To think that 60k is a lot of money to earn a year?!

[MinkSlink]

I think it is a lot of money to earn per year but it seems a lot of people on mumsnet don't think so, am I in the piss poor minority here or what?!

Were is that a good or bad thing?

Still a bit taken aback by it tbh!

Quite good emmon! I think maybe AIBU is not really the easiest place on MN to begin your experience!

I dream of earning even 30k, let alone 60k. I could work 24 hours, 7 days a week for my company (carer, not minimum wage) and I still wouldn't be any closer to earning that.

I have a degree but it makes little difference. I pay a far cheaper rent than people living in London, but still, have little hope of raising enough money to own our own house. Sometimes I feel like we are trapped, and I will always be on a low income with no hope of advancing. My low income (16k) means I get a small amount of help with housing benefit and child tax credits... which also makes me feel crap, as people (especially on here) view me as a scrounger. Yet I work 12 hour night shifts in palliative care - I am not lazy or scrounging. It makes me, and people in a similar position feel vastly unappreciated.

lmao Mortgage paid off,no debt and no credit cards,£60k ??? was my tax bill last year oh and I'm 42 ,big smile ,big smile!

Wow bloody that's great. What do you do?

Fiction writer?

katykuns - why would anyone think you were a scrounger??

I'm just wondering why this thread seems to have turned into a thread about living in London. It's getting a bit dull all this zone 1-6 stuff, i feel like i've wandered into an Orwell novel [hwink]

Just read all through this with open mouth. 60K is a lot, even in London.
In the papers today 'One in five British workers and their families are likely to have inadequate standards of living because they are being paid less than the living wage, according to a study.

The research by the consultants KPMG found that 4.82 million workers have to survive on less than a living wage,currently £8.30 an hour in London and £7.20 in the rest of the country. The TUC described the findings as "shocking".

The vast majority of Londoners, people in the south-east etc do live on low 20's and below and raise kids. To them 60K is a fortune. It is a lot of money.

Interesting thread. My DH and I earn about £60k between us, and we are certainly not poor but not rich either. We live in a cheap part of London (same area as Mrs Devere, zone 3) and we own a 2-bed flat with a mortgage of about £1k per month. Our childcare costs (one DC) are £450 per month - we're now TTCing DC2 as if I got PG now it would be a three year age gap so DC1 would get the free nursery hours. We have a car and we had two foreign holidays this year. So yes, we're comfortably off, but I never really understand who are all the people who live in 3 or 4 bed houses anywhere closer into town than we are. I just don't know how people afford it on half the income we're on.

ffs, this thread is mad.

For what it's worth, I agree that Eamon sounds like a bit of a (word that I'm not allowed to use).

Stating that he/she was a medical doctor and far from what he/sh considers to be rich is at best misguided, at worst pretty pompous. Compared to 90% of the population being a doctor is being rich.

Crazy thread!

LMFAO at all the people who reckon 'it's all relative' and '60K isn't all that much'.

IT IS.

1605 - I'm a gobshite who lives in Zone 2

I think someone up thread hit on the key issue. Its not really whether or not £60K pa is a lot. If you are earning more that 92% of the UK population its not really credible to argue that it isn't a lot of money. However, for a number of people on this thread, it doesn't leave them as wealthy as they would expect to be. £60K sounds like it should be large house and garden with a cleaner and gardener where its really just a 3 bed semi and a slightly elderly car.

To buy a house like my parents house in S Wales would cost us twice as much at least in London so on one level it can look like I am less well off than my parents were. However, I am much better off, my income is a lot higher and although my house is a bit smaller than theirs in terms of asset value I have a much more valuable asset than my parents.

I earn rather more than £60K now and some of my equally well paid colleagues still grumble about how much they get paid. It seems no matter how much you earn it never quite feels enough.

If this hasn't been linked to already, it might provide a bit of perspective:

www.guardian.co.uk/society/2012/oct/29/five-million-britons-living-wage

16% of people in London are not getting a 'living wage'. And that's low compared to most of the rest of the country!

I was thinking over the last couple of days how threads like this bring out the worst in me. I am very thankful that I am not poor, we have plenty, we are very lucky. So is the rest of my family. And I do see that lots of people who earn a high wage, also have lots of outgoings.

But this is the reality, isn't it? 16% of people are not even getting enough to live on properly.

As I've said before those points are conflating the issues. I don't think anyone was trying to argue that £60k as an income is not relatively high in terms of distribution.

What people are trying to argue is that income doesn't necessarily tell you about wealth and being rich is about wealth isn't it? There is a serious problem if being in the top ten percent of earners in such and unequal society doesn't mean you are rich really doesn't it and to pretend the fact that people on £60k do still struggle is not related to the fact that most people's wages (not the same as income) don't cover their living costs is crazy. It is part of the same problem - capitalism and filtering off of the wealth to the capitalists by the capitalists in government and the resulting provision that the main general population of wealth generators are put in varying positions of struggle. That surely is the whole point.

