What household income supports this lifestyle ?

[Drealifegoals]

If your lifestyle looks anything like this please share with me what yearly household income you have!

please share mumsnetters, this is where I want to end up for my 40s and there are people around us living this kind of lifestyle but I can’t ask them how much they earn IRL!

dream lifestyle is:

3 holidays a year - one long haul two smaller European city breaks type
1 nice car bought outright - nothing majorly expensive around the 60k mark
coffee out for both adults x5 a week
lunch out for both adults x2 a week
dinner out every Friday - whole family two adults two kids
good Christmas every year
money for regular hair appointments for whole family
enough money for both kids to do sports and music out of school
nicely decorated house
monthly shopping treats for all family members maybe £50 each
Food shop from M&S
clothing to be mainly high street with the odd designer item thrown in for whole family.

no mortgage, no childcare fees, both children in state school.

I just think property is a risk game. If you’re too risk averse and take a small mortgage or buy too late, you miss the boat if house prices rise, which generally speaking as be the case for decades now. Of course if you over leverage yourself and circumstances change you’re screwed then too. Everyone has to look at their own circumstances, but there are costs with being risk averse as there are with taking risk, as with any kind of investment.

This is odd

you are a FTB in your mid 40s due to a large inheritance and won’t have had a mortgage but you are insistent most finish up paying their mortgage in the forties and early 50s?

Yes @foursquares does.

FTB in her mid forties buying a property outright with no mortgage due to an inheritance. So will never have had a mortgage anyway!

But you didn’t did you? You’re in your mid forties now and buying your first home!!

You know we talk about people living in bubbles and echo chambers? This is one such instance. Absolutely no clue what it’s like to worry about interest rates and whether you’re going to be able to afford your mortgage payment. No understanding of navigating the housing ladder and how impossible it is to buy and sell at the moment. No experience of negative equity and the panic of nearly losing your house. Just a nice thick wedge if money coming from a relative and job done. Oh to be able to pontificate about the lives of the peasants.

and yet doggedly insistent about what others do re mortgages. Very peculiar

She wants to live like common people …. 🤪

Not necessarily. Very nearly mortgage free aged 41. Only 'inheritance' I had was £250 when my much loved Granny died in 2005. I have made overpayments though and saved so hard. Started off really skint and with debt and clawed our way out!

How old were you when you took out your mortgage @Cakeandcardio ? And how much for?

It's not alway bad advice, because there are many other factors. Not everyone is on a straight career ladder that brings a greater salary each year; they may be hoping to go part-time or scale back or even change career as they come into middle age.

Some people are more risk-averse than others, too. They may fear redundancy, if it's rife in their industry, and want to get the mortgage debt sorted as a priority. They might not feel confident in the markets - you got lucky, but anyone who invested prior to the crash of 2007-08 would not have been.

In other words, it's not necessarily "silly" to choose a different path.

We paid ours off with neither of those albeit we'd been chipping away for ages. The next one we paid off with some of my husbands commutation. (lump sum) when he retired from the police - he was early 50's I was still 40's.

Op we could do all those things - we do some of them. We have about £7k after tax and no debts.

If you have 60k for the car then
15k holidays
5k eating out
5k sports and hair and any other bits
12k shopping and bills
5k house stuff
5k treats and christmas
Plus 10k a year to save for the next car

So around 55k

I could afford private, I didn't as the child passed her 11+ and it's a good grammar which she wanted to go to. We did have her entered for the exam for a selective private school but didn't need it. So it may not always be needed.

OP some other things you might want to consider?

Private health care, Gym fees, Personal trainer, Glasses - they get really pricey, Dental, Cleaner, Gardener, life cover/critical illness cover. And of course wine!

6k a month minimum.

I reckon this would cost net of £100-120k per annum BUT how do you know they don’t have savings/investments/regular gifts from family etc which are supporting this

Lol, I agree!

I'd say I could achieve most of those things on £80k. But given your expectations on a reasonable car price I wonder if you'd also expect a higher budget per holiday etc than me.

Children's sports costs vary wildly too. Are we talking local football team or elite go-carting / horses?!

You've written a post that makes no sense - you are asking how much people with this lifestyle need to earn and then admit its you - do you not know what you earn?
If you are living in a fantasy world and pretending this is you but can't afford it, then maybe you should listen to the cheap second hand car and no coffee brigade as you sound clueless

You don’t have to have had an inheritance or windfall to have paid your mortgage off in your 40s. Just got on the property ladder early. I’m in my 40s and bought my first house when I was 20yo. Cost me 32k. I paid it off in my 20s. Bought a bigger house and paid that off in my early 40s.

I think if your aim is to pay off your mortgage you can do it - but it's hard to do it without help if you want to maintain a good lifestyle - hence why we haven't paid ours off. You have to decide what matters - we couldn't live on a tight budget for years with the aim to live mortgage free - it just isn't worth it to us, we would find that too much of a needless sacrifice.

No way does £100k cover that with a mortgage. I can vouch for that!

Same..i am so far behind others of my age on money/lifestyle :(

Im really impressed with this, we have a similar income, just paid off mortgage, and definitely dont have this lifestyle and still cant save 2.5k a month!
We do have 4 DC late teens/young adults. 1 at uni which is expensive. 1 has own place and is pretty much independent, and 2 at home full time.
We have 1 shorthaul holiday and 1 UK holiday a year. Sometimes all 6 of us go sometimes just us and youngest 2 DC but paying for 4/6 adults is pricey. Occasional weekends away but always down to visiting relatives/uni runs etc than actual leisure
Grocery shop is not m&s usually tesco/sainsbury and have 2 x 10 year old cars which we do own outright but aren't fancy luxury models.
I think the income to sustain the lifestyle described by OP ( without debt) is high, especially if big discrepancy in salaries and one person earns most of the income as an employee and pays high PAYE tax, loses child benefit etc.
If self employed and pay yourself through dividends and offset expenses then tax bill will be significantly less and net income a lot more.
Some people have a lot of hidden family help, ie an inheritance or parents pay or help towards big purchases such as car, holiday, home improvements or even just buying school uniforms and paying for clubs etc
Not all lifestyle is purely funded by earnings.
I would say an income of 150k but lots of variables, amount of tax paid, age of DC, how the joint income is split between the 2 adults .
I do find it hard to imagine going out and buying a 60k car outright, especially if just living off paye salaries.

You reckon wrong. Add another 100k

What expenses do you think you can claim if self employed that people on PAYE can’t claim?