To ask what your life would look like on 60k

It's over 20k more a year for my house hold of 4 children and a smallish mortgage.
I'm a carer for one of my dc so I'm at home with him as a sahp.
My dp is working his way up in work and is now on the management team, the pay isn't wonderful but we manage successfully.
Holidays are UK based because of dcs needs, clothes are vinted, meals are planned out, days out we take picnics etc instead of meals in restaurants unless a special occasion.

It's not enough to be frivolous by any means but our dc have a lovely life and dp and I are very happy.

If our lifestyle was skiing in the alps, we enjoyed pricey hobbies, beauty treatments or had a huge mortgage we'd have to sell a few kidneys but luckily that's not an issue for us 😉

We earn a lot more but save 50% +. So we would save less I guess

That would be a monthly take home of about £3.5
We have
Mortgage 1.5k a month
Council tax £300 a month
Electric, water gas and Internet £500 per month
After school club/holiday clubs £300 per month
So that would leave us 900 a month for food, insurances, phone bills, petrol, our girls extra curriculars (dance, Brownies, Rainbows,swimming lessons, drama).
I think it would be doable, but no holidays, meals out, no new clothes for adults

We would be significantly worse off.

Skint. One or both of us would have to find new jobs and our lifestyle would dramatically change. School fees, food shopping, holidays and our mortgage would become unaffordable.

Our school fees, school trips and holiday camps for 2 DC come to £45kish. I don’t know what everything else adds up to. DH and I are equally matched on income, but finances are his department. Life would look wholly different on £60k gross.

Edited as I forgot after school care is another £6k a year 🤦🏼‍♀️

The day to day wouldn’t need to change much but there would be less money available to put in savings.

Bills wouldn’t be paid. One of us, or both of us, would have to take a second job.

Dh and I earn this. We still get tax free child care which helps, but generally we have to watch the pennies. All the bills get paid and we are clothed and fed. We save to overpay the mortgage by 5k a year and have a caravan holiday a year.
However we rarely buy new clothes, own our car outright and rarely eat takeaways. One tv subscription service at a time, a bank account which gives us cashback on utilities and no overdraft. I never get my nails done, botox or extensions or highlights. All these things our friends and colleagues get, so their budget must be bigger/tighter.
We have a small 2 bed semi with no drive. South east is rubbish!

We’d struggle to meet our costs so we’d probably have to move to reduce our mortgage

It really depends what's your outgoings, and I mean necessities. In London it would be a struggle, but in different parts of U.K. it would be easier as your rent/mortgage wouldn't be as high.

We’d be fucked.

We’d have to sell our house. Probably get rid of the doggy fostering we do. No holidays.

Live well within our means as it is (£1-1.5K savings a month between us), but £60K wouldn’t be viable and that’s with 60% equity in our house that isn’t even big.

Our combined is around £100k… our mortgage is 2/3rds of one wage- we’d be able to cover bills, however nothing else. We both work full time as it is so we’d have to look for better jobs if we earnt that much

That's give or take our income.

We do ok. Mortgage paid, we afford treats and holidays. No savings though really. But both have pensions and we have been doing bits about the house

So we earn around £68k combined at the moment. We live in Sussex with a 1.4% mortgage til next August. We have two children (3 and 0) and life is comfortable just by virtue of luck really. Son became eligible for 30 free hours childcare in Jan which improved our situation massively and by the time daughter needs to go in Feb next year she'll be eligible for 15 free hours so we'll not be paying full whack for childcare ever again. We have no parental help re childcare so it's currently full time for son until he starts pre-school in Sept and will be full time for daughter until school too. Thankfully she is a spring baby so we've saved ourself a year's extra cost there. Son will be nearly five by the time he starts.

We go on two foreign holidays per year, take the kids out at the weekend, have savings... We don't buy much otherwise though. Holidays and days out are the priority. I get my hair cut four times a year, I make rather than buy myself new clothes. Kids stuff comes from Vinted or eBay.

We couldn't afford to not work full time though.

I'd live like a king. Honestly, I can't imagine such riches!

We bring home £4k

Last year we had seven weekends away
One 10 day holiday in Croatia
Partner had two separate weeks away with friends abroad
We have two teenagers who do hobbies
We live in the south east
We don't have money for home improvements or to save but don't struggle with anything else
Our mortgage is £900

It would be doable, but we'd have to have less days out and maybe drop some extra curriculars for the DC.
It would be hard to save much, whereas now we put away a bit each month.

Oh yeah forgot to say we are in south east - anywhere else and we could make it go much further

This was mine and my DH’s joint salary when we left university 23 years ago and were trainees. It was fine then but I couldn’t do it now.

We wouldn't be able to pay our bills.

Are you writing an article?

This is what we earn PA, the split is slightly different (partner earns more and I work 4 days a week). Perhaps we are not that great with money as we don't often have funds for extras like holidays, days out etc (we do have them occasionally but have to think carefully and not been abroad since 2016). No savings for doing things around the house etc. but I would say we are fairly comfortable, children don't go without and do extra curricular hobbies and always clothes and food on the table x

I would be glad that my pension income was about a third higher than median for the UK, and I'd be able to afford considerably more (including decent heating in winter, even though I'd be losing the fuel payment)

But I'd still shake my head a bit theatrically when the ageist stereotype of "rich pensioners" is glibly trotted out, especially as those near the median but not on pensions credit are going to find things quite a bit tighter (Martin Lewis has been talking about this)

We’ve done it on £60k with three children and a mortgage. We are a single income family though, so take home is a lot less than a couple on £30k each, where you have two personal allowances, no 40% tax rate and you’re still entitled to child benefit. A couple on £30k each like in your example would be significantly better off.

The OP didn’t ask if it would be ‘doable’ though, she asked what your life would be like. What sort of lifestyle would you have?