£100k and above earners - tell me your money worries

[SortMyHouse]

Hi

Inspired by another thread!

I would like to hear from people who earn over £100k, where do you live, what do you do / sector? What qualifications do you have?

Then the reality of how far that salary goes.
What are your costs?
What are your money worries?

Thanks

We have a joint household income of £115k- £75k me and £40k DH.

Honestly, no worries.

Our take home pay after tax/NI and pensions is around £5.5k a month.

Mortgage is £1k - 3 bed detached in South East; no desire to move even though we could afford it on paper. We have about 50% equity - south east.
Childcare is £300 as you fear is at school (wraparound only)
All other bills come in at about £800 a month.
Cars are old (mine 9 years old, DH's 13 years old) and paid for.
No school fees- but we did invest £2.5k in tutoring giving our DD1 a better chance of getting into outstanding grammar.
We save at least £1k a month (whatever is left in current account day before pay day)

The rest we spend on hobbies, days out etc- normally one family overseas holiday in summer and a couple of adult only city breaks. We live under our means- we have very working class roots- I was a teenage mum! We have invested over £15k in last 6 years for quals that have improved our respective careers and for a few years the childcare bill was more than my salary.

I would like to be mortgage free by 45 (currently 32) and retire at 55.

I will probably be eaten alive for this on here but I earn £135k and husband is on £30k. Money is tight.

Our mortgage is £850 per month, which my husband pays so it doesn't come out of my salary. Absolutely everything else comes out of my wage. Two young kids with childcare costs, about £850 a month. Bills and food approx £1500. I put £950 per month into my pension. I put £500 away to pay for tax at the end of the year.

I try to save £2k a month (to fund maternity leave for no3) and even that is a struggle.

We really scrimp, I shop in Aldi/Lidl, don't really go on holiday. Drive a 10 year old car falling apart at the seams. I honestly wonder what I am doing wrong!?

Not quite on 100K yet although I’m not too far off and that should happened next year I got pretty close to this year. I was extremely disappointed that all of my worries did not disappear instantly as soon as I got near the magic number and in fact the take-home isn’t really enough to justify the discrepancy in effort I have to make to get over that extra hurdle, the last 30K seems to require almost 50% more effort than the first £70,000 if that makes sense? it makes sense in my head ?

@busymamaof2. I completely get where you are coming from, particularly the expense of maternity.

We are old and dh has stepped sideways so about £240k between us in terms of salary. Used to be much higher.

School fees paid, children grown up, mortgage paid, 2nd home in France, additional unearned income.

Cost of running two large homes is high but life is a breeze. Having said that DH was pretty much an absent father for 15-20 years. Pensions very well funded but we both like work.

@SortMyHouse

23:14BookShark

Our current situation
Me £125k - qualified accountant - Derby university so a former polytechnic.

Partner - 145k - IT senior role, systems, fintech etc - Grandes écoles - french eduction

Live in West Midlands - house paid off years ago as it was cheap anyway

However, we may need to move to London soon as my partner wants a more inspiring role, he wants to keep this property as an asset is an asset.
I do wonder how would we afford London lifestyle in a nice area, private schools (we are yet to have kids).
You often hear people say £100k doesn't really get you far in London of you want the trimmings too.

Derby wasn’t even a polytechnic it was a college of higher education.

But well done

Seems the crippling things are
Mortgages
Childcare
Private school

I can see how that makes it all seem like less.
As I stated we don't have a mortgage
Our childcare is minimum. (Max of 100ish a week...but we are not tied into that payment. If we don't use the childcare then we don't pay.
We are not in the U.K. and we don't send our DC to private school (in fact there is no private school for primary in our area at all)
Where we live we have minimal actual bills (no council tax, no water bills!)

We therefore have 4K to play with and save which we wouldn't have if we lived in London with a large mortgage and private school fees. I can definitely see where others are coming from.

