For those who are 'well off', how did you get there?

[Ivyy988]

By well off, I mean comfortable enough to not have to worry about money, can buy luxuries, go on holiday etc.

I'm a single parent, study at a good uni (will have my degree next year), but come from a fairly poor family and I really want to never have to worry about money.

I'm not skiled in anything particular, but have a lot of motivation, am very good at saving (although there isn't a lot to save on a student loan) and mainly buy second hand etc.

What is the best way to get there? Am i best of looking for a graduate jon and working my way up? continuing in education? What things helped you get there? (other than inhereted money or where you had a large amount to begin with).

After leaving school with no GCEs (crap comp!), I taught myself and did night school classes to get O and A levels. Then I got a very poorly paid trainee accountant job in a tiny father/son practice and did accountancy exams by home study for 5 years (using my holiday allowance for revision and exams as the firm didn't provide any study assistance at all). Did nothing else during those years, no relationships, no hobbies, etc. Just put grit and determination to make something of myself after 5 crap secondary school years. Once I qualified as an accountant, my adult life began. Moved up the career ladder a few times, ended up a finance director in a worldwide manufacturing company, and now been running my own accountancy practice for 20 years. I look back at those dark days of school and then self study - I was on & off suicidal at the time, but I knew I had to see it through to make something of my life. Now is the time to sit back and enjoy the benefits!

Don’t have kids till you have established your income stream. Kids kill even good careers for women often so you have to be very very careful about when you have them.

My parents, though not wealthy, made sure we got a good education, amazing emotional support and left education debt free. That was a great start.

I choose something unusual and took a huge leap into the unknown, moving to a very far away country as soon as I left college. I also studied a degree at a particular university for the prestige and potential war ability rather than because I loved the subjects.

I married someone very successful who was already quite wealthy. Though in my defence I adored him before I had any clue what he did or what money he had. I guess though the circles I was moving in meant most people I crossed paths with were unusually ambitious and educated.

I grew up with little or no money, my parents managed finances very very carefully, and I never learnt how to spend till well into my 30’s. I was a huge saver.

War ability= earnability

Don’t have kids till you have established your income stream. Kids kill even good careers for women often so you have to be very very careful about when you have them
^This should be a mantra in schools. Reliable contraception has been available for over 50 yrs. Why does such a developed country stlll have such a problem with single mother poverty.

I'm from a poor background so I got a Saturday job when I turned 16 so that, for the first time in my life, I could save up and buy new clothes, rather than hand-me-downs.

I saved some of that money each week. I worked hard at school to get the best exams results I could. When I left school I went straight into an unglamourous, not-very-well paid job that would give me skills that meant I could always find work, even in the high-unemployment 1980s. My Saturday experience helped, too. I saved so that I could do a bit of travelling - my dream. I went to university and paid my own way all through, working weekends and evenings as necessary.

Then I decided to get on the housing ladder. For years I worked FT, plus 3 x 12-hours shifts per 2 weekends, plus some evenings. I took care to get jobs where I met people as work was most of my social life. I lived in flat shares, took no holidays, didn't eat out, rarely bought new clothes, just concentrated on working and saving until I accumlated the deposit I needed for a tiny flat in an unfashionable part of London with hopeless public transport.

DH is similar to me. Wouldn't dream of not working even if he couldn't find an ideal job. Had bought a flat, so we could combine and improve. We both had clear ideas of what was important to us, so had a good honeymoon but very few holidays thereafter. Our furniture was secondhand, we only ate out for special occasions, adopted technology late. Apart from homes, we've never bought anything on credit, but saved up for it first.

We established ourselves in our relationship, work and home before we had children. Gradually we were both better paid. By the time we had DC it became clear that if either of us wanted to progress at work we would have to commit to working late or going abroad with little or no notice, so we decided that I would sacrifice my career to be a SAHM, which allowed DH's career to take off as he was the guy who could always rush off to farflung parts and troubleshoot.

We decided that we wanted to travel when we retired so we saved with that aim. Again, limited holidays, specially foreign ones, limited meals out/takeaways, limited takeout coffees, decoration and essential replacement at home rather than upgrading. Neither of us are very interested in fancy clothes. We don't have much tech, replacing things when they collapse, buy older model mobile phones outright and use GiffGaff. Old car.

