920s), the main character offers his secretary £8 4 shillings a month. This comes to about £250 a month today. I guess the £600 a month could just about scrape by with basically no spare money, but the second example doesn't seem possible. Am I missing something?