Household income of 150k. We live in a 3 bed semi on the SE London/ Kent border which DH has renovated over the last year. Childcare for DTs costs us 3k a month so we often have to dip into savings to pay for anything other than ‘normal’ spending. Pre-children we didn’t worry about money.

busymamaof2 I do wonder if you’d get something about posting a statement of affairs on MSE forum. Your mortgage and childcare costs are much lower than ours but your £2k maternity savings is really quite substantial so that must be where you’re money is going.

Knowing that if DH lost his job, we could potentially lose everything, including the house. I'm now working hard towards paying off the mortgage, if I do that by 30 I'll be happy!

£150K joined income without bonuses.

We live in an outer London borough and are over-savers. I am anxious about pension (we are 50-54) so I put most of our spare money into long-time savings to a point where our financial advisor told me off.

DD is in state school as it is a great one, we can afford to pay uni without loans.

You don't need private schools in my opinon. If you rely just on £100K then school fees are an issue if you also want a large house, lots of holidays and a new car every couple of years and have more than one child.

No expensive hobbies, 10 year old car but we are not skimping on treats. We are lucky that we were mortgage free befroe DD came along and hence have a small mortage for the house we have now.

It depends what you mean with. "all the trimmings". I am official living in London but apart from work I don't really go there unless we visit a museum or a show (once/twice a year as we also have a really good theatre locally). I would hate living in Central London though.

Where exactly are all these good state schools in London where housing don't cost a kidney and a half?

State Secondary, not primary
The only good ones are all highly selective grammars

Dh IFA, aged 55
Me - editor, full time

Joint salary covers everything we need
Kids in state schools
No money worries (But then our major luxuries are holidays. We never get takeaways)

OP also think about age of posters. People a decade or more older than you can’t be compared to your future lifestyle. House prices and cost of living was far lower compared to salaries and they’ve had the opportunity to save for longer and benefit from compounding, benefit from cheaper private school fees etc. You need views from people who are in a similar position to you

I do envy your lower university costs in the UK. Here most get no government subsidies and the ones that do are often not great. It's not unusual for kids to graduate with a lot of debt. We were determined that ours could go to their best option uni and would not have to do that, but it's been very expensive.

Really? What an awful thread. This is the 3rd thread I've read as a newbie and I'm certainly not impressed.

20:35lovelyupnorth

What I meant to say was I went to a shit uni and I still did well, eventually.

Can we have a section for London folk please?

... because this shit's not normal 😂

Maybe MN will set up a platinum business class section for all the high fliers ?

@SortMyHouse

20:35lovelyupnorth

What I meant to say was I went to a shit uni and I still did well, eventually.

I know I was applauding the face.

At the start it was consistently the shortest.

I was involved in some of the early club nights in Derby before the student union got established back in the 90s.

Fact not face.

I earn about £140k DH doesn’t earn. I don’t really worry exactly but for me it’s school fees. DS is at state primary at the moment so just trying to work out whether to go for private at secondary. We can afford it but it’s the difference between pretty much spending what I want and having to be quite careful. It also massively increases my stress as the only earner and would hugely reduce the money I can put into pensions and savings. DS is my absolute number one priority but I don’t know whether to do the private school or save it and give him a good chunk of cash to start him out in life. Basically it’s his money I’d be spending on his schooling!

OP you haven't given enough details to make this meaningful so no one can actually give advice. Is the lifestyle you want going to be possible on only Dh's salary? No.

Where will he work, what tube station. Where will you buy? What area. What's your budget, how much deposit? What private school do you want for dd? You could work part time?

@Shellbear84

Really? What an awful thread. This is the 3rd thread I've read as a newbie and I'm certainly not impressed.

‘Awful’? ‘Not impressed’ by people discussing their shared experiences? Why? What’s wrong with them doing so? Yes, there will be plenty people for whom those experiences are something they’ll never share, but this thread isn’t aimed at them and nobody is forcing them to read it. Just like people who don’t own cats don’t venture onto the litter tray threads. Threads about finances don’t have to be competitive earning-one-pound-an-hour-and-raising-a-family-of-11 fests.