To be fed up with all the threads about high earners feeling poor

Nice try – but my kids don’t go to private school and I don’t live in a million pound pad.

What I actually said was having to take your kid out of a school is shit. If you don’t think children unwillingly moving from their school is shit for a family, then you’re a crap addition to the human race.

Who mentioned five holidays? No one. You did. Can you link the thread where anyone has been complaining about this specifically? No.

Stop exaggerating what people worry about to suit your bitterness. Sympathy is not a finite entity.

Who said anything about it being ‘equally’ as hideous? No one expect you. And therein lies your hang up and bitterness. Is there only one kind of ‘difficult’ all of a sudden? Or is someone facing removing their child from school or moving from their family home not allowed to find it quite shit?

No one has a monopoly on finding things difficult. Moving kids from any school if they don’t want to go is shit. Full stop. Having to move home is shit. Full stop.

Get over yourself.

This whole thread embodies the very worst things and people on mumsnet. 🙄

Its seriously annoying when people are moaning when financially comfortable. I have relatives like that. If you listen to them you'd thing they're starving and freezing after their 5th holiday abroad.

YABU. "High" earning is both subjective and relative. On paper, we are 'high' earners. In reality, due to trussonomics, I don't have enough money to feed my children this month and it's going on a credit card. Which is nearly maxed out.

But we must be fine because DH fell into the higher rate tax bracket last tax year, right? (It left us with less money than the year before, when he earned £10k less).

It's a reference to remind people that it's some of the lowest paid and least respected jobs are the ones that are relied upon by everyone including the higher earners, to make everything work, and that became very apparent during COVID because they were the ones still going to a physical location to do the work because it couldn't be done anywhere else. It was that or the service/whatever didn't operate, despite those that could work from home to assist with that being able to do so - without boots on the ground so to speak, there'd have been no need for the people WFH orchestrating it all.

That work is as valid a contribution as a financial one, just not valued by some who are quite likely using those services to their own benefit because they feel superior due to their higher income. Some people need to be aware of that, because they seem to think they're the only ones who contribute anything.

People seriously need to quit with this. Pretty much every group had some real challenges in the lockdowns.
Some groups of healthcare workers I think had a particularly awful time (though not all healthcare workers did) but seriously the jobs that were done from home were needed as much as the ones on the ground to do things like manage supply chains. The only difference is some of those jobs you don’t have to be in a specific physical location for.

I hate to disillusion you but people have always said things like this, it's just that now instead of just boring their nearest and dearest with their whines they can become worldwide bores! Thanks Tim B-L.
I remember my mother saying about a neighbour going on about how 'lucky' I was to become a teacher, Mum told her The harder you work the luckier you become.
(Yes, I know it's not always possible but some people need shutting down)

Times are really fucking hideous for almost everyone right now. No one is immune from financial anxiety. Feeling compassionate towards a fellow human does not take away sympathy from you.

Surely people who start troll threads are by definition lacking in intellect or reason.
I don't think all these posters are necessarily trolling, just feeling the pinch a bit, and they're not used to it. So they feel that things are getting tough and want to vent.

As a high earner I am definitely suspicious of these posts and have come to the conclusion that they are either from trolls or fairly low socially intelligent ppl. By the latter, I mean high earners who have clearly made money by not needing to have much of a brain but are well skilled at what they do and can charge well for it or book smart people whose degrees have gotten them through good universities and into well paid jobs but again lack any wider intelligence (to be frank I think most politicians and civil servants fall under this category).

In law you can generally come back after a career break but many firms knock years off your pqe. So say you leave to have a baby when you have been qualified for 6 years. You might go back after a break and be treated as 3 years qualified (if you’re lucky).

I’ve never known anyone make partner after a significant break. Not to say it hasn’t happened but I can’t think of an example. It may be unusual for a woman who has taken a career break to want to make partner of course.

If you’re senior in law and in an area where businesses development is important you will lose much of your network and clients during a career break which makes it essentially impossible to go back at the same level.

I have known solicitors with a specialist or sought after skill set come back successfully after a break but they were paid as if they were barely qualified for years despite their work not reflecting that.

£50,000 is a very small pension pot. Assuming a person worked for 25 years, and not factoring in compound interest, it would mean the combined employee/employer contribution was only £2,000 per year, or £167 per month.

Speaking to friends and family, I always recommend people put in at least 5% of their salary, which a lot of employers match. For someone on £30,000 per year, that would be £3,000 annually into their pension pot, which when compounded would make a huge difference to their retirement.

This thread reflects what’s wrong with MN. The OP is very aggressive and doesn’t want to hear anyone’s view that goes against her own despite not having any life experience on the other side of it. Debate is great but tearing people down is not. Chill out. Don’t click. Be happy.

"Oh, and not liking the topic of a thread is a ‘you’ problem. That you can’t stop yourself from clicking on, reading about and engaging with topics that annoy you doesn’t in fact oblige anyone to stop talking about said topics"

Exactly. Some people seem to assume a weird ownership or over-identification with AIBU. They seem to have internalised an image that everyone here is like them, or should be. When in fact, this is the internet and, as such, will obviously reflect people from all walks of life.

Engaging in threads is not compulsory OP. This is not your home or family or friends. AIBU is not solely about you. It's millions of people.

This thread is hard to follow because everyone is talking at cross purposes.

Fully agree with all this. There's power in numbers. It does none of us any good if people refuse to identify structural problems because they happen not to sympathise with the people impacted by them.

And yes, people do actually need to take some responsibility for not clicking on things they know are going to bother them. There is an issue that comes up on here sometimes that I find very hard, so I make sure not to read threads whose titles make it 100% obvious that they're going to be discussing it. That's what you do when you're a grown up.

I think this will be true for any profession where you need to be "licensed" in a way.
I took a break for 18 months from my career, and even that was quite a headache to return from. My CPD, membership fees and professional liability insurance, to maintain the registration, were around 3K all in all, and there was no employer subsidy for these - and I am pretty sure that would be a significant sum for someone living purely on UC. On return, I was grilled to an extent where I needed to provide detailed bank statements to evidence how I was supporting myself during this time.

I gave examples in one of my previous posts. I have several friends who found it impossible to return to their positions in Tech, Fianance and Law after taking years out to have children. All have two children and previously held senior, high paying roles.

They tried to resume their careers and found that their qualifications and skills were not up to par. But studying to upskill often didn’t help because they’d been out of the workforce for a while and employees generally prefer to recruit someone who is currently working.

Of course it is not impossible for them to re-enter the workforce at all. There are likely jobs in supermarkets, warehouses, zero hour jobs etc that they could do. But that isn’t the point I’m making. It is the fact they cannot pick up where they left off within the profession they are trained in. Bottom line is, resuming work after a break to raise children incurs significant financial and professional penalties.

I’m not sure why this particular debate began. Was it because you said leaving work for a few years, living on Universal Credit and then returning to work is a viable option? It really isn’t for most people.

Because it doesn’t fit with her idea that professionals earning £50k spend their leisure time swimming in pools of gold coins like Scrooge McDuck.

That's a no then.