To wonder what it's like to earn £200k per year?!

[ABCD1000]

Friend's husband earns just over £200k per year, with an annual £150k bonus for the last few years! No jealousy (much!) just wonder what life would be like?!

Oh crumbs, a month of his salary would pay off the rest of our household debts that we are struggling to manage. .

With that salary I’d be able to afford my own home. At the moment I’ll only be able to afford to buy rather than rent if I get an inheritance.

Just walked up the huge hill with heavy bags from our not so local bus stop, whilst being 39 weeks pregnant and incredibly sore.

No choice you see, but perhaps I too would have the same struggles on £100k

I've name changed for this post. I do have big regrets that I put my career (and the resultant high wages) before my DC for several of their most formative years. The DC suffered. DH bore the daily brunt of a home life going to pot. He was there every day as DS went off the rails over a period of about 4 years, he suffered through the daily drudge of a beautiful boy becoming a rather nasty young man. This ended with DS doing 3 years in prison. The only good thing that came of the high wage was the ability to pay for a very good lawyer. This period almost ruined us all. I was 'fortunate' to get to fly in and fly out again during the worst parts. My secretary had to break the news to me. It was one of the worst moments of my life. The worst moment of DS's.

Thankfully DS has had 10 great years since. Is a fantastic contributing member of society, working with disadvantaged youth. Has built a beautiful family. Is a far better parent than I was.

I do have regrets. Big ones. Money did not make it any easier.

I don't earn anything like the amount in the OP, but with a six figure income I am most definitely very lucky not to have money worries

However. Money can't cure me of my chronic pain from a spinal injury, though I am able to afford private physio treatment, I still live in permanent pain

Money can't cure my epilepsy.

I inherited my Mum's pension, which we put towards buying a larger house, and we were able to afford a lovely wedding -but my mum wasn't alive to be there

We can't have children. Money paid for multiple multiple rounds of IVF and fertility investigations, but they weren't successful and I was told by multiple Drs I will never be able to carry a child

We are lucky to have a beautiful home, but will likely have to sell it to find the money for the astronomical cost of surrogacy in the US because my womb doesn't work. We are lucky enough that this may still be an option for us, but I would give anything in the world to be able to get and stay pregnant like everyone else and for us to have the family we so desperately want

We are very very lucky not to have money worries, and I am very aware that many people struggle with similar issues who don't have the financial security we are lucky enough to have.

Money can buy a better class of misery, but it can't buy health or happiness.

This idea that high earners work really hard and carry a lot of stress and responsibility comes up a lot on MN especially from those who run a business.

Surely most people work hard though and stress free jobs are rare. Even if the job isn't stressful in and of itself, often the environment is stressful (things like being badly managed, being bullied, fearing job loss, trying to do a full time job in part time hours, etc). And high responsibility does not equal high pay (caring professions, teaching, nursing, etc). I regularly make decisions in my job that involve anticipating potentially life threatening risks and I often make those decisions under pressure and stress but I'm not well paid. I also generate a fair amount of income for the organization I work for and I have to balance income generation with risk avoidance and justify my decisions to people who are paid a lot lot more than I am but don't have experience of what I do.

Fact is that capitalism has gone crazy and there are quite a lot of people making totally unjustified amounts of money when you look at the bigger picture. And a lot of them make money by exploiting less well off people both as workers and as consumers.

I think a lot of high earners know deep down that what they actually accomplish in a days work doesn't justify their being paid so much. Hence all the special pleading about stress, responsibility, hard work, outgoings, etc.

Do you think any low earners also feel that perhaps they don’t deserve special pleading beach or is it just as simplistic as anybody with money is axiomatically bad for you?

I have support people who cannot afford to bury their dead children.
Its far more common that you want to believe.
I have support people who cannot get their children out of their one room accommodation because there is no lift and their child is too disabled to walk or be carried safely.

Money doesn't protect you from illness or disability or the heartbreak of infertility or bereavement.