I've been told on MN that missing out on a few coffees won't amount to a deposit these days, but judging from one of my DC, who is desperate to buy a flat, the whole lowcost approach still does: a nice little nest-egg is developing after 2 years in a moderately-paid job.

@ploopsie Thanks for the info, I had no idea the salaries were so high!

Falling into jobs which paid above average salaries.
Losing parents at a youngish age (30's), thus getting (moderate) inheritance early.
Having to share said inheritance with just one other person.
Being made redundant around the same time, getting a decent lump sum and an early pension.
A related out-of-court settlement (for ruining my career).
Generous PILs.

In summary, a mix of good (and bad) luck.

And of course being old enough to get through uni on a full grant.

For us the main factor was being incredibly frugal early on in life.

In our early 20s we never bought on credit, never spent any money even though all our friends went out a lot, and away in foreign holidays.

Even now I find it hard to spend money on myself.

And I feel I wasted those years of being young and carefree. We were boring and middle aged before our time!

@MoreMoneyPlease it's very competitive & demanding & there less women partners. However that is changing & there are lots of more family friendly initiatives developing eg 3 months paid paternity leave which I think is fantastic.

You can still earn very well in lower "tier" firms & traditionally in house lawyers earn less but still well but have greater flexibility etc

Managing money and holding into it is another great fact pointed out by pp.

I know lots of people who earn a lot but are always struggling because they live beyond their means and can't track their spending.

Having a good understanding of your incoming and out goings is vital. Then the more you earn falls in that frame work.

You don't need good maths to control your house hold accounts.

We aren't as comfortable as many on this thread, but we live in a lovely home on a modest income. Because we live in a nice part of a cheap northern town! We have a very small amount in investments, and I was part time when the kids were small. We have friends in London who have much bigger salaries than us, but comparable standards of living.
I know move up North sounds drastic, but it is more easily achieved than 'be born to wealthy parents' or 'don't have kids' if you happen to have poor parents and a child!

Honestly, I'd say hard work and luck.

I studied social sciences at uni and did ok but couldn't wait to get out of the education system by the end. Flaffed about until I was 26 and applied to the civil service. I sat every promotion board I could and have almost reached the level I'd like to stop at.

My mum helped me buy my house and I chose carefully and well when I bought it. I got in just before the property scene went a bit mad and then burst. I could probably have been mortgage free by now but I paid my mum back with interest which allowed her to be mortgage free.

I also worked bloody long, hard hours. I did all the overtime I could get; at one point I was working from 7.30am to 8pm 7 days a week. I stuck that for 8 weeks before I took a day off. I also had an hour and a half commute at that stage.

I've been lucky, worked hard and been in the right place at the right time.

There's an awful lot of "and then I met DH and we..." on this thread. It's much, much easier to be comfortable/well off with two incomes, especially if you have children.

I would say it's difficult to really get ahead in the industry I work in when you are a mum with children. A lot of the culture revolves around going for drinks and going to events finish late, there is also a lot of international travel. There is flexibility in terms of you don't need to be there at 9 am on the dot but the workload is massive that you will inevitably end up working at weekends and you wouldn't be able to leave at 3 pm every day to collect children.

What I've written below should say parent but the men I know seem to have an easier time managing this side of the work than the women I know

Yes of course, it’s self evident that you will generally be much better off with two good incomes.

And even more so if you don’t have children.

Past a certain level it also becomes a matter of saving/investing well and always having a sizeable buffer (to alleviate stresses and worries). Overpay on the mortgage whilst still having enough left over to make a comfortable life, or overpay as much as you can and accept that your life will be a little more spartan in the meantime, but trade it off against the money you will save overall and the difference it will make when you are mortgage free.

Make wise decisions about what will actually make you happy/help you to feel content in your daily life, and spend on those. Don’t spend as a matter of course and especially not to keep up with others at your income level.

Some people are set up for financial security or set themselves up by choices which have nothing really to do with the job they do.

• background that leads to coming out of education debt free and/or allows a quality education with professional/highly sought after qualifications.

-being coupled up so 2 incomes and 2 to manage children when they come -not having children until established in career and on housing ladder.

Things which make being financially secure really difficult - children very young which makes it hard for career to advance and costs of childcare make getting on housing ladder hard.

