Exhausted with current situation - money issue

Hopefully lots are reading this post and realising that Labour is making many people’s lives rather unbearable. I have a read a number of these posts, penned by high bracket tax payers, as the OP has stated, those with education and flexibility will seek a better quality of life in other countries. The UK is sadly a dust bin of inequality, things have got slightly worse for those who pay the lion share of the tax. With growth set to be very slow (and wages stagnant due to employers facing higher NI costs), and inflation and mortgages set to increase again, it’s hard to see a time when it will be different. To all those chorusing ‘leave London’, highly paid professionals all making this move would leave the country destitute, so this hardly seems the answer.

What about a permanent consultant post with a subsidised hospital nursery?

Also,regarding the lodger. They would pay at least 500 a month in London I think and its tax free.

You say that wouldn't even pay for the heating to be on. I don't quite believe that, but frankly at least your heating would be on so that's one less thing to worry about.

I’m pleasantly surprised with the responses you’ve had on here.

i literally have no clue how people are doing it.
we have “London jobs” that don’t exist elsewhere… when buying we looked outside London but the commute costs and time and additional childcare meant it wasn’t viable as the houses weren’t that much cheaper due to how popular commuter towns have become 🤷🏻‍♀️

we make very good money (over 200k gross) and feel the same. The only difference is we fixed the mortgage so could save a bit for both the Mat leaves and so we break even ish each month.
nursery fees are going to kill us BUT we are SO lucky we did a 10 yr fix as we’d be truly crippled if it went to 4% (we stress tested it when buying and up to 5 was fine but increases in COL have totally changed that…mortgage it will expire just as youngest starts school and then we will hopefully cope as smaller childcare fees).

I am trapped in a job I absolutely hate and it just feels so grim sometimes.
i am paying an okay amount into a pension but that’s the best I can say about it

I think if you are struggling and have no family near you keeping you there, that you should consider something drastic like moving north or to Scotland.
Can you and your husband target Glasgow or Edinburgh for work. Housing will be cheaper and it can be a new life for you all.
You have nothing keeping you where you are the now, it's just personal choice. It's harder to move when kids are settled at school.

You're basically free to move to where ever you want to.

The only permanent things you have just now are a house you can sell and your husbands job which he might find in another city.

You could get work in a hospital in a cheaper place.

How much equity do you have, maybe you can buy a house outright in Scotland and be mortgage free? I live in Central belt Scotland.

Massive sympathies. Childcare costs crippled me and that was 10 years ago before COL.
What helped me was an interest only mortgage. Much hated for good reason but I was able to just pay the interest when the kids were small and now I am overpaying as if it were capital and repayment (and more when I can) I'd speak to a mortgage advisor to see what's possible or extending term of mortgage. It's just temporary until you get past childcare costs.
I have a love hate relationship with my Victorian house. At the moment my conservatory is a balmy 9 degrees but at least I can shut that off.

I feel sorry for young people now-and can quite understand why many are just not having children. Nursery fees are crippling you even though you have high income jobs along with paying silly money for your mortgage due to hugely inflated house prices. You’ve had good advice on here-it will get better. But it is possible to commute into London by train-don’t dismiss it as undoable. Are you in an expensive area? Is it really impossible to move?

Anothrr thing - reducing eldest’s nursery hours by a day for now?

Hi OP, don't be hard on yourself, your house is annoying right now because of the weather I bet. Those wacky victorians didn't bother with building regulations! On the plus side I bet your house is larger than others at that price point and more elegant.
My cousin stayed in the lovely village at home we were brought up in in Cambridgeshire, I do envy them their cost of living but if you can't move your family out you can't. This period of your life will end and the children will age out of needing so much paid for care.
In terms of the mortgage rate it was something we couldn't really predict but you could extend the period of your mortgage I expect, then shorten it later when the pressure has eased. Mortgage lengths are a cultural thing not economic, as I discovered when I visited Japan.
And I know what you mean about other people spending money! I booked some tickets at the opera recently for an Xmas present and you would have thought I was trying to get a Golden Ticket for the chocolate factory! I would raise the prices of those tickets if I was running the ENO. This is a joke, please don't if you read this and you are actually running the ENO.

Lifestyle creep. Once it happens, it's very hard to see how you can make cutbacks.

