To consider £60-70k a high salary?

[rebsemmie]

Just that really, I just had a general chat with a few friends about work and salaries (not talking about our own salaries, just chatting in general). We are all in our late 20s, unmarried and childfree, so we were not discussing in terms of household incomes, just in terms of single people's income.

Much to my surprise, some of my friends did not consider a salary in the range of £60-70k (for one single person) to be very high, they though it was "alright". One of them said you "come on, you can barely afford to rent a place on your own with that income!"

I was a bit surprised as my salary is well over 30% lower than that, and I considered myself quite fortunate and well-off! Granted, we are in London which is very expensive, but still..

AIBU to think my friends are a bit detached from reality if they think a salary of £60-70k is just "alright" for one person??

I am 29, live just outside of London and earn £56k with a pension worth about £13k a year. I'm the highest earner in our social circle including a friend's wife who is a hospital doctor and earns less than £50k even with shift allowances.

In my line of work salaries are normally capped at £80k for very senior management and the mega money, along with job insecurity, is in consultancy.

Glug44 I will tell DD off to be more sceptical with the figures put forward to her thanks for the tip.

They take 15 trainee lawyers on per year as opposed to some that take on up to 80 which is what attracted her to this firm, but what worries me is how many people burn out so quickly. She is hoping to do 10 years working at a multi national then move to a regional firm.

Come up north with me ! You can buy 2 houses on that wage your freind would own 2 houses outright in a few years !

Consultant surgeons salaries start at £77K. Most of it will go in tax anyway.

I'm in London, I would be loaded on that salary!

I have 2 almost teenage DC and out household income is around 43K. We have 1 x foreign holiday and 4 x British holidays per year.

With an extra 17-27k disposable income I can only imagine what we could do!

So I'm on that salary level. It's a really good salary for me given where I live, my family circumstances etc. But I'm in my 40s, had a long career in my sector and am employed by a big global company. Naturally you spend more on life - house, holiday etc because it's within your means. BUT I would say to the people on here who are outraged (disgusting, apparently) that I don't for one minute take it for granted. I save as much as I can, I pay a lot of taxes (and am proud to do so as I believe that's how the system should work), I support a few charities and I know it's been luck as well as my skills that have given me the opportunity.

I come from a working class family (Dad was a miner and Mum stayed at home) and I remember what it's like to struggle at the end of every month.

I'll be honest I was a pretentious little tw*t when I started earning higher than average in my early 20s but thankfully I grew out of that phase and remembered what you have or get is not the measure of a person.

To me that's loads! Almost double our household income and we manage just fine- we don't have luxuries like foreign holidays and our kitchen is older than me but we have everything we need and can afford to treat the kids to days out etc. I consider that pretty good personally. We would feel loaded on 70k.

I sold my London flat, eventually a long time later , after renting it at a loss on the cost of the mortgage for years, at a fair market price. Having just checked what one went for recently, the priced has nearly doubled in 15 years, but OTOH, I was able with the proceeds, to pay off the mortgage on our family house AND stick a load into my pension. I don't want to sound smug, but these are the decisions we make in the light of the time when they are made, and at the time the transactions went through, outside London, properties prices were relatively low. So we have done okay, and when we get ancient and need care, that cushion will pay for it.

It’s a great salary if you’re child-free in London. It’s crap if you have kids and want to buy a house

These threads are always the same - the people who don’t live in London are the ones banging on about how a high salary doesn’t get you very far - yet interestingly it’s the ones that do live in London - like me - who know full well that there are thousands upon thousands of families who live within Greater London who are surviving - quite comfortably - on a lot less.

Just because you live and work in London does not mean that you have to send your kids to private school and take 4 skiing holidays per year.

Yes, transport is expensive, but it also means that often you don’t need to run a car.

Housing is expensive, but it doesn’t have to be impossible (as some PPs have pointed out rightly, you don’t have to live in zones 1 or 2 or even in top price south west London to have a decent life)

I am in the v fortunate position of running my own business from home that does well and fits flexibly around childcare. Yet all my clients and my industry are London based, which is one key reason why I remain here ( as well as being happy here)

We have a household income of circa £70k and feel very comfortable - in London (zone 4!).
We pay for childcare and take holidays abroad every year.

I should add, I went self employed; work was always precarious, and DH created a new company not long afterwards so we lived on what I earned for years. We are nearing retirement now, when we can afford it, or can work no longer! It won't be long glamorous cruises, as we'd like to help DS onto to the property ladder.

Of course "most" of it won't go on tax. If you earn 77k about 25% of that will go on tax, plus some on NI. You'll have well over 4k per month to spend.

OC but surely one of the reasons it seems loads to you is because you are nearing retirement & therefore would have much lower mortgage repayments? How much are comparable houses selling for in your area now?

Salary is always a tricky question. I know people who earn £12k a year and people who earn £600k a year. Funnily enough, neither of them has any savings - you can always spend as much as you earn. £70k in your late 20's is doing well, but there will be lots of people in certain industries into six figures by then, so if that's your social circle, it will feel below average. In other social circles you would be treated like a millionaire. The fewer people who appear to be able to do what you do, the greater the salary will be.

