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.

Stately - that's the risk, and is why DH chose to build a business he could do from home. He does school runs both ways, and switches off until DD goes to bed - at which point he powers up again if needed.

DD is in school until 6pm most days, and 7.30pm two days a week. I'm not actually missing that much time with her during the week. And weekends are fairly sacrosanct, neither DH not I work much at the weekends.

IME, it's often the marriage that comes under pressure. The relationship with the children is easier to maintain than making sure you have plenty of quality spousal time.

Reading all of this makes me very glad I have the wealth without the lifestyle demands that seem to go with it for some people. I'm most often found covered in mud having been jumped on by various dogs during our walks and precisely never found sporting any sort of designer gear.

We had an exchange student from Taiwan stay with us year. I nearly fell off the sofa in shock when he pulled out hundreds upon hundreds of pounds in cash and announced that his mother had tasked him with going to Burberry to buy her a Burberry scarf. I gave DS(14) directions to the shop from his school and off they went. It was a completely alien experience for DS and one that I told him wouldn't be repeated while he lives under our roof.

I'm definitely not suited to the sort of job that requires a high spend!

Statelychangers - that's a very good question. DP and I made very conscious decisions about our work-life balance in order to ensure the DC were never left to their own devices or poorly supervised on our watch (we knew the DSSs' mother wasn't going to pay them any meaningful attention). Undoubtedly we have less money than we could have had but we get to do all the things we really care about (life is very comfortable) and the DC are really well-balanced and happy, productive, mutually supportive people. I know far too many DC with "power parents" who have seriously derailed.

QueenJuggler - I agree that it is also marriages that come under pressure. I also know stinking rich families who live in turgid chaos i.e. It's the home that bears the brunt of lack of care.

stately I think it depends on so many factors, not least what exactly the couple do for a living.

I work flexibly and from home for a lot of the time. DH also works from home at least one or two days a week. It is very very rare that one of us isn't here when the DC get home form school, or if so they beat us by 30 mins max. We organise our work diaries meticulously so that we don't travel at the same time.

Also, by the time ones children are teenagers, the chances are you're senior and far more in charge of your own working hours/diary. For example, I went to parents evening recently and the majority of my DC's mates had both parents there. Ditto at house matches on a recent Saturday.

I was more thinking of the high earning men I know (I don't know nearly as many high earning women). I imagine that women are judged more on appearance, can't get away with wearing the same suit etc.

A lot of it is also very specific to the type of job you do. So image is especially important for what ExceptInExtremis does. The highest earner I know goes to work in t-shirt and jeans (and not even fancy ones at that).

I'm currently sitting in a roller disco with two 11 year old girls keeping half an eye on the FTSE (debating selling part of an AIM stock that I suspect is in for a very large crash soon) and half an eye on Mumsnet. I'm wearing jeans, a sweatshirt and cheap Sainsbury trainers that were meant for DD but she didn't like them.

whatscoming irritatingly, in my industry, it's perfectly acceptable to the men to be hoodie-wearing slobs (think Mark Zuckerberg-style). It's the women who are expected to be dressed to the nines.

Double standards still rife - unsurprisingly it's a very male-dominated industry.

getahaircut yes to being able to be more flexible - I'm working from home today because I need to go to an sports event that DD is competing in later on. Although I have to confess to doing precious little work today - I've spent most of the day browsing paint colours for the new extension.

Bobochic, absolutely true. I remember being horrified at the state of the house belonging to a woman I had previously very much admired in the industry. Filthy and chaotic.

But that's sometimes a consequence of people pretending that they have it all without all the domestic help. It's simply not possible for the vast majority of people, and there should be no shame in admitting that.

I am also mumsnetting from home working from home today.
There are certain jobs with a lot of flexibility, even in the corporate world. I dropped my DC off at school this am and will collect them at 4, I feel that my balance with them is ok, but I make that my priority when I am here because next week I will be traveling for four days.

Bobochic
When you say you made conscious decisions regarding work / life balance, did that mean either one of you had to step off the power track for a short (or long) time? How did you manage it?