What it can do is protect you from having to beg for help from charities, wait five years for a suitable wheelchair, have to cremate your child because you can't afford a burial plot, losing your children into care because you can't afford to pay for the help you need.

We lost our child and I had very wealthy friends who lost theirs.
Our grief and misery are identical. There is no competition. No league table.
But they didn't have to go back to work days after the funeral. They didn't have to collect contributions to pay for the funeral and they could pay for the therapy they and their children needed. I waited a decade for trauma therapy. A decade wasted on PTSD.
When their child was ill they didn't have to worry about how to get to hospital appointments or feed themselves while they were there.

They don't feel any happier or sadder than me about their loss. They have experienced a great deal less peripheral anxiety though.

I agree mrs, I do agree that’s it’s true for me, having faced no tough financial choices since I was a student I’ve forgotten what it’s like - like empathising with all people with with different circumstances it’s hard to do in a genuine way because we all habituate.

So people with less spend a lot of time romanticising the lives of people better off, and people who are better off find it hard to really relate. Threads like this where one side or the other is called immoral effectively are pretty unhelpful for society.

My parents worked every hour god sent and as a result bought a beautiful home in a highly sought after area but I didn’t really get to enjoy it as we were all age 17+ when it was bought . I appreciate that they did it for us , but I remember sorely, sorely missing my mum, wishing we could have a relaxed conversation and wishing she wasn’t always so tired , stressed and distracted . However , they taught me about hard work , persistence being goal orientated !

chronicallylate38, it's not about people with money being bad.

It's about a deepening and unethical gap between the rich and everyone else at a time when poverty not only exists in shameful volumes but actually seems to be getting worse. It's not right. That doesn't make high earners bad people - it makes them beneficiaries of an unjust socioeconomic and political system and historical context.

I would just find it less hideous if at least people could say that it's better to be a have than a have not and that one's place in life is not only earned and always fair.. And some honest souls have on this thread and do so in real life. But not all high earners see it that way and they are, to my mind, either not very bright and or not very honest which only deepens the divide and further highlights the unfairness.

@TheFirstMrsDV -- I'm so sorry for your loss.

TheFirstMrsDV, so sorry for your loss

I have friends with a very ill baby and they have to stress about the cost of getting to hospital appointments, parking, missing work and therefore pay they absolutely cannot afford to lose, etc on top of the worry about their baby. It's awful.

Thank you.
I wasn't trying to make this about me. Having a sick child and/or losing a child is just a 'handy' way to illustrate how money cannot stop grief and worry but can still make a real difference to quality of life while you grieve/worry.

well, there are plenty of not very bright or fair people earning all sorts of incomes. We need to define terms here beach - one of the problems with the super-rich is that nobody's found an effective way to tax them - and let's not even talk about amazon, google and starbucks.

I'd rather people saved their real outrage for the multinational tax dodgers who rip us off to a huge degree, rather than Mrs Jones round the corner who has a nicer car and always seems to have new stuff.

the higher earners on PAYE, very few of them are dodging taxes.

again i agree mrsdv although i reckon that if you've lost a child (as we have in my family) it's a tragic thing that few can properly relate to and you have more in common with people that have experienced loss, regardless of what they earn.

tbh, jo cox had the right of it for me, we've all got more in common than not, and attacks on people don't build anything.

My husband earns similar, not in the UK though. It sounds like a lot, which it is, but we take home less than you’d think. He gets taxed at 40%. We have to have certain insurance or we get penalised at tax time. The insurance is about $500 a month. In trying to manage our tax we own different things (sorry to be so vague), which we then have to pay upkeep on (I know that’s a nice problem to have). In order for my dh to work from home when needed we have to have a study, so a larger house. Which means high electricity, water costs, council rates.

But I acknowledge we are very fortunate. I grew up poor and I am so happy my dc aren’t. We are very lucky. I never worry about food costs, we go on holidays, I buy nice clothes when I want them, we have a lovely home, I have a nice car. When I was young, single and poor after just leaving home I remember the reality of living on noodles and having my electricity frequently cut off. I used to put $15 petrol in my car and hope it lasted me the week.

