To feel depressed at financial talk on MN?

[FluffyPotato]

I understand that people sometimes have to talk salaries for context but I think some people just like to throw out numbers so that they show their middle class status to the rest of MN.

A thread I've just seen 'DH works 30 hours a week earning 60k' and someone commenting 'oh my DH earns 100k'.

I work bloody hard 40 hours a week and get about 1200 a month before tax.

AIBU to think that some MNers just like to boast their household income figures to others? Getting quite sick at how middle class mums net is.

Dunno henry I've been poor and I've been rich, one is definitely much easier than the other.

I can't really think of one problem money brings me TBH.

A woman asked me how me and dp afford to send our kids to boarding well I just said we work very hard.
That's not really the correct answer though is it? If you don't mind my saying. People in low paid menial jobs work hard I'm sure, but couldn't afford private or boarding school, even with bursaries.

No one I know, not one single person earns close to 27k. I'd love to know if this is true. Probably some rubbish figures

No it's true. Numbers don't lie, only our interpretation of them.

But that number is the arithmetic mean as an average. The median is more like 19k I think.

Arithmetic means are skewed by single outliers. Say you've got a hundred people and 99 of them earn 15k a year, and one earns a million quid in the City.
You've got an average of just under £25k. Now those people earning 15k are thinking wtf? No one I know earns 25k... but that's just one person throwing it all out. There are a small number of colossally rich people in the UK who throw the mean out. The median is more informative

How hard you work isn't the sole determinant of how much you earn. Carers work really hard and their wages are awful (which is a sad indictment of how our society views the work.) it's the combination of how much you earn your company plus how rare your skills are plus the demand for them that gets the big bucks.
A friend of mine writes algorithms for hedge funds. He's Loaded because he's one of about four people in the U.K. Who do that AND it makes big money. Another friend is an academic who is literally one of four people on the planet who do something but because it's not creating money for someone she gets a modest wage.

Your quality of life depends massively on where you're living. 40k each in the back end of Lanarkshire is going to buy you a massive place. 40k in London each not so much

I've seen this (and commented) on a couple of recent threads where the wife was being made to feel like her husband did some super critical super important job (remember the sepsis thread), and then revealed his salary as being so small they were living paycheck to paycheck. It seemed like DH in that case was having delusions of grandeur.

Similarly another thread (was that today's?) where the DH seemed to think earning 3x of what his wife did entitled him to act like a twat. I usually point out that in my house the income discrepancy is something like 1:15 (because I'm a poor student on a really tiny stipend), but even THAT income disparity doesn't mean one should get treated like crap in one's own home.

So I guess I own up to sometimes talking in actual numbers but it's not meant to be a humblebrag - more just to offer a different perspective.

Don't fall for this fallacy. Patently untrue. Hard work or talent does not equal financial gain or success

This is really important.
DP earns 15.5k for a 40hr week, he's a good worker and an intelligent, kind person. But if he only TRIED HARDER and aimed for BIGGER THINGS then he would be earning FAR MORE!!!!

Except he wouldn't, because that's not how it works.

The fact that life doesn't work that way is something we should tell our DC I think.

If they want to earn large salaries then just working hard won't cut it.

I find it odd that people want to share that information, even anonymously. Not really the sort of thing you discuss.
I get that the thread asked a specific question but it (like so many others in that vein) seemed unanswerable to me as it is so context dependant that I can't really see that the answers could be helpful in any other person's set of circumstances.

Maybe not completely relevant to the thread but it's important to remember this ......

Am I Rich?
· Got $2200? In this world, you’re rich. Assets (not cash) of $2200 per adult place a person in the top 50% of the world’s wealthiest.*
· If you made $1500 last year, you’re in the top 20% of the world’s income earners.* *
· If you have sufficient food, decent clothes, live in a house or apartment, and have a reasonably reliable means of transportation, you are among the top 15% of the world’s wealthy. *
· Have $61,000 in assets? You’re among the richest 10% of the adults in the world.*
·If you earn $25,000 or more annually, you are in the top 10% of the world’s income-earners.

· If you have any money saved, a hobby that requires some equipment or supplies, a variety of clothes in your closet, two cars (in any condition), and live in your own home, you are in the top 5% of the world’s wealthy.
·If you earn more than $50,000 annually, you are in the top 1% of the world’s income earners.**

If someone is asking a question what do I say I hate talking about money. I can't remember the last time I bought clothes or had my hair done. I'm a tramp compared to my children. If you knew me you would think the complete opposite trust me.

