To think that life is too expensive?

Why is your wage only £40k each? Are you both relatively newly qualified? In the UK? 80k is still a very good household income, I’d do a clear budget accounting for every penny. Online tutoring is good for extra money, I only do 1.5 hours a week and it’s an extra £200 a month.

In fact a quick
google shows there ismore than one such agency, but here’s an example www.we-teachers.com/en/concept-pricing

My dh and I are both teachers on the same salaries as you and we both have to do tutoring 4 times a week each...it pays for our holiday!

If you’re a teacher you will have about 12 weeks when you don’t have pupils in. Could you not use that time to tutor privately or take on a different job. That way you won’t have to work 7 days a week? That’s too much

Re home swap, there’s even one agency just for teachers.

Make that the 1970s

It was probably in the 90s.

Depending on your subject, why not offer tutoring over the summer holidays? (Or even 1 night a week- you could charge up to £50 an hour for some subjects at GCSE/ A level or Common Entrance.)

You will get around 8 weeks, compared to the state system of 6, so you could work those until your DH is on holiday.

Apart from it being in the OP, it's been pointed out time and again on this thread that she teaches at a private school.

And it has also been pointed out that her husband teaches in a state school and her child attends a state school so unless she wants to go on holiday alone, school holidays it is...

You could try house swapping. This is a cheap option with a family abroad. There are websites that facilitate this. The NCT used to do it as a cheap way to holiday.

i agree with you OP. it's so frustrating and as i sit at my job slaving away for pennies i have to ask myself why im doing any of it?! jobs have always been soul sucking but now you dont even get a sort of decent lifestyle in return. im almost 30 and still live in a tiny 2 bed flat working full time which is not how i wanted my life to go really.

also university costs coming up must be an additional stress on you. university expenses are absolutely crazy now! student loan covers the fees but is nowhere near enough for everything else (rents, foods, study materials, leisure activities, etc) in many cases. and it's even worse than it was when i went, and i was basically locked out of entire regions for university even though i had grants and bursaries for being dirt poor. no wonder students are not bothering and trying to earn their degrees with AI, im not sure i could say i wouldnt do the same if i knew what was ahead of me as a late teenager now.

You need some financial advice because having £9K on credit cards means you're paying a lot of interest each month.

This has built up over years I assume, not just the past 5.

Your mortgage is tiny. Maybe you need to look again at who it's with and shop around. Many young people now have mortgages closer to £200K.

I don't want to be mean but my guess is that you have both spent beyond your means over the years, maybe with expensive lease cars rather than something older, phone contracts etc.

Insurances? Might be worth looking at again. You should only need car, home and mortgage.

You've for the double whammy of a student loan and low-ish earnings in midlife because you decided to retrain (assuming your previous jobs paid less.)

Wages haven't kept up with inflation is the problem. We spent all our money bailing out the banks and we've been fucked ever since.

£40k doesn't buy you the same as the equivalent would have done 25 years ago.

The equivalent to today's £40k, 25 years ago, would have been £21k. No teacher was earning that, in 2000. Shit, I was earning more than that for a stress-free lowly admin job, in 2000. Teachers' starting salary back then was £25k so clearly something's up with wages. And that's in a unionised workforce with incremental pay scales. Outside of the public sector, pay is even worse, comparative to before NatWest et al came at us for the £billions.

Well, quite. It certainly doesn't cost £80k a year or we'd all be up to our gills in debt.

Sounds a difficult time with re-training and this starting at a lower salary. However, both of you should increase salaries over the coming years, presumably have pensions from previous jobs as well for the future. You do not have that much left to pay for your home, which as it is in the SE should be a good asset.

it is now that is a cash flow situation,

Tutoring and exam marking sound great for you both.

also, as a Uni student your oldest child should be able to start earning through his studies to help pay his way.

I was going to respond with a comment but having read ALL your posts I can see why you're in a pickle.

The fact is you've only been working for 5 years.
So you've not even reached the top end of the basic pay scale for teaching which is 6 years.

Basically, you're both earning the same as newish teachers in their late 20s, yet you have children who are coming up to 18.

Teaching has never been well paid (I was one- in a private school.)

But if you're teaching at Eton, Harrow, Charterhouse, Westminster, HA, etc you should be on a higher pay scale than state schools and you can grow your salary with more responsibility.

You obviously knew what the salary was before you went into teaching later in life, so it should not be a surprise.

You could I assume do some work during the school holidays as they are much longer. (If you contract allows this.)

@Gffbjjgfddbjkkm if you’re both teachers then if you’re strategic you can boost your salary.
Look for a role in a different school - with more responsibility or across the border to move from England pay scales to fringe or outer London pay scales.
Just moving schools could significantly improve you’re earnings - sometimes even accounting for travel costs.

Happy to help navigate the options in teaching if you DM me - I’ve been a teacher now for almost 20 years and have learnt that loyalty to a school doesn’t mean much!

No it isnt, its circa £50k, 10k is a fairly decent difference.

you’ll have long holidays in private so look for something then, save whatever you earn for a future holiday.

unfortunately you are realising that when you borrow money (even if it sounds doable and necessary at the time) it causes problems down the line. You need to cut up your credit cards and live within your means, I mean it with kindness, you have learnt the hard way. Can your dc take a gap year and work to save for university? My dc managed to save £15k working in McDonald’s full time for a year then kept it pt at university

I’m not surprised you’re struggling on 80k…costs are crazy these days. You have to work more than an hour mon minimum wage to buy your kids ice cream these days. Ridiculous.

Im assuming you’re in the southeast…where I think it’s hard to get by comfortably on less than 100k pa. Mortgage for a reasonable family home, food, holidays etc.

She mentioned her husband teaching in state school

Two people on minimum wage is just under £60k.

So no, it's really not a big income.

However, I don't know how teacher's pay works, as in they don't work for 12 weeks/3 months a year. Private school, more like 4+ mths off. Can you not get another job for the time you are not working?

I do think life is very expensive these days. It seems like only a few years ago a meal out locally cost about £25-30 for two adults for food. Now its £50. Prices have practically doubled or increased by a huge amount across the board for everything while while wages have stagnated.

I don't get it.

I earn £80k, I'm a single parent, so your combined wages but with just one tax free allowance and paying more in higher rate income tax. I have two children and live just outside London. Money is plentiful.

Would also add that if we had left it till the last minute to book ( literally the night before) we could have had the same holiday for £89! It flashed up on fb and i did actually look as if i was going to book and that was the cost