To think getting less than 50% of your pay is crazy?

This!!

I understand you're getting at the whole tax thing but this person is very well off by today's living standard so they should pay more tax.

I would be proposing different solutions to those problems. Rail privatisation was done badly, in the same way Thames was. Network rail and Thames are too big to regulate and should have been split up, Thames should never have been allowed to load up with so much debt. If we were able to run public infrastructure in the same way as Singapore runs changi airport state ownership can work very well indeed (albeit with a state owned profit making company underneath running the infrastructure). I don't actually care as long as it works properly.

House prices/asset bubble is caused by quantitative easing and tax and regulatory systems which incentivised bank lending to real estate rather than productive investment in capital and growth. House builders making money from land trading rather than house building also doesn't help. Green belt planning system is ridiculous and stamp duty stops people trading down into smaller houses when they arguably should. There would probably be less foreign ownership and investment in UK property in those circumstances.

100% marginal tax rate as I said above depends on personal circumstances - eg when you lose any free childcare when you go over the 100k income threshold.

By the time they’ve paid higher rate tax and their NI along with the student loan and pension contributions it would come out at take home of less than half to be fair.
but they’d be saving for their future ( Ie the pension ) and saving some tax by paying into pension ( which comes out before tax)

My husband and I are both high earners. We essentially lose 50% of our earnings. It's not a popular position on mumsnet, but my husband is a cancer research scientist and I work in Alzheimer's research, so I like to think we give a lot to society in addition to our enormous tax bill! There are definitely days when I question why we work so hard. We'd have a better quality of life if we worked less and got below the threshold!

I really feel for you. I went to uni the last year before the first fee hike (to £3,000 per year) and I borrowed £11,000 in total, which increased to £13,000 in six years before I started paying it off, and then I cleared the whole debt in the next 6 years. Even people who started the year after me got a much worse deal, and those who started post 2012 have been completely screwed over. Fuck Nick Clegg and the Lib Dems.

Perhaps find out what the OP does for a living, do the legwork to train for said job (if you’ve got it in you) then you won’t need to cry. ☺️

Correct me if I am mistaken, but I doubt very much he pays the rates of income tax the OP is quoting.

You may not want to openly admit however as it is a touchy subject for some on here, there are plenty of legal loop holes to reduce your tax burden.

How do you propose an employed Dr avoids PAYE. You absolutely don’t know what you’re talking about. There are many employed people on PAYE paying that tax. Drs are one example. Tech engineers that companies don’t want to outsource are another.

You should invest in a good accountant.

Not an option for everyone sadly but if I could I would - if you think of it as a tax it effectively puts me on the same tax bracket as someone earning £50k more without a degree (and, I don’t mind paying it off as it was a loan, my issue is that despite having been paying it for 7 years the balance is going up 😅)

road upkeep comes from general taxation - after all we all use them - for waste, ambulances, police, etc

Well if you’re earning 15k a month your student loan repayment will be high, but cleared quickly. My son is going into a finance career, has a graduate loan lined up for next September after graduation (via internship). Fortunately for him, his dad is funding his uni so no loans, but if he did need to repay it, he would have low outgoings the first few years when living at home so could save a lot of salary and pay off loan faster. As he will be a high earner, so makes sense to pay off student loan as fast as you can. Contrary to popular opinion that its not something to worry about, the interest rate is high, so unless you’re going into a lower paying industry (nursing for example) its better to just get it paid off as quickly as you can.

Once you hit 40% tax, your salary is massively reduced

Defo wins the award for Stealth Boast of the Day op!

Oh sorry - I was about to have sympathy when I read that as £15k per year not month…

My DH is (well, £14k). He has an accountant.

Thank you I will. Quite a few of us senior medics are....

YABU.

I would be annoyed at losing half my income to deductions but if the rich don’t pay tax, then who will? The poor can’t afford to.

Plus there are no private medical schools in the UK. It costs about £250,000 to train a medical student.

@thepariscrimefiles Basic rate taxpayers won't even come close to repaying their loans unless they become higher rate taxpayers fairly early on.

If your gross salary is £50k (which I think is just under the higher rate tax threshold these days) and you're on repayment plan 2 (i.e. you started university post 2012 and paid 9k a year tuition fees), you're repaying £170 a month towards your student loan. This is essentially pissing into the wind. When you factor in the size of your initial loan and the compound interest, if you paid off £170 a month for 30 years you'd never pay off the full amount. And that's assuming you earned £50,000 a year for 30 years.

No, the people who will pay the most for their education are those who repay the full amount of what they borrowed (or close to the full amount) but over the longest period of time. These people are the same people who are getting stung absolutely everywhere else. So they earn too much to be able to claim child benefit, they're probably not getting any free nursery hours either, and yet they will be paying off their student loans until they retire. For those people it is essentially a graduate tax on their education, only they had to pay a fuck load more tax than the people who went on to earn £180,000 per year.

In that situation, and especially with interest rates how they are at the moment, it would make more sense to spend 2-3 months paying off student loan in full and putting less into their pension over the same time period.

I don’t have an issue with higher rate tax but I do think the loss of personal tax free allowance is unfair. I know so many people who earn close to that level but then cut back their hours so they don’t go over £100k or whatever it is - NHS consultants for example. It doesn’t necessarily benefit the economy.

No one earning £15k a month is on PAYE...

If you know of someone tell them to get an accountant.

Presumably because for the employed pensions are "taken off" without the ability anymore to opt out, not to mention the employers contribution which is syphoned off into the scheme.

Thankfully I'm self employed so don't play that game.

Not true. There are no private A&E departments. If a routine operation goes wrong in a private hospital, the patient is shipped back into the NHS.