This cropped up exactly a year ago when labour's John McDonnell suggested that Labour could increase tax for those earning more than £70,000. Data showed that (just a year ago) £70k meant you were in the top 5% of earners - let that fact sink in.

The gov needs to look at taxing wealth not just income imo.

I wouldn’t know what to do with over 25k 😂

Wow, I’m a single parent who works part time as a teacher and I earn £18k which probably comes to £20k once child benefit, child maintenance payment and tax credits are added. I have a mortgage which I manage to pay, I don’t pay out child care as this is why I only work 2 days, I feed and clothe my children and run a car. Even when my ex and I were together our joint income was only around £26-30k at one point when I went part time and we survived on his £15k salary for a while too when I was made redundant. I’m 40 years old. If I was in my 20s and earning £60-70k then I’d think I was rich!!

Certainly not the norm in most industries to be on that salary in your 20s in London

It's objectively a good salary based on the average income and that it's significantly above that

Depends on the sector as to whether that's perceived as a good salary for someone in that industry commensurate with that level of experience based on industry norms

In my industry there are salary benchmarking surveys every year from numerous recruitment agencies - at my level, in my discipline, that wouldn't be perceived as a fantastic salary because the industry norm is that pay for these kind of roles is much higher than that. If I get sent a job spec with a salary of £60k when the typical salary range is £90-110k, and other job specs are all within that typical range, that will seem a low salary within that specific context. That doesn't mean it's not objectively an above average salary overall. And doesn't mean salaries for my role aren't massively over inflated compared to what a genuinely valuable role like being a teacher or nurse actually contributes to society.

@turnipfarmers "just doing the payroll" is not as simple as some people may Think
I "just do the payroll" for a smaller but well known company, not multi national and in the north where salaries and living costs are lower and earn a nice salary thanks.

@laurief I know what doing the payroll involves, thanks. I used to do it.

Mw my husband and our 6 kids live off less than 20k a year!! He works 60 hour weeks and im a SAHM with our disabled son and baby! We would love to be on 60k a year and hopefully once our sons older and im back at work we will be close but to us that would be luxuary!!!!!

I had to retire early due to stress (teaching!) and five years later my husband has been made redundant so our joint income isn't anywhere near £60k though it used to be a lot higher. We are hanging on by our fingertips. Still, we are managing and happy enough.

It is not about headline salaries but about the disposable income you have when you subtract your joint outgoings from your global family income.

Many things can skew this. The tax system is designed to be much more generous to lower income families and to hit higher earners hard so working for higher salaries doesn't always mean getting a lot more in your paypacket. In fact, should one earner go over £50k the loss of Family Benefit means you have a marginal tax rate of about 60%. Two lower earners would bring in a lot more. Similary, earning over £100k means you lose the whole of your tax allowance which is a huge hit and, again, a tax rate of about 60%. Many other factors affect the critical 'disposable'.

When I retired I did the sums. I was paying £800 a month out of taxed income to pay for two children at university; another £160 for cleaning and ironing and about £300 for fuel. When I factored in the actuarily reduced pension I would recieve if I retired and the money I was paying for the children who were both finishing university and my job costs I worked out I was actually killing myself working for about £300 a month. The children graduated and the costs disappeared with that event and I retired. In fact, I found that the job cost even more than I thought to maintain as I had to have smart clothes. My costs have dropped like a stone now I have time to budget, buy bargains, buy fewer clothes and clean, decorate and maintain my own home.

So £60k could be a high or a low salary depending on your circumstances, attitude to money and spending habits.

Teacher22 but that's how it should be! Of course the first part of income should be taxed less, so that (theoretically) everyone has enough to live on, and the excess taxed higher!

As for the 2 people on 30k getting to keep more than 1 person on 60k, say - that's often a controversial area but in the country where I live couples are taxed as couples, and it often results in the wife not returning to work at all, ever. If the husband earns 40k then the wife takes a 20k job to get back into work after having children, she will be on the highest tax band. This happened when I returned to work part time - I would pay very little tax in the UK but a huge proportion of my salary here. Even though I'm a low earner atm we have after school childcare to pay for to the tune of €200 per month, and pay a cleaner (not that we have to, but I'm re-training too so "working" full time including the college days and we can afford to) - even without uni to pay for my salary only covers expenses really. However it means I'm paying into a pension again, plus the security of the fact that if DH lost his job I could up my hours to full time (suitable staff are hard to find and they'd bite my hand off) and the amount taken in tax would be less, so we could cover the rent and basic bills on my full time salary. So its worth working.

If couples are taxed as couples it does, unfortunately, set women right back. The decision to return to work after having a child becomes even more weighted becasue returning on anything but a very high income seems a bit pointless as so much will go in tax and other deductions. That's even after childcare costs go right down to just after school, or even when they are completely out of the picture. Then you end up with women in their 50s who have almost no pension and have been out of the work place 25 years and are up the creek without a paddle if their husband leaves them or they want to leave their husband (financially they can't).

Teacher22 your right, so many don’t seem to get this though. I dropped down to 2-3 days a week in a new role & even though I earnt much less my take home wasn’t so bad plus we qualified for CB for a bit. If you earn 30k & then get a rise to 60k the difference is probably 19k & that’s before pension, student loan changes & would also mean losing child benefit.