We earn a lot less than i imagine you do, have two kids, and don't really worry about money overly. We can afford nice days out, nice clothes, we run two cars, have holidays. But we don't live in London, we live in a house that hasn't overstretched us so have a modest mortgage, heating bills are low as we chose a newer home, that sort of thing. You want a particular lifestyle in a particular place and this is the price of it. There's places we can't afford to live, so we don't live there (we don't particularly want to live in those places but even if we did, we wouldn't be able to).

I'm not suggesting it's right that stuff should cost so much, but while cost of living crisis is obviously a thing, where you choose to live and the lifestyle you have matters to and you're got the salaries and job prospects to be able to choose. There are lots of cheaper cities to live in, cheaper homes to choose. But it's about priorities: not many of us can have it all, we have to make compromises somewhere.

I think these are the crunch years really (speaking as another person with young kids in London who sees ££££ flying out the door each month.

Your eldest will presumably be eligible for 15 (not 30) free hours the term after they turn 3. Not very near but in a year max that will be a few hundred pounds less in outgoings at least. Does the nursery offer a sibling discount?

What would a childminder cost for two, as opposed to a nursery?

Any room for manoeuvre on the mortgage? Extend the term by a few years? Has the value of it increased so that the LTV would shift in your favour when you next remortgage?

A friend’s spouse was a GP and picked up extra remote work for an online private GP service, fairly flexibly - would something like this be feasible for you?

I don't get why you can't move out of London. Your job is very portable. Whatever your husband does it will be possible to do it somewhere else in the UK.

I honestly don’t know what I did wrong as I look at other consultants 10-20 years older. Nice houses in nice parts of London, kids were in private school, some have nannies to help.

If you a consultant contracting you ought to be bringing in a minimum of 100k if not quite a hefty chunk more. Assuming your DH is on similar, you ought to be ok when not on mat allowance? Unless you bought a really pricey house in a bit of a desirable area like balham or tufnell park or something.

Are you sure you aren't getting doom and gloom because you are currently essentially on one salary & still paying a huge nursery bill from it? It will be miles better when you're back at work.

Its not just you - housing cost has made the uk a very expensive place to live.

I think medicine is a funny one as lots of older doctors came from really rather wealthy backgrounds and led a very affluent lifestyle, its perceived as a well paid job but simply doesn't earn what law or finance do unless you are a prestigious specialist in private practice. Also don't discount - NHS pensions are huge & valuable part of the pay, doctors who go private often fail to recognise how much they need to earn in salary to make up for it.

I remember haemorrhaging money when my DD was very little. It is very tough indeed. Until they reach a certain age, where you can reliably walk out of the house for two or three hours to go and get something and tell them just to watch TV, everything you do costs tonnes. Pizza express? Hundred quid once a babysitter is factored in.
Consider a lodger. One friend is making £1200 per spare room. You could say reduce that marginally and ask for a couple of nights of babysitting?
I love that people say leave London it’ll cost so much less, but as I’ve said on a different post childcare issues are a total nightmare, as is the commute. One friend moved to Cobham and struggled to find anyone to cover her kids for just two days a week.

have you overextended yourselves on the Mortgage? Would you be better off downsizing?

Is the weather getting to you? You have an eight week old and perhaps you’re stuck at home. These things get thrown into very sharp relief when you potentially have a little bit of spare time, but no money to do anything with it.

If you are at consultant level then depending on your specialty you have options.

You may be able to do private work - London is a good place for this. I have a friend who is qualified in dermatology and while she only does nhs many of her colleagues do private sessions.

Private work is considerably better paid than nhs.

You state that you are not in the nhs but that you need to travel within London to get shifts. I presume you are locuming.

There are London hospitals that have nurseries with extended hours so you might find your childcare cheaper if you took a permanent post and got a space in the nhs nursery.

Friends of mine in a similar position to you have moved out of London and one half commuted in. The medic then moved into a more family friendly specialty. The cheaper house prices outside London meant they could afford a warmer nicer house.

I agree with these 2 posters

you are unable to see that there is a life, jobs and work outside of London.

a modern house with insulation would also help.

Surely with an 8 week old you are on mat leave?

Just take the 2yo out of nursery. £1600 a month- if you're off for another 10months that's £16,000.

Then at end of mat leave they'd be at least 3.5yo and they'd be moving to preschool anyway?

Seems the very obvious solution for a huge saving.

