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

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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.

I think daughters post underlined the perception of how deep inroads you can make into your must have/nice to have list.

Of course a bigger income will (all other things being equal) give you more choices. But all other things are not equal - and housing costs (even after you've 'cut your cloth'), travel costs and childcare can be of the same order of magnitude as the are home of a 100K salary - it is not 'free money' the way that making money on property has been in the past. I object to the rhetoric of hate and envy towards top band tax-payers earning 'four times what I do'.

I think the trick is to hang out with people with similar incomes and lifestyle or less than you rather than be/feel the poorest in your group.
A couple of times my DH has come back from work telling me about his work collegues who have brought overseas properties or 50k cars. I say to him that is nice but they are not an average bunch of people and let us concentrate on enjoying what we have.

Nobody said an expensive lifestyle helps the poor did they?

But it is true that the high earners pay a disproportionate amount of tax which benefits those on low incomes disproportionately (I'm not saying that is wrong BTW). As a family we pay a massive amount of tax - in fact about £100k.

It is incorrect to say that the tax from the high earners doesn't benefit the low earners.

daughter the point is that they do buy properties in poorer areas - which leads to areas becoming gentrified. Nice for coffee shop owners and landlords.

Our top tax band salary bought us a terraced house in Barking. My CMs daughter (a teacher) had to move out to Orpington because she was struggling to keep living at home after her second DC was born - and she couldn't afford the local house prices. It was nice for us that we'd found a house we could afford - albeit an hours commute from work and a bit ropey - but it was not so nice that CMs daughter was then having to commute back to where she'd grown up. 'People should live in cheaper areas' doesn't solve anything on the large scale.

handcream interest only mortgages are usually a lot less than paying rent in fact.

Daughter yes and no. I think that we need to do far more to ensure equality of opportunity (which means for example making sure all children get a good education/training that best suits their abilities, and also reducing inherited/unearned wealth which can mean the rich and their DC stay rich even if their abilities are mediocre). I don't think however we can ensure that X job pays as much as Y job... sadly.

Haven't had time to read the whole thread but it does strike me that 100k might be what the editorial team at the DM perceive to be the squeezed middle. The real squeezed middle who are having to swap sensible spending for scrimping, are maybe not so much on their radar.

On a bit a bit of a tangent, it's funny how £100,000 seems to loom large in people's minds and assumes a sort of magical significance, as if everything suddenly changes when you hit six figures.

That's probably relevant because it has held that position in people's minds for many many years, yet all the while its spending power has been eroded by inflation. Maybe that is why it seems disappointing to some people when they get there, they still imagine it as the fantastical salary they dreamed of when they were at school twenty or thirty years ago without adjusting for inflation.

Very true bluegrass.

The same is true of HRT, I think. Interesting that that threshold is being dramatically lowered now.

Minipie it's not really about earning equality, it's about equal respect. Let's make care home work a valued profession. The working classes in Germany are not all failed doctors and lawyers, they don't need or want the status or responsibility or even the income because they have enough within the job that they do and enjoy their free time in the way that they choose to.

Here, having a vocational or service career instantly means being poor. When that societal anomaly is corrected the rest will follow. It will just take a lot of balls from a political party to drive through the changes needed to the education system and minimum wage to make that happen.

I think the big error that the couple made is not thinking through the private school decision. They've said they want it for the sports but have they any idea how much private sports coaching you can actually buy for the half million or so that they have spent on the school?

It's a trap that I have found myself close to falling into. There is a private secondary that I have my eye on (for many many years from now - see my user name!) and I have found myself saying to dh "wow - they even have their own boathouse - it'd be great for the kids to be able to learn to row" (I rowed at university). But half a mile down the river from the school boathouse is the (much bigger and better) boathouse of the city club. Fees to join are expensive - £300 a year or so. Or 3% of the school fees. Hmmmm......

Once you put your child in private school then taking them out must be heart breaking. I suspect a lot of people cheerily start at 4 thinking that it isn't much more than childcare without realising that they are making a 14 year £250k decision. Our rule is that we won't start unless:-

1. We can pay the fees comfortably out of earned income AND
2. We have the full fees for both kids in savings AND
3. Our housing situation is sorted - by this I either mean no mortgage or so much equity that we could downsize to a "big enough" home and have no mortgage.

That means that if something goes wrong with our incomes we still have the savings and if something goes wrong with the savings we still have the income. And that school fees can be our only "big expense" as housing is sorted.

I suspect this means that private school is a "no" for us but I'd much rather that than have to take them out mid year 10 as one of us has lost our jobs.

Out of interest, I just looked up the price of a house as close as possible to the one I grew up in - a semi on the outskirts of north London.

At the time my father was a civil servant, in a specialist scientific field. My mother was a SAHM and they had three children. It was a comfortable, but fairly simple lifestyle. We had holidays in the UK once a year, camping or staying with family, and ran a car.

An identical house, around the corner is now 659,000. The salary pay point for the role my father held at the time is currently 52,000 (possibly adjust that salary upwards a bit for London weighting, as the employer has since moved out of London). However, it is fairly easy to see that someone doing that role could not buy that house now and also have a spouse at home.

Our parents' generation - definitely true to say that people 'have never had it so good'.

PS. I actually do feel a bit sorry for the people in that DM link. I suspect that they were invited to give comments for something along the lines of a 'how do you budget for your lifestyle' piece, but didn't realise that the writers would portray them as the Cotswolds version of Marie-Antoinette...

daughter - again I think you are painting an inaccurate picture with broad brush strokes. I know many wealthy builders - either getting rich through working up to managing big projects - or by profiting from the property boom doing up run down houses. Similarly with other trades and service professions.