I don't really want to go into details on here. I stopped working for a long time and DP stayed in very sedentary roles and refused ones with more money and more travel. We had the added significant complication of a blended family and the fact that the DSSs' mother is not the hands on sort.

The other thing that changed our equation was French taxation which greatly disincentivises second earners. DP and I now have our own company, which is much more tax friendly for me than being a second earner in a salaried role..

I should also add that it was terribly important to us that DD grow up bilingual - totally, two mother-tongue bilingual - and that also required lots of early maternal input (we are a French-speaking family living in France).

Are there no forever living bods earning this much?

Bobochic
I quite understand. And it makes sense that one power earner in the family and one in a supporting role would work well for you, especially with bilingualism thrown into the mix. Are your Dsc also bilingual and at what stage did you come into their lives?

Some of the lifestyles described here seem to be something of a hamster wheel and are not what I would aspire to. We have a small niche sales based company. Last year we made much more that the cited 11k pm.

However we work from home. DH visits customers maybe once a week. He has one good suit, although increasingly it is a jacket and open necked shirt that seems to fit the bill. I deal with the more complicated business admin (we employ someone for the more routine stuff) and manage our rental properties and other investments.

I also manage the house and our four offspring (two in uni now). I clean my own house, manage my own garden and fit in some volunteering. The DCs were always walked to school and I was the primary carer during the preschool years.

We have a lovely, paid for, house and the sort of cars that tend to get people's backs up on here. And, despite going to the local comp, our older kids have got into their Universities of choice.

We are early fifties and retiring next year. We decided a good few years ago not to expand the business but to keep small and retain our good work life balance.

Wizzywig

Yes, my DSSs are also bilingual, though not in the total native speaker way my DD is and they both speak franglais these days - but they'll get over the code switching in time! They both received lots of extra input in English while they were still living at home. DSS1 has been in the UK for three years and DSS2 for one, as they both chose to go to university in England. I came into their lives when they were 6 and 8.

Tinkly that sounds really perfect, and eventually DH and I hope to get to that stage. I've realistically only got 10ish years left earning at this level (am mid-40s now), so it's a bit of a case of making hay in our situation.

Bobochic interesting that raising a bilingual DD was critical for you - it was for us as well, hence the appeal of a home-based role for DH. He's the native French-speaker, which is obviously the less dominant language in DDs life, given she lives in the UK (where accessing a fully bilingual education is challenging in the extreme).

I suspect DD will be very far from perfectly bilingual, though. Her spoken French is very good, as is her reading. Her writing leaves a lot to be desired!

It's impossible to learn to write French without being schooled in grammar and expression. My sister's DC are also half-English half-French but their French isn't good at all because they didn't have the same opportunity my DD has had to attend a bilingual school and grow up in a bilingual world with lots of families undertaking the same project. Community supports language learning no end.

Queen My only real regret is that I do not feel intellectually challenged enough. I gave up my high flying career when I had DC1 (in retrospect I think I had some degree of PND) and then it just never made sense financially for me to return.

I suppose it just illustrates that no one really has it all.

Perhaps when you retire from the business you will find the time/energy to explore more intellectual pursuits, Tinkly? You are so young to be retiring! Lots of possibilities ahead!

Yes that's exactly what we're finding, it's actually the written expression that's the problem. She has no problem with that in spoken language, mainly because she has plenty of opportunity to practise colloquial language with friends and family (there are a fair few bilingual families around us). But her written French is very stilted (grammar isn't the issue because my DH is a grammar-pedant and has drilled her in it from a very young age!).

She's only 8, so there's plenty of time to develop it - although I'm currently dithering over summer camp for next year. The choice is France (South, which seems appealing), but is really a camp for English children, so I worry about how much French she's actually going to speak, or Canada, where the majority of children will be French-speaking, but in a very Canadian accent. I'm rather envious of the wider choices available if I were looking for English-language or Spanish-language support.

Tinkly my DM is over 70 and still studying. She took her 2nd degree at the age of 50, and hasn't stopped studying since. You have years ahead of you - maybe you can't have it all at the same time, but it might possibly be possible to have it all, but in different stages across your life.