People I know say that if they had their kids before they were in a family home, it's been almost impossible to then move on from renting or the 1 bed flat they were living in before. This is because they either return to work full time and face crippling childcare bills or work part time or not at all and don't have a big enough income. If they had more than 1 child, especially in quick succession the difficulty was compounded. Just 1 child or getting beyond pre-school age quickly, reduced the length of the problem.

I agree that the vast vast majority on here reference meeting a partner and often a successful partner as being key in their journey to financial security.

What people call financial security might differ. Op talked about wanting holidays, but I wouldn't actually call that security and actually when people have a big longing early in life for nice holidays or cars etc, the spending on those can put longer term security at risk. I'd be interested in;

• living in owned not rented accommodation
• getting mortgage down as quickly as possible and ideally being mortgage free well before 50 (being freed of the mortgage gives so many more financial options)
• knowing you can retire comfortably by 60
• having access to basic leisure, basic holidays and ability to pay for random purchases without giving it much thought
• being able to afford a big purchase with a bit of forward planning - like an extension or serious DIY project.

It isn't about doing any of those things on a huge scale. Some people have high incomes but aren't financially secure becaue their outgoings are much bigger. They might have a huge house but their mortgage and other debt is vast. Others might have a modest house but lots of spare cash and know their pension pot is growing well and they can go out and buy a new car tomorrow without debt if they need to,

Being born at the right time helps.
Early/mid 70's baby here. This meant uni was free for my generation and although we did GCSE / A Levels and went to uni in recession, we hit the job market in the mid 1990s. In retrospect, we were a Silver Generation to our Baby Boomer parents who were the Golden Generation. We had the ability to buy houses on single salaries, take advantage of the ridiculous boom in the housing market and then when we coupled up with partners who weren't arseholes, resources got pooled to our advantages. Now we are middle aged, our degrees and experience mean we have good positions in good jobs and have 25 years into pensions, etc.

As a comparison, my neice and her partner are trying to buy a £350k semi detached on a 35 yr mortgage in their mid 20s off a combined income of £60k. A lot different to when I was her age and was buying my first house at 2.5 times my salary on my own....

Like LongPauseNoReply, self made millionaire through building up my own business. Left school with no more than 'O' levels, DH the same. A lot of hard work, a few risks, but now retired at 47.

Worked hard at school and got a scholarship to a top private school. Worked hard some more and got a 2:1 from a decent university. Got a graduate job at one of the most prestigious graduate employers. I’m aiming to start my own company by the time I’m 45. Married someone very similar to me. Between the two of us we will always be able to scrape a living no matter what. But that’s not to say that we haven’t had short term money problems or that we think our position is 100% secure. Part of not worrying about money is understanding that sometimes you’re just not going to have it for whatever reason but that you can claw your way back out of whatever hole you find yourself. I guess it cones down to a combination of a good CV, a certain amount of tenacity and a metric duck ton of not caring too much. The second you start to worry about money you get conservative. You end up screwing yourself over by not taking chances and before you know it you’re 50 years old and working full time making someone else rich.

We are not mortgage free btw although we are in the latter stages of it now. We are overpaying to bring it down and I echo many other PPs in doing this. We only have 1 car so no PCP or lease agreement and apart from the mortgage are debt free. We have never had credit cards and save up for holidays and have only recently started going abroad for holidays. People may see the two holidays a year (1 × foreign, 1 x domestic) and think we are well off but don't see the 9 years of crippling nursery fees where we struggled to afford a short camping break. Swings and roundabouts

Bloody hard work! Born on a council estate and my parents always wanted to "better themselves" so they were a terrific example of working hard. I am academically very strong, so after a good degree I joined a graduate scheme and got professional qualifications. I have a corporate role and earn around 70k - but my husband is self employed and earns many multiples of this. Similar background to mine, but he took a risk when he left his last employer to set up his own practice. Fortune favors the brave - or it did in our case, thankfully.

Geordie is so right about the time we are born.

I suspect many on this thread were born in the 70s and benefitted from lower house prices in the 90s and early 2000s and were able to buy alone, or buy bigger with a partner young, than people these days are able to.

So it's all very well, us middle aged people telling those in their 20s the magic recipe to stability, but they start off in different times and increasingly for them, having a leg up onto the housing market seems to be what makes a difference and sets them in a similar position to most found themselves around the turn of the century. Isn't that why financial security will be more polarised in future and we will have a greater sense of the haves and have nots. In 20 years there won't be so many saying 'my background was relatively poor but I got ahead...' Because without the leg up from parents onto the housing ladder, people will be stuck in renting for ever or much longer and their chance to pay down a mortgage and be in the stable situation of low or no mortgage will never come or only come when they are much older.

