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

How would you know? Are you speaking from personal experience or just assuming?

it will generally be true for any high earning competitive professional career. It’s obviously not something you have experience of. It’s fine not to understand but stop the sneering

yes, op is not particularly pleasant. In my particular profession, part of the issue is losing current knowledge but also there’s a stigma which tends to stop you getting senior roles with any kind of career gap. I don’t think that’s necessarily justified, but either way, if I’d taken years out, I would have been lucky to get another job in my profession. That’s just reality

It’s tiny - read the article, it would give you a pension of £1500 a year. Peanuts.

£50,000 is not a small pension pot when the average is £37,000 on retirement.

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/money-mentor/pensions-retirement/private-pension/pension-pot-amount-average-uk-how-much

That poster gave 4 alternative examples. I'm not sure why you're pretending to struggling with this concept so much.

Correct. It's not a "high earner" wage

You can disagree with it as much as you like, but those are the facts on the ground for anyone taking multiple years off. Which explains why people generally don’t, even if they would be financially much better off leaving work and going on UC for those years. Which you apparently didn’t believe could possibly be the case a couple of pages back.

Hopefully now you understand why people stay in work anyway despite being much worse off in the short term.

Thats odd. I don’t see that in what you quoted. I see reference to it being “entirely possible” for a career to be over, but I don’t see a poster saying her career WILL DEFINITELY be over.

Regardless, it’s a small semantic difference.

You don’t seem to grasp that if you lose your licence to practice (by being out of practice for a number of years) there simply isn’t a route back in. Maybe there ought to be, but there isn’t. You can’t apply for a job without a licence to practice. You can’t regain your licence to practice without evidence of current safe practising. There are no tests you can take to prove you are still safe, no retraining pathways. Once you are out, you are out. A lot of women leave medicine in general, and surgery in particular, because they can’t afford childcare for the antisocial hours they need unless they are married to another high earner.

There was a GP retainer scheme (for returning GPs, not surgeons) but that was scrapped about 20 years ago. Now if you leave, it’s a one-way trip and you have to find a new career. I suspect law, accountancy and other regulated professions such as dentistry and physiotherapy are similar.

Generally the more people complain about deteriorating standards of living, the better. This is particularly true when it comes to those considered aspirational/‘well off’ - aka people that political parties are actively courting.

People SHOULD be complaining. That people are struggling to afford their wants as well as their needs (and wants aren’t in fact a bad thing to aspire to unless you’re in favour of an entirely utilitarian existence), when they have previously been able to cover those expenses, is indicative of a much larger problem.

’People that make more than me should shut up and suck it up!’ just reads like a desire to see others brought low, rather than actually wanting to see the issues vocalized in the hope of improving things across the board.

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.

If you’ve seen it happen to many others, it’s reasonable to assume your career would be over. Maybe the poster had seen it happen.

i guess it depends how much disposable income you have at the end of the month, and this has affected all people. Therefore, if you had a few hundred spare each month, then increased mortgage costs, food costs, energy bills etc is going to make you ‘feel poor’. It’s comparative to how you were before. It doesn’t mean you are poor, just that you are feeling less affluent then you were before.

I’ve posted before that it would be good to have a board for higher earners who can ask questions about financial issues, tax, difficulties with money etc without being judged and shouted down.

Despite being a higher earner I’ve found myself living pay check to pay check recently and I’d be interested in hearing from others who are/were in a similar position and the kinds of tactics they used to mange money better. But I’m certain the thread would be derailed by people accusing me of being insensitive, boastful or ‘goading’ people who survive on a low income.

Do you not even recognise the irony in what you are saying, from your own example?

I know a woman who had a 20 year old gap from working in tech and still managed to get a job. She gave a talk about it at a women in tech event.

People don’t give talks at events about things that are routine. She was giving the talk because it is unusual 🙄

And, just to spell it out further. A job is not a career. A job is the paid activity you are doing in the moment. A career is the trajectory or path through a series of related jobs showing progression. So if you halt that trajectory you are, by definition, damaging your career. When you return you may find you can’t get that momentum going again, and you are stuck in a job with little or no progression. This is what people mean when they say their “career is over”. Yes, they can get a job, but not necessarily have a career

£60k no fortune? 🙄

It can mean your career is over. What do you think career progression looks like for older women with a career break, mothers in particular? A job is not a career, and they're not high earners anymore, so you've got nothing to whinge about.

It absolutely would in my profession - you lose your professional registration if you can’t demonstrate you are maintaining your skills every year. Would you want lifesaving surgery done by somebody who last picked up a scalpel in 2018?

I suspect most other regulated professions are the same. You live a very sheltered life if you aren’t aware of that.

This is a batshit example. That guy earns the same as me but there’s no way I could afford the dogs AND my mortgage and childcare fees. Nor could most people on the same wage. Don’t cite people like him as the norm, he is not.