Combined salary needed to afford this lifestyle for 2 kids in London?

[brownbutter]

The lifestyle I mean includes things like:
-private school (and wraparound care if needed)
-nice holidays
-4+ bedroom house
-hobbies
-days out
-contributions for first property deposit

I was doing some quick mental arithmetic and I was thinking you would need combined annual gross salary of £350k plus? Does that sound right?

Obviously depends on a few factors like mortgage, savings, other sources of income etc.

You'd need some more info first.

Are you servicing any debt? Saving a set amount? Contribution to pensions? Saving for kids uni fees/cars etc? How old are the kids, and therefore how many years of private school will you need to pay for (it gets more expensive each year as they get older)? Is the house a cash buy or will you have a mortgage, and if so what size mortgage? Whereabouts in London will you be based? Self employed or salaried PAYE?

Where is the 4 bed house? S Ken is very different to Peckham.

To have most of the things on your list, especially 4+ bedroom house, private school (optional wrap around), nice holidays (granted you might consider Cornwall nicer than the Caribbean), you don't need to have a combined salary of any significant amount. What you need is to be either borne from wealth or stoop in wealth via other means be it marriage or inheritance.

How long is a piece of string?

Private school - day or boarding? Just google a couple of schools and look at their fees

4 bedroom house - with mortgage? Or all paid off. And location obviously. Just go onto zoopla, find the house youre imagining and play with their mortgage calculator

Hobbies. Horse riding and skiing will be more expensive than doing park run or cycling.

Days out. Once again, way too vague.

Contributions to first property deposit. I think the average help from family with deposits is about £25k. So if youre saving from newborn to age 25 then £1k a year, less that £100 a month. But I'm guessing you're after a more hefty deposit.

@DojaPhat yes very true!

Ok lots of think about - I know it’s a generic question with lots of variables.

I don’t know all these answers as of now - for context I’m deciding whether to have a second child and lifestyle will play a part of the decision.

Which zone do you want to live in London?

Is there a particular reason why you would not consider being further out? Some of the private school options are better in the London commuter towns anyway. With wfh so much easier now a lot of my colleagues are moving further and further out as an hour or 90 min commute is not such a big deal when only 3 days a week.

We are in zone 3 and won’t move as DS is settled in school. We have a 4 bed house but it’s a terrace, and we only have one child so only 1 set of fees. Combined income approx 250k, but we have lots of disposable income.

@WatchandWaitorNot yes very good point. We’re currently located in zone 2 (north London) but open to moving in the future.

we are on combined £200k roughly but both have the type of roles that allows a good portion of work from home. I just hope organisations don’t revert to the pre covid 4/5 days in office. That’s the only risk of moving further out for me.

Also open to grammar schools but I know those are very competitive and sometimes catchment area dependent.

what sort of London commuter towns? Do you mean like St Albans?

We are in Z4, have two kids, and have all that you mentioned except private school. We have a combined income of £250k-ish so agree you need £350k to include private school.

Yes about right if self funding / no parental help.
We make 280k ish combined and have most of this but not all.

4+ bed house yes

Holidays yes buttt we have "given these up" while kids are small. We wont do a proper 10-15k hol until youngest is 3 just not worth it for us.

Hobbies yes they are important to us
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Days out - yes but we do a mix with lots of them on the cheaper end, we do loads of nice free stuff. Kids are small that it's easy now.

Private schools- we are v on fence due to affordability would be secondary only if we did and kids would need scholarships probably.

The private school is really the drain...

@GreatGateauxsby agree, private school has got so unaffordable now.

private/grammar secondary and state primary might be the way to go…

Yes, but only if you also have a lot of cash. If you want to live in a 4 bed house in a nice but not especially fancy part of London it will be 1.5-2million just for that. You can get a large mortgage on that income, but the repayments start to be prohibitive and would prevent you from doing the other things. We have two children, a joint income of about the amount you describe, and had about 1m in cash when we bought our last house. We could have afforded the private schools but not very good quality after-school care and almost no holidays with a mortgage of another 1m on a fairly nice but also fairly run-down 4 bed in Brook Green. When we lived in London we ended up sending our kids to a state school. If we hadn't had the 1m in cash (from work and previous property sales; we also had children very late in life) it would have been impossible.