We throw all of our money at our children and when people ask me what I do at home with them because I Home ed its oh this and oh that. I never talk about myself people ask and it makes me feel so uncomfortable.

In the whole 10 years of living here I have only had 1 friend who I can talk to and won't gossip behind my back. A lot of the people I know do gossip about others behind their back. Am I better than them on that respect I am because I don't gossip behind people's back. The stories they tell is horrendous about other parents.

I haven't really noticed it, but perhaps it's just the demographic of the MN posters you see talking about it. I remember posting somewhere else about maternity pay and how we were going to struggle losing £2k a month (difference between my usual salary and pay while on maternity leave), and everyone fell over themselves to express amazement because that was there entire household income and I must be rolling in it.

Anat is right above. It is also fairly pointles to show off (and mnoey has nothing to do with class anyway - no one who shows off about money is going to be particularly high up the English class system for a start - they might be right but they won't be displaying higher class characteristics). I have sometimes mentioned on MN that I earn a fair bit but only to encourage others and their daughters into picking the very high paid careers and thinking very hard about what work they pick as you need to work smart as well as hard to do well in the UK.

I was very lucky but also worked hard. I was lucky to have been born with a higher IQ than the average 100; to have parents who valued education and made sure we turned up at school and did homework and aimed high; for getting just about the bext A level results in the school' choosing a good university, being just about top of ath and picking law (high paid) for my degree and deliberately choosing London adn deliberately choosing business law (much better paid than most crimional awyers). In other words it was a huge combination of luck and hard work and active choice. To choose to take 2 weeks off and work full time for 30 years + when having babies - n ot a choice most women would make and it paid off. Luck - that I've never been ill, always had perfectly good natural births, no C section to recover from; luck that breastfeeding went very well and I loved it and could express at work etc etc.... Massive mixture of luck and hard work. Choice to be virgin until after I graduated (thus not surprisingly I did not have a baby before then and luck that no one raped me and made me pregnant before then either).

Lucky that I have 5 children but also planned because I made sure I married young (21) had first baby at nearly 23 etc etc... So a system of career planning from mid teens, feminism, marrying a feminist man plus hard work plus luck. Even now I seem very very l ucky - lastr period in Jan (I am 55), and not a single menopause symptom - that is massive luck for mid years compared with most people or it is because I don't eat any and I mean none at all junk food and don't drink or smoke? Probably a mixture of choice and luck yet again.

9This doesn't mean difficult things have not happened to me but again I feel lucky because I always seek to hope for the best and be optikmistic - in fact I think my good mental health and physical health are actually at the heart of everything that goes well in my lfie. Again luck comes into that.

Like others, I haven't seen this out of context but only when income is relevant.

Well, except for the moronic "My DP's ex cripples us with maintenance payments but is clearly loaded as she has 12 cars and has her nails done three times a day!!!!" posts.

I wish people talked about salaries MORE. Not necessarily on MN but in general. The weird stigma around talking about salaries makes it so easy for employers to get away with pay discrimination. I was frank about my salary when I earned £14,000 and when I earned £50,000. I wish more people were.

O for course some people earn less or more then others. Some people do like to boast but I think it says more about their need to show off then how hard they work or their real contribution to society.

One consequence of the UK being a very stratified society (it's both a symptom of low social mobility, and in turn an ongoing cause of same) is that people here tend to be very sheltered - MNers in particular. (Sorry I'm not trying to be mean, I'm calling it as I see it, like the brash foreigner I am )

So there are MNers who think it's normal not to go abroad for ten years. There are MNers who feel like poor church mice because their mates at Oxford went into banking when they became teachers, and now they are trying to raise 3 children in a 2 bed in Zone 5. There are MNers who are from the Jilly Cooper style old fashioned country UMC/UC of battered Labradors and stinky Volvos. There are MNers from the London seriously wealthy, where half their colleagues and social circle in the bank and St John's Wood/Chelsea are not British at all but national identity is almost an antique irrelevance in a world where they could be transferred to New York, Frankfurt or Geneva at any time.

Likewise there are MNers who never meet a non-white person from one week to the next, and MNers who consider a school with less than 40% non-white-British ethnicities to be alarmingly undiverse. MNers where everybody they know has completed their family by 25, and MNers where marrying, let alone reproducing, before 30 is a bizarre and self-destructive life choice.

