Does everyone on MN earn loads of money!?

[whatsausername]

for context, I earn 27K per annum and so does my husband. We have one DC. We are early 30s.

I just feel all the posts I read on here more or less everyone is loaded. Don’t get me wrong we can comfortably pay our bills but we have to save for anything big (holiday Xmas etc)

we still private rent. I’d love a mortgage but it’s not gonna be in the next 5 years for us.

everyone on MN seems to have huge houses, loads of holidays and multiple DC’s 🫣

"It makes me laugh so much when people say they just want something nice to wear to the shops on a Saturday and people post links to shapeless sludge coloured dresses that cost £300. 😂"

Yes and if anyone complains they say that OP didn't specify a budget and they never think that not specifying a budget might mean 'normal'.
Pub lunch is another one, everyone claiming people are wearing lovely dresses to their local pub.

i feel wealth shouts more than poor. I’m a UC top up which given me around 52k. Thankfully own my home so should be okay once that paid.

The people with large houses and a high income are the ones who tend to mention it at every opportunity.

I tend to take the salary claims at face value, but I do wonder what these high earners actually do in their jobs - and more to the point would it make any difference at all if their jobs didn't exist? Also what are the salary profiles like in these companies,? If the "workers" are on £100k the CEO must be on £5m! Hang on! I've worked it out they all work for Thames Water!

S&B is more about disposable income, though, not necessarily someone being a high earner now. Someone living alone on a pension of £30k per year with no housing costs could have more disposable income than someone on £100k with a couple of kids in childcare, huge mortgage, commuting costs etc.

Or people could just be putting things on their credit cards.

It's about being wealthy. There's no need to overthink it.

@sundayfundayclub

Unfortunately I am not a data analyst with some sort of database. I was speaking from my lived experience.

I work in a company that has worked actively to bridge both the gender pay gap and the D&I pay gap (something I was heavily involved with as a black woman).

Yes google says that 1% etc but that is not necessarily current real life and that was what I was trying to say. I work in an industry where where you categorically cannot use those old stats as fact anymore.

I wish I could attach our board reports so you could see the progress but I can't.

There is a long way to go, I agree, but blanket statements don't help at all imho.

It’s a mixed bag, I’m struggling but my sister is on here somewhere and her husband genuinely earns shitloads. Different threads attract different people and it’s good to have a range of perspectives imo.

UC tops your wages up to £52,000?

How?!

I think Mumsnet definitely runs wealthy.

Of course there are some people here like you, OP, but compared to my real life (in an average part of the country, if not a bit better off than average) there are far more people with large salaries then I come across day to day.

I sometimes think there should be a separate board for 'well-off people problems' because as in this thread, there are some who seem incapable of reading the room/thread and post very insensitively.

I don’t work.
I guess you could say I’m a Tradwife. Through choice can I add.
My husband has a good pension from the police and earns a very substantial wage for the job he now does.
I take £100 a week as ‘playing out/spending money and I choose to save most of that.
I also have my ‘silly money’ which pays for larger things and dip into our joint account for everything else.

@HelpMeUnpickThis why would you need to be a data analyst to know the majority of higher earners are women? Surely if you know this you have seen evidence it is the case? Personally I find statistics a bit more reliable than lived experience.

My work has involved gender pay gap reports & in my lived experience men represent a higher proportion of higher earners. HTH

UC top up, to 52K??

Oh, & DH works for a MC law firm which has done a lot of work re gender pay gaps. I still wouldn't say it's representative of every industry though.

Salary is 42k so about 10k top up. I have 2 kids with childcare costs otherwise wouldn’t get anything. I plan to go full time when they’re out of primary and reduce my award to nil

Nope. We earn less than you. There’s a huge range here though. Some of the people you describe will be massively in debt. I’d rather earn less and have no debt.

Jeez get me some of that UC top up!!! 😧

Not me. I don't work and am on UC.
On most threads, it is irrelevant anyway.

And me!

I’m similar, disabled, no medical retirement, living off one wage, my husband’s. I’m 58 with no private pension, my husband is 61. We have friends who are fit and healthy with good pensions travelling abroad for 6 weeks at a time.

Some who chose not to have children, one has 500k in her pension pot, she was a manager at Sainsburys and New Look, I was gob smacked when she told me.

As mentioned we’re not skint but careful, rarely go out for meals as it’s become so expensive. But my husband is healthy and I’m grateful for that as he’s a tower of strength for me.

Lol very true.

That said, those sort of remarks are about class as much as income. Our local pub is, well, not like that. It also doesn't serve food anyway, and when it briefly attempted to do so during the autumn 2020 covid restrictions, the result was horrifying. Local house prices reflect the working class, would get half of MN needing smelling salts vibe. The small mortgage has meant DH and I have always had reasonable disposable income even when we were lower earners than now.

i mean there’s income and income.

i’m disabled and medically retired. I get PIP and ESA (worked for twenty years before my accident)

so I have just under a thousand coming in per month, which isn’t a lot.

but I do own my own house because I got divorced and moved to a (much) cheaper area. So no rent.

I have higher costs my income (disabled and use a wheelchair so have a cleaner, electric, gas, physio, I run a car because public transport out here is not wheelchair accessible so otherwise I wouldn’t really leave the house).

so at some point I’ll have to sell the house and move somewhere cheaper again, probably next move will ideally be to a very small flat, and then I’ll once again live off the money from the house sale until it runs out.

hopefully by that point I’ll have my state pension.

I reckon a good percentage of that 1% of women are on MN then! A thread yesterday from a SAHP asking if her weekly spends were unreasonable given her DH’s £170k PA earnings and there was a high number of responses with posters saying they earned more than this.

To be clear the 42k is pre tax and pension.

Do t worry OP I’m pretty skint too 😂 30k but I’m a single parent with one child so I pay for everything. Thankfully I work from home some days so don’t have childcare costs or travel costs those days. Almost all my clothes are from vinted and I have to save hard for an annual holiday