If you are minted....

[FeralBeryl]

*What is your/ partner's career or job?
*
Not a TAAT more a TIBAT (inspired by a thread)

Someone has a monthly take home pay of £11k
Not going to lie, I fully intend to suddenly obtain the necessary qualifications overnight for whatever it is. sure there'll be an online course....

I know there will have been a great deal of sacrifice, no work home balance etc. I'm not wanting to judge at all-I'm enthralled

Please.

whatstgecomingoverthehill - where I live (central Paris) even the uberest rich live in apartments, sans garden, and private schools, while sometimes very hard to access (wildly oversubscribed), are inexpensive. However, housing costs are extremely high and that goes for the atttic rooms that you have to provide for your Filipina housekeepers and your au pair (without which dual working couples with demanding careers cannot survive).

I live in an absolutely stunning location and there are all sorts of advantages but it's really very expensive! The trouble is, if we moved further away to a cheaper location, our earning capacity would be shot dead in a second.

DH is a company director, and also owns the company. It's quite a small operation, but punches well above its weight, due to their expertise and state of the art equipment. They've done work for a lot of household names.

In the past he's had to work insane hours, and we had to make a lot of sacrifices. We've had to cancel holidays last minute, and DH worked every weekend.

But, now they're established, with a good core of competent staff life is much easier and calmer

We live really well on less than 11k a month and want for nothing. But have more than our fair share of equity I suppose.
To get to that level of income DH would have to go up a level at work, where people have sleeping bags in their office and nervous breakdowns. He's already said no to that.

DD is interested in doing law - might show her this thread.

homebythesea re women giving back - after 30 years in my industry I am told I have the 'gravitas' to ensure the seat at the table, but you can be be sure I did not wait to be invited. I have made it my mission to always have several professional mentees throughout the years and to work closely with identified disadvantaged young women on career guidance. In a (still) male dominated field it is critical to lift up the next generations of women - and frankly, nothing makes me prouder than seeing them become successful in whatever they choose to do with their lives.

When I said we had a gardener, odd job man and cleaner, I didn't for a minute think anyone would assume they were full time. About 7 hours pw each.

A Ferrari . So, sorry to disappoint.

youcanshove I think you are responding to Queenjuggler 😀

If you have the occasional business associate drop by a gardener and housekeeper becomes more of a necessity as your home is an extension of your business.
The family member I know does have a second home and i see it as being pretty fundamental to switching off, along with the occasional rather extreme get away. Otherwise work thoughts just creep back into his mind.

On the giving back point, when I first started working, one thing that struck me was how little the senior women of the day did to mentor junior women through the minefield that is work. I am where I am today partly because of the guidance of male mentors at key points in my career. I have been determined to change that and know other female peers take the same view. As Madeleine Albright quite rightly said "There's a special place in hell for women who don't help other women'.

We have a full time housekeeper, part time cleaner, part time gardener, home PA (as well as our work PAs) who run our lives. They make our lives a heck of a lot easier given everything we have going on but I am not sure i would say out loud that any of them are "essential". Doesn't sound good does it?

That's why there is little social mobility especially in the professions discussed here where the earning potential is of the highest order

Of course, lack of aspiration etc is a big cause of lack of social mobility. However there is also the concept of 'the glass floor'. For social mobility to happen someone must go down as well as up. And parents do their damndest to stop that happening. In particular, wealthy parents use their resources to stop it happening.

So people say they want social mobility but then use everything they can to stop it in practice - they want it as long as it's not at the expense of their own child's position.

Particularly in the current climate, where assets accrue to those with assets it's a big problem for social mobility.

It's similar to the concept of no inspiration etc for those at the bottom of the social mobility pyramid, but subtly different.

I disagree, Blingy, that it "doesn't sound good" to speak about the people who make your lifestyle possible as "essential." It's one of my bugbears that successful people too often gloss over the domestic/logistic support they need to maintain their time-consuming careers. It's disengenuous and unhelpful to those who might want to follow in your footsteps not to be told how you manage at home, as well as how you manage at work. There is nothing to be ashamed of in employing people and acknowledging what they do.

I also think its disingenuous how often very successful people gloss over the advantages that they enjoyed or even the small privileges they had.

Bobochic, I'm struggling to understand why you have to live in central Paris otherwise your earnings would reduce. There must be some pretty specific reasons for it, which wouldn't extrapolate to similarly wealthy people.

I agree there is nothing to be ashamed of in owning a big house, employing full-time staff etc. But these things are not needed to earn lots (unless for pretty specific reasons such as having to entertain a lot at your home). Arguing that these are 'costs' for a high earning job really doesn't cut it with me.

