To think £100k pa is NOT 'the squeezed middle'?

[ArsenicFaceCream]

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The article is very confidently attributing the definition to Danny Dorling, but did he really name this figure?!

These women are fools.

But you objectively are wealthy if you own property worth millions. You might want to stay there until you die, but you can sell it and release all that wealth if and when necessary. People who aren't wealthy cannot do so.

For example, using bohemian's example - nice 3 bed flat, SW16, near the station, zone 3, £1750;

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Season ticket into London terminals just under £90 pcm.

I think one aspect that is rarely referred to is how many 'dependents' hook onto a high earner.

A single person earning 100K is in a totally different frame of spending power to someone with a wife/DC/elderly parent to support.

To bang my drum - house price inflation has given families an unenviable choice about whether they should take the financial risk of taking on a big mortgage, or the welfare risk of raising their DC in overcrowded conditions. Our income was 50K when we finally geared ourselves into a rental flat that would meet the council's bedrooms/occupants ratio. With tiny DC it was fine to juggle pop-up beds in the living room - but with teenagers not so much.

Greengrow, the lawyer you had for your divorce was shocking, from what you say. And it doesn't say much for your own legal skills, so I wouldn't keep banging on about it. That you can be left with the children and be wiped out doesn't bode well for the rest of us.

The cleft stick is such that people in London should be doing something about London property prices. But they can't, because it would mean their own property falling in value.

What a mess. What will happen? Intriguing to watch from the outside.

seriously, if angels became manifest in the UK tomorrow I would be disappointed if the DM didn't manage to find some expose on their foul habits didactylos This just made me .You're right of course but as a shop worker working lots of nonsense hours these 'poor' folk really boil my piss!!!

I didn't say that all trips cost 5k. I mentioned anecdotally that someone had been asked for 5k for a trip. I think it was to Africa to help set up education systems for the local children. There was the cost of the trip and then it was suggested that the parents might like to contribute some money towards the charity in addition to the trip. It actually put one parent off sending her child there as he had got a place on a scholarship.

The comments about house prices in London are misleading. There's a nice two bed garden flat in Catford for £240,000. 10 mins walk to the station. When people say that a flat would cost them hundreds and hundreds of thousands, they mean a flat in the affluent area of London they deem acceptable.

It's about choices and some of them are hard. We moved out of London to have kids but we had to commute to our London jobs for two years (vast cost in money and time) before we both found local (and less well paid) jobs. I'm extremely glad we did it but making a choice to live where we could afford to meant leaving friends behind etc.

Having choices (even if you don't like them very much) makes you very lucky. Poor people don't have any choices.

I agree with the comments about housing prices. Of course you are looking at shocking prices in central London but prices are more affordable in Greater London. I know this road/area and it is lovely; www.rightmove.co.uk/property-to-rent/property-46540603.html Half a mile to a Northern line tube station.

arsenic - of course it can be done & is done my millions of Londoners. But like angeltulips said - a flat in Steatham surrounded by flat-sharing trainee accountants is quite a long way from a cottage in the Cotswolds with space to keep a horse . So if you can afford a wee little terraced house a bit smaller than what you grew up in - you would probably make the effort for the sake of the DC - even if it munched up over half your take home pay.

The 'us and them' rhetoric peddled by politicians & DM is divisive and unpleasant. In the same way that benefits claimants aren't chain-smoking yobs - higher rate taxpayers aren't snorting cocaine off nightclub toilet cisterns.

NCer here

I earn over 100 k and so do many of those I work with. The vast majority have perfectly normal working class or middle class backgrounds and so when we start off in our line of work you would absolutely expect 100k to be a lot of money and for that to provide an excellent lifestyle. But as many have pointed out, it doesn't.

Now don't get me wrong, I'm not going to whine to the Daily Mail about it and that article is their usual dislike able bullshit. But my job is only really available in Central London and has long hours. So you need a property commutable to that and good flexible child care or a stay at home parent as our hours aren't 9-5. Add in costs of commuting, suitable clothing and the constant bloody coffees we end up buying due to lack of meeting rooms and it gets expensive. So I find many of my colleagues become flummoxed as to how they're earning six figures but still money has to be carefully watched, it wasn't what they expected. And family don't understand - I am careful not to tell me family what I earn as they wouldn't understand why we are thinking so carefully about whether we should send DC private as they would think it a given on my salary that you would given they don't earn that and live in a much cheaper part of the country. 100k is clearly an unusually high income but doesn't get you a mega yacht lifestyle.

You are right there Party. They do tend to peddle out their stories about 'benefits claimants' and 'the rich' a few weeks before they make a nasty announcement. It's the Autumn statement coming up, so................

Gosh Party how can I put this? that mortgage payment, season ticket and commute for that house doesn't seem a particularly good deal.

Particularly when you could rent this;

www.rightmove.co.uk/property-to-rent/property-47944475.html

Just for the record, my bet's on higher rate tax relief on pension contributions.

I seem to be swinging in favour of renting

Is there support for the offspring of not rich people to go to Uni? I thougt it was a student loan or nothing?

I think for very low household incomes there is a supplementary grant Cad

Renting is definitely better value where I am at the moment. We were renting before we bought the house we're in now, but the landlord wanted to move back in to the property. The problem with renting, I find, is that a lot of landlords seem to really want to sell, but don't tell you that, so once you're in, they decide to put it up for sale. Constantly having to hunt around for suitable rentals with young children is very stressful.

Full-time student – household income Grant for courses from September 2014 Grant for courses from September 2015
£25,000 or less £3,387 £3,387
£30,000 £2,441 £2,441
£35,000 £1,494 £1,494
£40,000 £547 £547
£42,620 £50 £50
Over £42,620 No grant No grant

Arsenic - our last rental - BLW DD lost us our deposit. Have you priced that in .

Formatting went mad. Can you read that?

Link here;

www.gov.uk/student-finance/loans-and-grants

It's all very depressing Party. No argument from me about that. I gather agency fees are horrendous too?

& it was a bad deal for us - so we went to a second floor two bed flat with no lift & a dodgy neighbour - but biking distance to work. And put up with Christmas party chit chat about how raising DC in a flat is tantamount to child abuse . Which is better than my friend - who carelessly gave her downstairs neighbour her mobile number - and then had two years of SMS real-time running commentary on precisely what DC noises were carrying through the floorboards. (Occupant being a single lawyer who believed that her 300K flat should have bought her a more glamorous neighbour than a family with two preschoolers .)

There is an element of eco-system to how London works. I'm out of work right now - but when I was working 100% of my wage went on paying the nanny, paying the cleaner and paying for a weekly meal out to catch-up with my family. I didn't think I was especially fat-catting to be leveraging my skills in to bring in funds which partially supported other young women who had chosen to work in childcare/domestic/catering. We makes our choices - and now I do my own cleaning, childcare and freezer cooking - but I think the moral highground is dubious.

We are a low income household I think....DS 1 qualifies for the full student grant. We live in the south east and have 3 DC. We feel we live pretty well on about £25,000 a year. All bills and outgoings are 2000 per month, including 1100 on our mortgage. The only thing we don't have is holidays...we have a few days out here and there instead.

No cleaner, no childcare costs (I am a SAHP), run 2 cars, DC do clubs and school trips etc. DG commutes to London 3 times per week.

£100k is an amazing amount of money! My extended family (parents, brother and DC, parents in law) all put together live on less than that...14 people in 3 households in the south east!