Being a high income on the distribution does not mean you have to put up with people telling you they no more about your life than you anymore than being on benefits should and actually what this line of behaviour does is allow and enable governments of capitalists to increasingly erode the top up benefits of precisely the people spoken about in this article.

Facts also being that post tax/top up benefits real incomes of people on £60k may be similar to those on low wages which means the government uses this belief of a lot of people on this thread that a £60k income is "huge" to justify taking away top up benefits.

Can none of you see that is what is going on? Where do you think all the tax credits and childcare payments have gone?

Does anyone think that it depends on how you spend that money though. There is an argument that it is really expensive to live in London and South East, but equally it is just as expensive to live in the North if you live in a really expensive area and then commute to a place of work in London/The South. I know people can't always choose where they work, or relocate at the drop of a hat, but surely whatever the figure you want to put on it 60k, 40k or even 90k it depends on what you decide to spend your money on and what standard of life you choose. Some can manage on 15k a year others find it hard to manage on 90k.

more than.

my sister thinks shes poor, she has no housing costs at all earns over 100k but classes her horses as essentials and pleads poverty all the time.

i have a overwhelming urge to slap her round the face most days, i was looking through her bills the other day and found it shocking some of the things she classes as basic needs.

I agree that there is a huge divide as to what people view as essential. I was talking to DH about this and he was going on about our 'essential' costs, which included not only our second car but also my income protection, Internet and Sky. Now, I don't doubt we have little disposable income at the end of the month but that is because of the above things. I don't doubt I could if necessary cut back but that is what my salary affords me - the choice. For the vast majority of people in the UK they don't have that choice.

You can choose to look at this in a relative way and realise that 60k doesn't make people as rich as you'd think being in the top 10% of earners but it does give us choices. To pretend otherwise is obtuse.

Except that this is also an argument that has been demonstrated to be false; that people on £60k struggle because of choices or different ideas about needs the "nice house" argument. However it was demonstrated how someone on a £13.5k income had a choice over housing also and the factor is likely to be dependents on the income, housing costs, number of people with income in the household etc rather than strictly the place within the income distribution. Unless, and some people have said, they don't believe people on £60k before tax can possibly be living frugally out of necessity. Really those beliefs have not been substantiated by anything greater than it being what those people think based on what they earn and how far it goes for them and I think this shows they don't really understand the extremely complex nuances within the system.

All I've ever tried to say is that someone's real actual income is not the same as their pre tax income in the distribution and you can't actually tell how wealthy someone is or how secure based on that income.

All kinds of things have an impact on your real income/security including tax credits, childcare help, childcare vouchers, dependents, debts, benefits in kind from the state or employment, how many of you in the house work, housing, travel/work related costs, assets, the state of repair your property is in etc. £60k might be high in the distribution but it does not bring you above being affected for better or worse by any of these things. That's why it is factually accurate to say it is a high pre tax income by distribution, although maybe not huge which would be relative to the top income, but it isn't factually accurate to talk about gardeners, cleaners, school fees and choices.

The argument about choices CAN be applied across the board for the vast majority of people and actually families with medium level incomes can be much worse off than those on low incomes, single people on low incomes can be better off than large families on a high (in terms of distribution) income, single people on benefits or very low wages are worst off of all working age fit to work nationals and asylum seekers, carers, the disabled, terminally ill and mentally ill at the moment can be worst of all as they are most likely to fall between the new gaps in entitlement. It is really complicated. A lot of it isn't even about poverty, what it is about is struggling.

I just think people should remember everyone is an individual with individual circumstances and fine, treat any claim you like with scepticism but try to listen objectively too instead of getting carried away with telling people that they have xyz and should do xyz. That applies to people labelled scroungers as well as people labelled as being on "huge" incomes.

Choices for people dependent on top up benefits are being eroded by government not people on £60k btw and as I keep saying, they are able to do that by clever use of propaganda. When the coalition got in top up benefits were available over the high rate tax bracket for families which meant there was a greater difference between higher and middle income families, the coalition took this away, not because they had found it was unnecessary (wages were low compared to living) but as part of a staged driving down of wages/entitlement/income. Now they have achieved this making of middle income people fairly similar to the high income people who have lost tax credits the next stage is this "xyz is a huge income" "why should people on benefits (including top ups) be able to afford the same living standards as working people (it isn't work they mean but lack of top up benefits)?" "We have to get rid of benefits to incentivise hard work" part which is going on now. They are also generally reducing entitlement for the poorest but doing this more overtly because there already was great stigmatisation against them that they just had to whip up.

Oh and choices for people of this generation were eroded by the people of the last generation whom government encouraged to take on ever more unaffordable personal debts driving up house prices, something which, along with the timing of the crash, and the selling off of council stock and lack of replacements means my generation are absolutely crippled by housing. Our children may also be and now will on top of that be crippled by student debt too.

(My parents did it - bought a massive house they couldn't afford without a silly mortgage they shouldn't have had)