I'm not one for very large homes (far too dangerous in Paris - you become a permanent hotel for friends and family!) but living close to your work is a real necessity for lots of jobs, much as international travel is a real necessity for others. Having domestic staff is a necessity for people who travel a lot - I have plenty of friends where both halves of the couple travel internationally (Asia, the Americas) for two or three weeks every month. What would their DC do if there weren't permanent nanny-housekeepers to take care of them? These are not uber rich families - they might live in apartments of 160-220 square mètres.

whatscoming of course you need staff if you have a job that means both of you aren't home for extended periods. Somebody has to look after the children/run the home.

One of the reasons DH chose to set up his own business rather than try and get back into his old type of role is because post-DD being born, we wanted to find a way to avoid exactly that. But if DH were still working in his old industry, we would have no choice. I travel 20-something weeks of the year, and he would have been doing similar.

I think it is naive to think you can do a job which pays 100 or 200k and not need some sort of domestic help.

exceptinextremis I agree if both spouses work. In my experience it is the men who work at that level and their wives who take up the slack in all other aspects of their lives as pp have said. I've never come across a situation where that doesn't apply, and is the only way my family can function

The biggest factor that prevents mobility is attitude. I've heard so many more negative comments about "toffs", "people like us can't do that", "don't expect to rise above your station" than I ever have in reverse. People need to be empowered by their own peers if upward mobility is to improve.

I'm not so sure about the glass floor. I know many families where the grandparents made the money, the parents spent it and my generation works hard. They might not be poor but they aren't living the lives their grandparents did.

I agree that being born with the proverbial silver spoon does not always translate into life long riches. Just look at the myriad threads about privately educated parents now struggling with the fact that private school is way out of their financial reach.

The biggest factor that prevents mobility is attitude. I've heard so many more negative comments about "toffs", "people like us can't do that", "don't expect to rise above your station" than I ever have in reverse.

I see plenty of comments on here referring to people as chavs and loads about how upper class people do not lose their status when they lose their money - downward mobility is strongly battled against too!

How much help working couples buy in is dependent on so many factors; their hours, how flexible those hours are, their frequency of travel, the type of work, the age and number of children, where they live, where they work, the schools they attend, the proximity and ability/willingness of extended family, the personalities of the family members.

There is no set pattern.

As for social mobility, well it has become increasingly harder to move income levels from where you were born.

There are numerous and complex reasons for this, including of course lack of aspiration and protectionism by the wealthy (the perfect whammy, coupled with the demise of the traditional middle class). Plus globalisation, immigration, expansion of the universities, property price rises etc etc...

What some of us could achieve twenty years ago, is becoming increasingly difficult. Not impossible of course, but very difficult.

I don't agree with economic theories of opportunity hoarding (protectionism) somehow being worse than they once were. The greatest issue with social mobility today is huge oversupply of graduates (many, many more than a generation ago) with skill sets that are mismatched to the needs of the economy.

Speak to a tradesperson where we live - they are booked up months in advance, they tell me they are recession proof - the local schools however are still encouraging all the students to get a degree - or a high level apprenticeship with PWC etc. There is no glory or prestige in a trade here in the Home Counties - but there is need and there is money to be had - a lot of money and there's also a lot of unemployed and underemployed graduates. It frustrates me greatly. I want a clever tradesperson - they do a better job!

Queen, I should have been clearer. Yes, if you have children and both work then you will need appropriate childcare. But from high earners I know it is pretty rare for both parents to be working at that level. As you have demonstrated it is a choice you make. If you have two people with the capability to earn at that sort of level then you have a lot more flexibility over your choices than most, and it is driven by what you want to do than what you have to do.

And whatever people choose to do is absolutely down to them, and they don't have to justify it. You can employ housekeepers, cooks, gardeners if you want, and why not? But most of these sort of costs are not inevitable consequences of having a high earning job, and when Bobo says £11k a month "doesn't sound like a lot" it seems that they have lost some grip on reality. I don't buy their insistence that their job requires living so close to work either - maybe it's different in Paris but the high earners I know in London live in nice areas, but they aren't particularly close to where they live. Most seem to base where they live as a lifestyle decision (large house in suburbs/country or fancy apartment in town) and it doesn't seem particularly related to their work.

I agree - in the past few months I have needed a roof tiler, a hedge/tree cutter and a painter/decorator in the Home Counties. All the good ones have long lead times and are very well off!