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 think the part about investing is just as important. It's one of the key elements I'm drumming into DC. I was given my first shares for my 15th birthday - a penny share that my father fancied. I sold it three years later having watched it triple in value and have invested whatever I could ever since. It's made inheriting money a seamless process for me.

I bought DS(14) his first shares last Christmas. I didn't give him any guidance and let him choose. He wanted to go with whoever made some video game thing. By pure luck he chose well and I will transfer the shares to him on his 18th birthday. I am already drumming in the importance of investing whenever you can and he watches me make investment decisions all the time.

Can someone explain the tax disadvantage of two earners?

Not wanting to overanalyse Free's finances, but if a bit over 50% of £11k goes on your two main expenses then that still leaves say £5k a month. That is still really quite a lot, though yes it does highlight the difference with 2 people working.

I agree with the role of networking not always being to women's advantage. Years ago I remember going to a work seminar (US consulting firm) about networking and how to build client relationships. All my French female colleagues rolled their eyes in disbelief - if we had done 10% of the things suggested, our French (male) clients would have taken it as an invitation to dinner and bed ;)

whats Oh yes, as I say we are in no way poor but there are no designer handbags any longer! We probably put another £2k a month into long and short term savings because we are boring conservative risk averse lawyers and then simply running the house and feeding and clothing 5 people plus entertaining the troops plus feeding the nanny in the daytime plus heating the house all day etc etc etc takes a big slug. So the fun money is pretty small. As I say, we are doing absolutely fine and living like this with 3 under 4 is not exactly a hardship as the thought of taking a 4 hour flight feels me with dread (holidays are the thing I miss the most). I am hopeful that eventually the proportion of fun money will increase. We are just trying to pay ourselves first.

It's the opposite of the risk takers way of making money but we recognise that we are pretty close to the top of our game (barring Dh's place finding the next Microsoft and paying out x100 investment!) so we need to make the most of the cash coming in.

Nofly yes it is important, I just said to ignore it in that article because it's a sales pitch for a particular service.

Honestly, I don't remember many specifics - it was our incredulity at the proposals that made us ROFL. I do remember it being suggested that we should send copies of relevant press articles to our clients with hand written notes (this was 20 years ago - you didn't email your clients) and us all agreeing that a French male client could only possibly think one thing if we did that.

DP and I are friends with plenty of people in that firm (that's how we met) and, when we see how the Partners' social and private lives are deeply embedded and intertwined with their professional networks (their clients are their friends - their families go on holiday together) it's deeply apparent that in that very male-dominated world, it's very hard for women to build professional networks the way men do. It's a boys' club.

Emailing press articles about you or copies of your conference speech texts to clients with notes is par for the course in my industry - which is dominated by US firms.

Indeed.

I am still, sometimes, caught unawares by myself being far too forward with French men and them getting the wrong idea.

Email helps. In those days it wasn't yet OK to email clients.

But, in general, I don't think that the very gorgeous and intelligent young women recruited by those firms find it easy to tread the line between building deep professional relationships and not giving their clients (men in the midst of mid-life crises) the wrong idea.

No, I agree. I'm sure almost all of us have had experience of clients thinking that paying for our services means something rather different to what we were actually billing them for.

Yes. Obviously you can sometimes play it to your advantage, professionally. I can think of instances when the most gorgeous consultants were sent out to do the face-to-face competitor interviews with unsuspecting men who ended up giving out far more information than they had intended, so desperate were they to impress the goddess before them. Pfff....

I don't want to post exact numbers but our income is over £9k a month take home. Dh has a degree and a some technical qualifications. I don't have a degree but am very experienced in my field.

We are both home by 6pm and have quite a good work / life balance.

I wouldn't say we work that hard, or long hours really but we are both good at what we do. It isn't just luck though, we had a plan and stuck to it and negotiated well.

"It isn't just luck though, we had a plan and stuck to it and negotiated well."

Its luck that you were able to stick to it!

This is what I mean, it isn't just luck, but luck is the most important factor!

For example, being born 5 years later might have meant that without a degree you wouldn't have had access to your job, or wouldn't have been considered for training, wouldn't have got started on your own etc etc.

locus the tax disadvantage referred to is in France.

Here in the UK two people earning a joint income of 250k will pay less tax that one person earning it.

But there are also other factors, primarily pension provision.

I had the luck to be born in the 1970s and thus ability to buy my first home in the 1990s whilst still in my first job - in London for under £100k. Admittedly it was a doer-upper, and I had to spend about another £30-40 on it, but oh my word, it was a wonderful place to live.

My DD will not have that same opportunity to buy her first home in her early 20s without significant financial help from us. That same flat is worth around £600k today. That's way beyond the reach of most first-jobbers.