And I hasten to add, none of these people are bad. Or at least, lots of them are bad and lots are lovely, helpful, annoying, clueless, judgemental, generous. They are all just human. I'm not trying to suggest that any one of these ways of life is inherently superior or inferior. (Though I would say that among the many downsides to such a stratified and divided society is that it fosters hostility and judgementalism between divergent groups.)

So many British people live in bubbles. It's the case in other countries too of course (an accessible example is the extensive discussion of the past two years on Trump Country etc) but it's particularly bad here. I think the most worrying sign is that the division and hostility only seems to be increasing while social mobility continues to fall off a cliff.

Horrid you home ed? Then why were you being asked how you afford boarding school?

Either way that wasn't a question about salary! The asker was either sneering at you (in which case why answer at all, just say none of your business) or wanted gossip to make herself feel better "oh Horrid doesn't pay the fees, her in-laws / parents / rich godparents do, they are just like us" or wanted to hear information about scholarship funds or bursaries or it not being that expensive because of some tax loop holes ...

She didn't want you to say "oh we can afford it because DH earns 200k".

oh my DH earns 100k

Might have actually been me who said this OP. If it is the thread I was on then you are deliberately missing bits out and making a TAAT.

OP in other thread said her DH refused to help with housework because he earned 60k and she earned far less. I said that my DH earns 6 figures while I'm a SAHP but does loads around the house and who earns what doesn't matter. It was not a boast. It was relevant to mention our income in order to highlight how unreasonable her DH was.

A quick question - posters who consider talking about salary to be crass, is that just if you're a high earner (to not be seen as boasting) or do you think talking about an average to low income is also crass?

I've never really understood the social etiquette regarding talking about earnings and capital, probably due to being aspie and not really understanding social nuances full stop!

On a completely different note, my chief MN bugbear is women bragging about their husband's "big career" when they have none to speak of. I'm not sure why it irritates me more than anything else - I'm sure it says more about me than them. But nothing makes me cringe more.

I always immediately suspect the poster in question to be a bit naive and clueless as to what a large salary actually is (so often it turns out to be something like 35k which is well below median household income for 2 adults and 2 children). The bragging about something not that difficult which the poster has nevertheless entirely failed to do personally.

It's just so tacky. I would take a million Xenias (who was admittedly an oddball and often needlessly unpleasant to SAHM posters in distress) over the poster who breezes into a thread asking "MNers who are high earners, what do you do" only to cluelessly miss the point and crassly brag about her husband. Gah, nobody cares about your boring husband, the thread was about how women with families still manage to earn well. (I'm not trying to single out anybody in particular here, there are so many of them).

/vent

I don't believe a lot of what gets written on here.

Holdme, that is why the internet good and MN because those women who cannot imagine mumsnetters can earn over £100k (and I think we had one IT lady on £1m actually once on here) get to see these things really are possible. Also look at the BBC example - because women kept their pay secret from each other and so did the men they had no way of knowing how much the men earn. By disclosing pay you improve your own position. It is certainly worth at work if your contract allows it exchange pay bands with colleagues to help your own pay negotiations.

It is also good to be aware of how little financially lots of people have too. I hope I and my children never ever lose sight of that.

On a completely different note, my chief MN bugbear is women bragging about their husband's "big career" when they have none to speak of. I'm not sure why it irritates me more than anything else - I'm sure it says more about me than them. But nothing makes me cringe more.

HoldMeCloserTonyDanza That makes the two of us. I find it embarrassing and feel rather sorry for them. I know that says more about me than them but so be it. It's so unbecoming.

MN was set up my a MC person, why wouldn't you think it would be attractive to other MC parents

I actually think it's a lot more WC than when I joined 6 years ago.

FYI where I'm from there's no classes thank fuck as you sound ridiculous getting shitty about such a thing.

Not true in every case, but it is unfair to imply successful people have just got lucky and not worked for it

They got lucky because their hard work has been rewarded when so many others' hard work isn't.

Earnings don't directly correlate to class, and there is no society without some form of stratification, even (or especially) the ones where everyone absolutely denies it. Class is weird and stupid but countries without an acknowledged class system are stratified more blatently by income or wealth or race or how far back you can trace your ancestry in the country or education or religious systems etc.

Lucky "disclosing" things on an anonymous forum doesn't do much for openness because so many people are talking bollox and half truths.