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.

I had a woman come to paint my house last year. She said she used to manage a nursery when she was younger, she got paid £18k and a lot of flack.
She now does painting and decorating and easily makes £60k a year, she says it's physically hard work but the hours are better and she's her own boss....it might not sound like a fortune compared with some jobs but for a 32 year old who left school at 16 - it's not bad!

There is always more money to be had for "one-off" services than recurrent ones. People are much more price elastic when the same bill doesn't have to be paid month in month out.

I'd agree with the issue of oversupply of graduates to a degree, Bobochic - bit I'd add in the fact that, for many graduates, they lacked sufficient guidance early on in their academic careers about what degrees/skills-sets/experience is actually going to be valuable in the workplace. If you don't have the right guidance (which is so often from family members who know where to look/who to access/people to talk to), it's so incredibly easy these days to spend your time and money on acquiring entirely useless qualifications.

whatscoming I agree that there are a lot of single-income couples where outsourcing domestic work isn't needed (although whether the entire burden of domestic organisation should fall to the non-earning spouse is questionable). But increasingly I see a trend towards what you could term "power couples", where both parties work in demanding jobs.

I personally don't live near where I work - I commute 3 hours a day when I'm working in my base office. But I make that choice because a) I'm not in my base office that often and b) my DM lives near to my office so on the rare days when I don't want to schlep back to Sussex, I spend the night in what was my childhood bedroom. Which is always nice for my DM because she's older now, values the company, and I do a few jobs for her that are hard for her to do when I stay over.

It's taken us many, many years of effort and planning to get to such a balanced lifestyle - and every few months, something happens that means we need to adjust things again. I refuse to be all "woe is me, life's so hard when you're rich" - that's just ridiculous (and trust me there are a lot of people who can't see how ridiculous it is)

It's also taken a huge amount of luck - luck to be born into a family that could give me the advantages to build on, luck to meet a man who so neatly matches my aspirations and dreams, luck to have a DD who is ridiculously confident and secure so is able to deal with my comings and goings with barely a care. Luck has a lot to do with success. So does drive and ambition, as well as innate capability.

Not minted but not doing badly. Husband is an actuary, i'm a personal assistant

I think that what you (and I) call "the right guidance" is what other people call "opportunity hoarding". I am really big on guidance for our DCs and tbh they have had some terrific engineered opportunities, but they also have to seize them 100% - which they do - in order for them to lead to places where they can stand on their own two feet and demonstrate what they are worth in the big bad world.

I agree that "power couples" are very common now, more common in my circle that one spouse staying in a lower gear and picking up the domestic burden.

Lots and lots of "power couples" around me, and the domestic/child raising logistics are often a major planning/expenditure feat. Power couples want to raise power children :)

Bobochic - yes, indeed, potentially a matter of terminology.

Ditto the meaning of "trophy wife" - these days, it's more likely to mean "wife in highly competitive desirable role who can go toe-to-toe with my colleagues" than the previous definition.

Yes, I agree with the evolution of "trophy wife". The trilingual marathon running P/E partner who popped out baby number three in between two sessions of her Executive MBA and buys her own bling :)

"I buy my own diamonds" is the boast of the day. Ditto the mat-leave MBA.

I'm not a bling fan myself. The luxury that I have allowed myself in recent years is first edition books.

I wonder how many high-earning women had their children late in life. I was 36, which was actually relatively young within my circle of working friends. Many of them were 40+ - and thus earning well enough to build flex into working patterns/afford the domestic help needed to keep the show on the road.

Everyone has their favourite toys. I have to admit that marathon-running and bling-buying are totally not on my radar screen - they just scream pointless visible status symbols (blatant showing off).

I like running, but a marathon is way beyond my limits! A gentle shuffle across the Downs at the weekend is the limit of my capabilities.

Give me a pair of skis, though...

But the point about bling is an interesting one. When you earn more and move in circles of similarly high earners, it easily becomes de rigueur to have the sought after trinkets, whether they be Chanel handbags, bling, private education, domestic staff or whatever.

Which brings us back to the idea that 11k is not that much. It's not, because it feels impossible to buy a handbag from Next, jewellery from Goldsmiths etc etc

Hence the feeling of not having a spectacular lifestyle.

Very true, Extremis. I suspect I look positively miserly to some of the people I work with. And I am very far from that.