I think it was Queen further up thread you said . If you don't know what professions/industries/roles pay well because it's never discussed/wealth is never demonstrated, how do you know what to aim for?

It IS important for the youth of today to firstly know what industries and professions are out there, and secondly what they pay.

If all you know is teaching/police/NHS/Tesco, you are never going to aspire or achieve your potential. Even more so for girls.

My eldest DD is at Sixth Form with little idea of what she wants to do, or what degree to get/uni to attend. If no one talks about for the worry of offending someone then its very sad and archaic.

"If all you know is teaching/police/NHS/Tesco, you are never going to aspire or achieve your potential"

Yes because service or vocation are terrible things to aspire to aren't they?

Like these professions don't add more to the society that you live in than merely making money.

Like they aren't something to aspire to?

Arrogance, ignorance and hubris in one post there.

Of course they are things to aspire to.

But they aren't going to make you wealthy, if that's your aspiration.

And they aren't the only jobs out there, is probably the point Kath was trying to make.

Then it was very poorly phrased then: "you are never going to aspire or achieve your potential" infers that people in the areas identified aren't aspiring or achieving their potential.

I agree that when choosing their A Levels, degrees and careers, many people just have no idea about the earning potential or lack of, in their choices. Many people seem to think that the key is simply to be highly qualified, so more degrees must equal more money. There were people on this thread at the start stating they had several degrees but were poorly paid and seemed angry that their 'hard work' hadn't resulted in lots of money. Of course, it's fine and valid and necessary for us all, that people go into teaching and nursing and academia and all of the other jobs which require some kind of qualification, but aren't highly paid...these jobs are not lesser in any way, but the reality is that they are in areas where the product or service doesn't have high monetary worth, so will never be as highly paid or rewarded as some of the other jobs mentioned here. Those jobs are fine...but people need to go into them with their eyes wide open to what the benefits are and what the downsides might be (as with all jobs) so fine to choose teaching because you love seeing kids learn new things and value that above a high salary, or fine to enter the financial world because you love that and so want a high salary. And it's not all about choosing wisely is it....the majority of the population simply won't have the ability to carry out those niche jobs which pay well, and if they did, the huge supply of workers would drive the wages down. However, there are certainly people out there who might have had the ability and the drive and everything else needed, but who just didn't have the right information to make choices that could lead them to high paying jobs. Perhaps there is a little bit too much of 'just do what you enjoy' involved in the advice. Yes, do what you enjoy...if it will deliver what you need/want too.

Another question has occurred to me from this thread. Most people on here are Mums, what with this being MN. There have been a couple of men too. My question is about women in the high earning roles - just out of interest, what sort of proportion of them seem to be childless? Here on this thread there are lots of highly successful women with kids (or those with husbands who are highly successful) so you start to feel like having kids isn't hindering careers....but is that true? How many of the really successful women are childless, compared to the numbers with kids? Just interested.

It was perfectly obvious that potential meant earning potential - on a thread about earning highly, pretty self evident.

small you seem very determined to pick fights. As if you want to bring everyone down a peg or two. Unhappy until everyone accepts that you are the richest person in the thread and that no one has ever achieved anything through talent.

This thread is so interesting and lovely that on the whole it has remained pretty civil!

I don't think we really fall into your category of take home at £11k but my DH earns 150k per annum and we take home £6k as he puts the maximum he can into the pension. He gets quarterly bonuses which increase that take home.

I don't think that it is vulgar to talk about money on an anonymous forum, cannot imagine most of us would have this conversation in RL.

I don't feel 'minted' (don't like that word!), but do feel incredibly lucky and fortunate to be in the position we are.

My DH came from a modest but supportive background and I came from a comfortable middle class background. He is in IT and is completely self taught - did an MBA at weekends and evening whilst working, took a few risks, started his own company which failed and is now employed by a large American IT company which pays pretty well.

Our DC's go to private school but that is paid for by my parents as stupidly we couldn't afford it ourselves despite the income. We have a big, old house that costs a fortune to run and we both have fairly expensive and time consuming hobbies (horses and cycling). I don't work as I totally blew my good education something that I occasionally regret but on the whole not.

We have old cars and the house needs a fair bit of work on it, not sure how people would perceive us from the outside? Well actually away from the house I don't think we look well off at all as neither of us have the least interest in clothes, jewellery, cars - the only thing we both love with a passion and spend our money on is travel.

I often sit and think about the rest of the world, just listening to R4 discussing ISIS in Iraq and the terrible situation there. I wonder how on earth it is that I was so lucky just to be born in this country. We have so many massive advantages over most of the world. It seems so unfair that the world is so unequal. I feel lucky every day.