Those in the really top paying jobs will still manage to buy young by themselves, but bigger numbers than in our generation will need parental help and clearly not everyone will get it. Those of us born in the 70s who have done well might find we can slip our kids £50k as a house deposit but many many people won't be able to give it to their children.

I came out of Uni with some debt (not massive, but had to pay for my final year myself) and had taken an extra small loan on graduation to get myself sorted for work life. I paid those both off within a year (I was earning peanuts, but cycled to work most days rather than got the bus, ate very cheaply as I had as a student, rented a very cheap room as a lodger rather than a flatshare, and didn't go out much). I also started an account in the credit union at that job, and put money into my savings as a salary sacrifice before I even got paid. It might only have been £10 per fortnight, but that added up over the months into real money rather than 1 night at the movies if I had it in my ordinary bank account.

I managed to get a slightly better job, and was able to move in with DGM, who wouldn't take rent. I still kept eating cheaply, although I was now doing food for 2 a fair amount of the time - but I also had the kitchen space, including fridge space, to do that and to make things to last a couple of days.

When DH and I bought our house, I was able to put money towards the deposit. DH put a lot more as he was a couple of years ahead of me earning and had a better job (we were engaged and planning the wedding at that stage). We had a cheap but nice wedding. We lived with concrete floors and bare walls for a number of months and did a lot of the finishing of the house ourselves.

When the market dipped a couple of years later, we were able to sell our house and get an older one but far closer to the city. We again did a lot of the work ourselves on it - my sewing machine made so many curtains and cushions in the 5 years from buying the 1st to getting the 2nd looking reasonable!! We continued to eat well but cheaply - buy in bulk, use Asian supermarkets, buy what we would eat on 3for2 offers, use coupons and loyalty cards, buy yellow sticker items and freeze, cook in bulk and freeze, make lunches to bring to work etc.

After I paid off my college/graduation debt, I basically tried to buy things for cash not on finance. So continued my savings into work-based credit union (and allowed myself 1 treat when I got a payrise, before increasing my savings again on the next paycheque as we had been managing fine on the previous amount). We could go in and negotiate on big items because we were cash buyers - and we would get good quality items that lasted longer having researched them before going near a shop. DH had a car loan for a good few years, but paid it off once he could and we started buying our cars with cash.

In the crash of 2006-2013, the interest rates were falling generally, but we still had our jobs and could keep paying at the previous rate. We had paycuts, but could make lifestyle choices to cut back again rather than keep all the luxuries we had started to allow ourselves. And told the building society to keep our payments at the old rate, putting the excess into the capital. That took 7 years off the loan term. As of this month, we own our house outright.

We only got Sky a couple of years ago when we needed to change broadband operator and they were the best option. We do check and change our utilities and insurances to get the best value (which is not always the cheapest option). We didn't have great mobiles for a long time - nowadays we have work ones, and have bought DD a decent enough one second hand. Our tech lasts us a long time before we replace, so it might be high end, but is usually not the latest models. I get my shoes mended rather than replacing straight away if a sole wears through, and will repair a lot of clothes before replacing them.

We have also both been promoted through hard work, so have got good payrises over the years. But have not changed our lifestyles totally to match those numbers - it has improved, but we still save a significant proportion.

We are not super-wealthy, but we are comfortable and have a decent cushion of savings. We had been enjoying life a little in recent years. I have a good wardrobe of clothes etc. We now have a fair amount of "fun tech" and drive 2 nice cars. We have had a couple of really interesting long-haul holidays, and fund DD doing some quite expensive sports and private school (and getting resources to help with her SNs to live life to her greatest potential).

But we still research before buying, use offers on what we are getting anyway, keep saving into lots of different pots etc. Our lifestyle is really not about spending all we have - we spend enough to be comfortable and put away the rest. And hope to enjoy spending that in a few years time when we are close to or at retirement. I still batch cook for the freezer and sew things for the house (not always, we get takeaways, buy M&S goodies, and sometimes have bought readymade curtains). We tend to go on self catering holidays and not to major resorts, as that is what suits us. We are usually too busy with work and DD to go on loads of nights out. But we are happy and feel we have a good life now, and a cushion to enjoy later too.