Outside London you can have all of those things and a third child too!

Depends on a lot of things.

Tunbridge Wells, Beckenham, Sevenoaks and Bromley are all nice and there are grammar schools in Kent.

Commuter towns- Sevenoaks, Guildford, Colchester, St Albans, Cambridge at a push, Kingston, Reading, Hitchin, Windsor, Braintree, Hove, I dunno really, just trying to think of places that my colleagues live but have never looked into it that closely. I think a lot of the senior people live in lovely villages near uninspiring towns.

If you are still young enough to be having another child, you and your DH must still have quite a lot of promotion potential ahead of you? If only one if you does well in a City type job you should clear 350 easily, no? And if you both do, you’ll manage much more.

We have that lifestyle and combined income is higher (around £450k). But we have surplus income, live in zone 2, overpay our mortgage and save a lot, so I agree it would be possible on £350k if you lived less centrally and didn't overpay and had less savings.

We have a 4 bed terraced house in a fairly central area which was expensive, but you can get 4 bed houses in other parts of London for less than half the price. We spend a lot on holidays although they aren't luxurious, they just cost a lot as we never take dcs out of school and we often do excursions like theme parks. We don't skimp on hobbies or days out, yes we do free stuff but we try to do most London experiences at least once, and we like taking dcs to the theatre and to concerts. DCs are at a prep school and we don't need wraparound care, but we do use holiday camps (they can be pricey as DCs like to try out different activity based ones).

All our money has come from earnings, plus a fair bit from capital gains of assets (bought with earnings). No inheritance or family money.

Thanks everyone.

Money doesn’t go far in London (stating the obvious I know!) - I’m going to look up those commute towns to consider for my next property move.

@WatchandWaitorNot yes we are in our 30s so more promotion opportunity ahead, but not sure we want to be a CFO/exec level at the detriment to work life balance (working on weekends, holidays, evenings etc)

So then it must be £500k plus income to afford this lifestyle IF no inheritance/family help etc, and to have some buffer in case of redundancy/other events. It seems crazy but this is why so many are moving out of London especially with more flexible working

A school friend of mine manages that on £250k single income (sahm) but it was tight around 200k and they have had patches of watching every penny.... but that means not going skiing every year in this context!
They planned for all-through school fees before pregnancy, planned only 2 kids to afford it, and saved / pre-paid school fees for both children to get ahead of the curve.
They have typical 4-bed london terrace. No inheritance or family wealth, buying a London house early and stretching themselves allowed them to climb the property ladder without a huge mortgage. I would not say they are well off. They have a good income but the school fees drain that and they would hsve struggled without all their financial planning.

We have this lifestyle, but in Buckinghamshire, and commute to London when needed. Combined £250k ish, with 3 children. I don't understand why anyone would settle in London, especially with children (we lived there for about 8 years in our 20s).

Entrance to Grammar school is down to ability (incl tutor enhanced ) not income. So don’t take that for granted.

However the good news is plenty of high earning middle class families send their kids to good comprehensives in London.

You can manage on significantly less than that but that's because there's so many variables. Houses aren't the same price everywhere for starters

@paranoidmumdroid1 sounds like they did a fair amount of financial planning and bought their property at a good time.

@Scottishgirl85 it’s only the London job market where you need to be in the office 4 days a week. If companies continue to offer hybrid working I’ll definitely consider a move out to get more for my money. I’ve heard chesham, amersham, chalfont etc (which are in Bucks I think) are nice but also expensive (but not London expensive!)

@TempleOfBloom yes noted, I know grammars are ability dependent so I’m prepared for that not to be a given.

Life's not all about money. Just have your 2 kids and worry about it later. They do not care about luxury homes and private school.

You will know your own industry but in mine and DH’s (City Law and the operations side of banking) 3 days a week in the office is the norm, not 4.

Also have a look at living in Surrey and commuting. My commute is shorter from here than from some parts of Zone 3 that I lived in. Also, some of the best schools in the country are reachable from here eg LEH / Guildford / Wimbledon High / Kings / Hampton. You get more for your money in terms of house and garden size.

Many people in Surrey have all the thing you list on similar household income.