You are right, Extremis, that in certain jobs it is de rigueur to have the right accessories and lifestyle. Christmas, which for most families is a relatively home-made, traditional, ritualised affair has power couples vying for the furthest flights to the most exclusive beach resorts (or the most luxurious mountain chalets).

I earn 7k before tax and my wife earns around 1k. I look at people I work with and they all have merc's and BMW's 60k cars, but all on PCP deals paying around 500-700 a month for them. I drive an 8 yr old Ford Mondeo. We have a nice car as well, but that cost 25k. Everything we have is bought and paid for, with the exception of a very manageable mortgage. I am always amazed at how different my lifestyle is to others in the department who go skiing twice a year, carribean etc. I prefer proper family holidays camping/caravanning. I guess I'm a steak and chips guy whereas my colleagues prefer caviar and foie gras

But the fancy stuff that you can buy if you earn lots isn't a 'cost' to having those sort of jobs is it? Which is what Bobo seems to be saying.

You cannot turn up to work in cheap clothes or with bad hair. Obviously there's a range of possibility but you do have to dress the part. Even my DSS1, a mere babe at 21, obsesses about his look when going to assessment days etc in the city and has a €80 haircut, his teeth polished etc.

Dunno about the bad hair, have you seen some of the city boys?

Depends where you are working (or want to work).

DSS1 did a two-month internship in a city firm this summer. It was highly selective to get onto and the internship was basically a two-month long selection process. DSS1 said that all eight interns were amazingly good at the tasks they were set but three of them didn't get job offers and that it was the three whose face didn't fit.

I quite agree.
I went for an interview with a headhunter recently and she actually commented approvingly on my handbag. Admittedly I work in the luxury sector, but these signifiers do mean a lot.

I think the 'range of possibility' extends lower than you are suggesting. IME anyway, the high earners who are into clothes go for the Savile Row suits etc, those who aren't seem get along fine with 'nice' but not 'flash', i.e. spending 100s rather than 1000s on a suit.

whatscoming it absolutely is part and parcel of the job to dress accordingly. That doesn't necessarily mean Chanel bags and suits, but regular colour and cut (roots are not acceptable and are seen as slovenly in my industry), nails always being manicured, having well cut clothes that fit well, travel well and don't crush when you're sitting down (which rules out a lot of cheaper High Street stuff), and are on trend (note, not fashionable, but stylish and contemporary), good shoes that are really stylish but that don't pinch or hurt when you're standing presenting to a bunch of city boys or clients, all this doesn't come cheap. The older I get, the less I can get away with cheap stuff looking good on me.

Add to that the fact that I don't actually have that much time to shop (and neither do many women in high powered jobs), so tend to shop in places with either a really good personal shopping service, or an incredibly well curated collection of clothes, requiring little effort to put together a few really good looks, and you're soon into decent amounts of money. Even internet shopping is too much effort - can't guarantee being home to accept delivery, no time to get to post office/shops to organise returns.

So I do get some bits and pieces from Zara, and the likes of Reiss/Whistles etc, but the majority of my work stuff is acquired in two afternoons a year (one for winter wardrobe, one for summer) in excellent boutiques with fabulous service. Browns in South Molton Street and Matches in Wimbledon are my go to places. And the amounts I can spend just on updating my work wardrobe are eye-watering. But it absolutely would be noticed if I didn't do it.

All employment has a dress code, even if it's unofficial.

How much time do power couples spend with their kids? How do the kids cope long term with rarely seeing their parents?
We live in the commuter belt and there is always the judgement around here that when the two parents are working very long hours the teenagers are over indulged and completely out of control....I've yet to meet a teenager where both parents are very career focused so I have no direct experience.

100s not 1000s on a suit. Assuming you need 10 decent work outfits per season (to accommodate the fact that you might not have time to always have 5 clean outfits for the week hanging on your rail), at £200 pounds a pop, that's £2000 per season. Just on work clothes. We also have to have home clothes as well!

Personally I've never even managed to spend as little as £200 on an outfit that would be acceptable for work, even in Zara. Let alone anything more durable, that might actually last the season without falling apart. Decent shoes cost more than that - I spent almost 8 hours on my feet yesterday. I don't want to be doing that in New Look plastic shoes that make my feet sweat and hurt.