I thought Funerals for children were free? Or so I was told.

Funerals for children can be free but you won’t get to choose the plot (communal burial) and if a baby, you may not get the ashes (if, indeed, there are any). Iirc, it is communal cremations under a certain age (gestation).

I earn £30 and feel rich! I am from a very poor family, save £700 a month "just in case" and am still comfy

Yes, I think £60-70k is about right for the level where money is no longer a source of unhappiness/stress but then won't add anything extra beyond.

It's a nice aiming point. Particularly as a dual income, I don't think it's completely unachievable. (There would have been a time that I considered it unbelievable and probably impossible). I would like to aim for that, then be conscious of it and beyond that level either use the money to save so our DC don't struggle like we did or support relatives who have not had the same breaks. But in reality who knows how they will behave until they get there.

Having a sick child and/or losing a child is just a 'handy' way to illustrate how money cannot stop grief and worry but can still make a real difference to quality of life while you grieve/worry

Yes. I saw this with having a child with special needs. In our case autism. We could afford extra therapies, tutors, etc. Sometimes, it just seemed like we were throwing money at her problems. Her first job was through a work connection of her fathers. It's still heartbreaking, but the profound difference of opportunities was striking (as she got older, I've done a lot of work with children with special needs growing up in poverty.) On the flip side, I never had a support system and my DH was often gone. For me, it was phenomenally isolating.

I do feel like some people think that having money means that one doesn't have problems. That isn't the case. Every one has problems.

I sometimes feel pressured to not say what has been hard for me because I have a big house and a nice car. There is a message that I'm not worthy of empathy for anything. My child with autism, years of feeling isolated, and so on are seen as whining because my diamond shoes are too tight.

Coyote, parenting a child with special needs is all-encompassing. Did you ever discuss with your DH the possibility of him taking a role or job with less travelling or less days? With a lower but still livable income?

I agree coyote. My dd had a difficult two to three years from 15 to 18. Anxiety, depression, anorexia, dropped out of year 12 due to poor mental health and eventually recovered when an underlying Neuro developmental disability was diagnosed.

She got incredible A'Level results, is having a gap year and applying to Oxbridge. BUT and this is the big but if we hadn't had the money to pay for all her care via a mixture of private health insurance and £4500 on what they declined to pay for I dread to think where she would be now.

She did not meet CAMHS thresholds. She would have become significantly more unwell, she would in all likelihood never have been diagnosed, she would have dropped out and probably never have got back. Her life chances would have been shattered.

The fact that society is allowing any young person to suffer like this is what is despicable about a first world nation. Not the fact that some people have more than others.

Something else I have come across several times in my working life.
If you have the money to pay for lots of therapies and interventions for your disabled child it can actually make it easier to apply for DLA.

You have more evidence for the form i.e. you can list all the physio, SALT etc they are having and how often. You can fill the page where the parent waiting on a list or only having the megre NHS offering only has a couple of things to write. You may have a diagnosis earlier than someone still waiting, you may have far more reports and other evidence.

How can that possibly be fair?

This is NOT a dig at well off people who claim DLA. I will help you fill in the forms if you need me to. Your child is just as entitled as the next.
Its NOT a dig at people who pay for therapies. Who wouldn't if they could?

I can think of 2 people, one family and one friend with dc with autism - one family earns approx £200k and the other is on benefits.
Both dc are adults now, not able to work and lifelong dependent on their parents. They have more in common than they are different - all the services the wealthier family have been able to buy haven’t significantly affected the position of the children. In both cases the mum is the main carer - now, like mrsdv points out, life is still significantly harder for the parent on a low income but having a dc that’s never going to be able to support themselves is a game changer over and above income differentials.

On the whole, we should stop demonising higher earners and try and rebuild the concept that we’re all in it together and that society is not a dog eat dog thing.