Was £65k a huge salary 5-6 years ago?

[Donotfitin]

I‘m just curious as back then we thought it was life changing money. I’m currently on that salary and to us it’s now “mid” (in fact, I’m starting a new job with a higher salary which is a really nice upgrade, but still not life changing).

So I wonder if it was us being naive back then, life getting expensive, or something else.

I agree that it would have gone much further 5 years ago. I would have considered it upper mid then.

It still is a huge salary for anyone not working in London. I always feel London is a city state within the UK.

No, it wasn’t and still isn’t a “huge salary” It is however roughly double the average salary.

I would say a huge salary is over £200k

These threads do annoy me! There are inevitably people saying, “that’s a fortune! We earn tuppence ha’penny and only wear sacks, and we have a weekend at Butlins once a decade - you’re spoilt!”. 65k now is worth 20k less than it was in 2020. This and fiscal drag (as many people have said) are the reasons why you don’t feel like you’re in clover even when earning this big number sum.

It was the magic number in terms of the tipping point of life becoming easier
Now id say its £80,000

The UK is a low in income economy. It has been for 30 years. You go somewhere like Australia where you’re on over 100 grand bare minimum and it really does shine a light on it.

MN has two camps. The "no one deserves more than NMW" and the "husband on low six figures"

65k is objectively a "good" salary at 2 x national average - but, is it great for say working for 25 years post university? Probably not.

For context, I was on that five years ago - felt well enough off, and managing a team of 5 - so I think it fitted the role.

Sacked from that job last year (when it got up to about £73k), and now on £55k.

My boss seems to think this is infinite riches, whereas I think "I took a 20k pay cut for this job (desperate times desperate measures)

It's all relative, and I am grateful to work (of course), but at the same time sort of "over" the whole career ladder myth I think we have all been sold.

@Mosman2020 where do you get that Aus figure from? The basic minimum wage there is around £26k and average is higher than year but nowhere near 100k.

I think it largely depends on housing cost - if mortgage free and you're not looking to move or do home improvements (i.e. you are happy with your house) then it can buy a very decent standard of living (albeit not extravagant)

I've paid quite a lot for a small 70s mid-terrace so despite earning that amount for a while, I don't feel like it's a massive salary even though I know objectively it is. Probably also due to paying other large expenses too such as nursery fees whilst trying to save money for a bigger house. Neither DH nor I have been recipient to any inheritance and don't expect to be (we had to top up DFILs care home fees and sign off that we don't want to inherit from him so we don't take on his debt for e.g.)

The interesting thing is that I didn't feel much difference going down from 78k to 65k due to the tax rate, student loan repayments (type 2 and postgrad), and pension contributions.

I've been interviewing for a 100k job and again it's interesting to see how little it changes things for us materially despite being a huge hike in gross pay. If we don't want to increase our mortgage it'll take 4 years to hit our savings goal for a bigger home. I guess my expectation was that it'd have a bigger immediate impact

But I am very aware of how lucky I am, and that I am able to throw more into my pension etc than the average uk worker, that the house is expensive due to area and school catchment etc etc. It's just a few years ago I thought we would be able to happily pay for a cleaner multiple times a week, eat out regularly and not have to check price tags as much on this salary whilst living in a nicer house!

No, it just went a lot further

The basic minimum wage is not what I’m comparing it to. There is a legal minimum which is entirely different from the average.
If I lived in Australia, I’d be on 250 grand a year now in the UK I’m on considerably less than that not even half for my skill set

I don’t know, it’s weird isn’t it. I remember when I started work in my profession 15 years ago £40k a year sounded like a fortune. I’m now on £72k and still living payday to payday. Although that is because of a big mortgage on my house which is much nicer than where I lived 15 years ago. But not anything out of the ordinary.

I earn about that and dh a little less. We’re very very comfortable. We’re mortgage free, with one teen but the money that we would’ve spent on mortgage is now invested/ pension topped up so we don’t have that money day to day. We don’t really think about money very much, have about 4-5 holidays a year. We’re very lucky.

I was earning the same salary 5 years ago and I don’t notice any difference now which I know is a very privileged position.

It’s possible DH’s my salaries combined before tax are about £70k. Our house is worth £750k.

I bought my first flat in London just after the banking collapse in an undesirable area for £170k and then sold it around two years later at the height of the London bubble for £100k more. I then moved out of London to a do-er upper along the Elizabeth line that shot up in value when they got going with it.

Our Mortgage is less than £800 a month we have a preschooler in childcare that doesn’t cost us anything in childcare frees because we are able to flex my hours around her preschool 30 free hours. We have a much better quality of life than we really should do considering our salaries and lifestyle

Yes I assumed this would be the posters answer - rode the housing inflation wave.

This isn’t achievable today on that kind of income - the £170k ‘undesirable London flat’ probably costs £500k now.

It’s amazing really how people’s fortunes differ based on when they bought a house!

Most people don’t earn close to that even in London

The 90th percentile salary is about 72k so on 65k you’re maybe on the 85th percentile. Thats obviously quite a high wage in the distribution but recent high inflation has obviously impacted the buying power of all of our salaries.

Choices, choices ….You presumably enjoy living in your nicer house so worth still living pay day to payday, and using your now higher salary for that, otherwise you could have not bought the house with a big mortgage and had more disposable cash etc. and thus not had to live as you describe. I think a lot of this conversation links back to expectations and wants, no problem of course with that, but hard to hear from the top 10% as it comes across as a moan, when those higher salaries to give people often more choices in life.