Nursery when you're at home is a massive luxury.

No advice but you have my sympathies, I am now late 50s but it seems like just half an hour that I was in your situation, albeit as a band 7 AHP and DH as a care worker in a modest flat in zone 3 . We only kept our head above water through an inheritance, I don’t know what we would have done without it. The thing that worries me in your post is the contract work, I hope you are contributing to a pension/ NHS pension , I started to at 27, wish I’d done it earlier, those early years of contribution really make a different to your final statement. Hang in there, it will get easier.

@dreambow, its hard but somehow you have yourself backed into a corner.

Start by drawing up a proper budget sheet - all monthly costs, all annual costs.
Versus income.
You need to see exactly where the drains on money are, including things you might not be noticing, and if you can afford to live as you are on current income. If not then you need to plan to turn this around sooner rather than later.

Then you need to make a plan, and decide if you sell and move or if you stay and economise.

Take emotions out of it and simply look at the ins and outs. Don't be fixed on not selling the house and downsizing / moving out further if needed, there is always a solution.

Then sit down with your husband and decide.

Right. You’re 8 weeks post partum, you must be shattered. Doesn’t help that you spend time at home and on your own, living in your own head is bound to mess things up.

Get a heated blanket and an oil heater today, and have them constantly on, you can’t be cold. Buy some tin foil and put it behind the radiators, they’ll reflect the heating back in, as opposed to seeping into the walls.

Pick up the baby and go for a 5k walk every day. Go to the library at nap time and read a book in the warm, get a thermos and keep drinking warm drinks.

I know you’re accustomed to a certain lifestyle, but whilst the kids are not in school, those years are pretty dire for everyone.

I don’t know how you have set up your finances, but now is a good time to throw any savings you have into the mortgage in order to lower the interest. Even a £50 overpayment lowers your interest rate, you’re probably talking pennies in your case, but do it anyway.
Keep a notebook for all your expenses. Physically write everything down. If your budget for mobile phones, Netflix, prime, Apple, internet etc is bigger than the food one, start cutting down.

Food is expensive, but you’re in London, plenty of Eastern European, Turkish etc shops, I promise they’re cheaper and better quality than the big supermarkets.

Above all, it’ll get better once the kids grow up a bit more. Hang in there.

Sounds like you stretched yourself too thin with your house purchase and 2 young kids. It will improve as the kids get older (unless you go for private school). Your options are to continue as you are or downsize or move out of London.

I fully empathise with how you feel OP. You made plans but the COL crisis has bitten hard. We are by no means hard up but if I compare my life now to what it was 5 years ago we aren’t feeling the wage rises have made much difference at all to our standard of living. We should be able to afford much more and more easily but everything has gone up.

Hell, I’ve just been sorting out a box of receipts from 2007 and we must have been positively rolling in it when I look at what we were buying but it didn’t feel that way at the time!

As well as a proper budget OP could I suggest you add in two extra tabs on your spreadsheet. One is a Shit Hits The Fan (if one of you loses your job) and the other is expected wage rises. I’ve no idea if, as a consultant in the NHS, you are likely to hit certain bands or whatever and is your DH looking for a step up too? It’s really difficult to balance this all with young children in the mix but take comfort in the fact that there are people in the same position as you right now (but they aren’t the ones in Gail’s).

My sympathies OP 💐

Just echoing others who have said the nursery years aren't forever. DS dropped from full time nursery at 2k a month, to school + £250ish clubs/wrap around a month pretty much overnight and our standard of living has shot up since 😂

You can’t afford your house. You can’t afford to run it, and have no equity to sell it and move on. Two kids in nursery will always be expensive. Why are you living in London and commuting out to work? The house needs dealing with - insulation or moving somewhere less trendy or central.

I think you would be better off working in the NHS with some private on the side when the nursery years are over.

Maybe move to Australia for a year or two while your kids are young, there’s heaps of work for doctors and you’d have a great lifestyle,

Appreciate you are 8 weeks post partumn, and at this point I hated every life choice I had ever made!

Unfortunately, unlike 90% of the country, you have the income that will allow you to have options that can make a difference.

Your post should be updated to 'I can't believe I don't feel as wealthy as I am'.

I'd advise you re look at your financial planning, as you seem to be living a life that costs more than you want to pay (for the little it leaves you with).