Partymatron there is no 'rhetoric of hate and envy' towards the wealthy. The Labour party have seized on an entirely delusional attitude, a lot if people just want a fair wage and a reasonable amount of free time and respect in their job.

Every day call centre workers go in to work being treated as though they are a burden on their employers. They are spied on, checked up on, treated abominably if they are off sick.

They have a right to be angry but most haven't got the time or energy to engage in the hate and envy you seem to think exists.

If there is rhetoric at all to be unhappy about it is the rhetoric of the greedy and entitled high earners on this thread thinking that they deserve to complain while this sort of thing goes on at the other end of the spectrum.

I think it's more like £175k rather than £250k.

With regards to private sports coaching, clearly you are not going to spend £hundreds of thousands on sports coaching, but I don't think that's entirely the point.

Part of it is placing your child in that environment where sport (and all the other private school extras) are an expectation. I went to state school, my kids private, and they do vastly more sport, but also there is a culture, in large part from the parents more than the school of doing stuff like several high-grade musical instruments at age 10, drama, ballet, all the rest.

Of course if you are motivated you can push your children into that at primary level without having the motivating factor of most other parents at school doing the same, but not everybody is. And at senior level, you're not always going to be in catchment for a naice state school.

Of course it's a lot of money, but these days you could spend £350k on a 1-bed flat in a murderous part of London, and while you can always sell the stabby flat, and the money won't come back from the school fees, money is there to be spent - and if you later bequeath that flat to your children, it's perfectly plausible that they would have been better off (in terms of enhanced earning potential) with a private education.

(And I think the real ballsy political change would be to tax assets. Like large houses belonging to elderly people. Which would probably at a stroke raise the status and salaries of care workers. You can't reconcile having well paid carers - and being able to leave a large inheritance.)

Its interesting what 'Mumoftwoyoungkids' says about private school fees.

It is certainly true that if you are used to paying childcare the first few years of school fees is doable, but if you really dont want to have a mortgage, have the fees in the bank already for the whole of their school life - well the only people who would choose private would be the very very wealthy.

Sometimes one needs to take a little risk. Life is just too short to think of all the things that can go wrong.

As I mentioned... my childhood was very "upper" (affluent) middle class. I know fairly well that it was not "ordinary" middle class. I had class mates that were the latter (parents were teachers as zillionaire says, and no, they did not have our lifestyle). In fact, I was sometimes asked to give a tour of our house (6 bedrooms, living room with dining area, games room, study and so forth) once they saw our neighbourhood.

I guess the problem at hand is that there's a big difference between "upper" middle class and the "ordinary" middle class, and I think it's mainly the ones who belonged to the former that feel the squeeze in particular. Teachers I know now actually have a better lifestyle than the ones from 30 years ago.

However, I think it is very flawed to just brush this under the carpet in the "be lucky with what you have" manner as many here seem to have. In fact, that is dangerous for the UK economy. The company my DH works for (very highly skilled job) admitted bluntly that the workforce with this particular skill level is paid 15-20% less in the UK than in other developed countries. Including other benefits paid, you can say that the UK employee costs about 50% less than in other developed countries.

Basically, in the company's view, in terms of cost, the UK is somewhere between a developed country and an emerging one. They get the infrastructure, stable political system and skill more aligned to a developed country, but pay a lot less for it.

They can do this because everyone else in the UK with this particular skill level doesn't expect to get paid more. You see, they benchmark against what other companies pay, and every single multinational company seems to choose to pay less. In the long-run, this is BAD for the UK. And this whole "be grateful what you have" and "don't expect too much" thing... really isn't helping here.

I don't really follow Daughter. You're saying it's about respect not earning equality, but then you say the lack of respect comes from the low wages?

The idea that people should be grateful to high earners for paying taxes is ludicrous. Everyone pays tax - even if not income tax. Do the well-off expect a round of applause?

As for shouldering more of the burden of taxation, that's exactly what's wrong with the system - the rewards are increasingly concentrated in the hand of a few, while the many get poorer. Company directors these days seem to think they are 142 x more valuable than the directors of the 1980s even when the performance of their companies is worse.

"For years, we’ve only been able to afford very mediocre holidays to Cornwall, where we have family, or staying with friends in either Geneva or France" did give me a giggle though.

If Labour get in next year though they do need to take care that they dont frighten off the high earners, those people are paying the most amounts of tax, you might not feel that's important until they are no longer there and the tax revenues dry up.

Of course nobody should be grateful to high earners - they're hardly earning high salaries for altruistic reasons.

But it is important to recognise - purely from an economic point of view -that high earners contribute a large proportion of tax revenue, and that historically when taxes have been increased on high earners then the overall tax take has gone down as high earners choose to emigrate or do less lucrative jobs. Also the overall spend on consumer services, retail etc (which support many jobs) goes down.

I think we can recognise that the country benefits from high earners, without being grateful to them, iyswim.

edam - round of applause? Just pointing out the of the headline figure 100K somewhere in the region of 40K would be taxes. So it's not really 100K, or 4 times 25K salary, or 'I shit on all the rest of you'.

You only have to see what is happening in France to recognise what is happening when a socialist government is in power. Labout left a note saying 'no money left' and very funny it was too!!

The economy has certainly picked up, why would anyone want what Labour did again?

If the high earners werent here or we all decided to do less paid roles then surely the tax revenues would reduce.

Where are they all going to go handcream? Mainland Europe where income tax is generally higher?