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??

@turnipfarmers that makes your attitude towards it even more ridiculous.

Absolutely puppower. It's perfectly possible in certain areas of the UK for a household with 60 or 70k income to have no wealth at all, whereas their neighbours on 15 or 20k household income have wealth of nigh on a million. This is nonsensical.

Haha we have 2 kids and mortgage and only earn half of that together but manage to live so yes that is an extremely good wage!!!

I think a big problem with salary perception is that people don’t tend to recognise the costs and benefits of boring expenditure and tend to think in terms of holidays and wide screen TVs.

If you spend money on dental care, insurance, keeping your car well maintained, swimming lessons, pension contributions and repairing the roof it’s difficult to feel rich.

On the other hand it’s easy to discount the hardship faced by people who can’t afford the dentist, don’t have the security of owning their own homes, can’t afford insurance and can’t afford extra curricular activities for their children.

a brilliant wage.but depending where you live and like for like being able to cover those living cost It would then depend.in derby this would make you very comfortable indeed and ud be a rich family.in Richmond London u then might struggle and deff not to live how you would've in derby.
but still an incredibly lucky wage for most.

PaulDacreRimsGeese yep huge intergenerational inequality which is the problem.

*If you spend money on dental care, insurance, keeping your car well maintained, swimming lessons, pension contributions and repairing the roof it’s difficult to feel rich.

On the other hand it’s easy to discount the hardship faced by people who can’t afford the dentist, don’t have the security of owning their own homes, can’t afford insurance and can’t afford extra curricular activities for their children.*

Well quite.

We probably have a family income close to €70k and we are comfortably off despite paying more tax than we would on the same wages in the UK.

WTF is with claiming that you're not well off because you spend more money?

We pay a cleaner €130 per month, we pay €200 per month for after school care, we insure 2 cars and pay out the standard hefty running costs in terms of fuel and servicing, and need them to get to work. Lucky us. Not poor us, we have these massive expenses. Lucky us, that we can afford to buy two nearly new cars and run them, so that we can work and earn and not take any job we can get ourselves to by public transport. Lucky us that we can pay a cleaner instead of having that to do too on top of working. Lucky us that we can afford childcare. Lucky us that we can afford a house with a bedroom for each child not a small flat. If we were on rubbish wages we couldn't afford those things.

Insurance too - lucky us that we can afford to pay life insurance and disability/serious illness insurance so that we'd have a sufficient income if the main earner were unable to work. Not poor us we have to pay more insurance. A family living on one minimum wage zero hours contract could not afford to pay out the insurance premiums meaning that if the earner was hit by a bus and left too disabled to returned to work they would not have any coverage. If that happened to DH we'd have a sum coming in each month which would not cover his earnings but would give us a buffer to pay basic bills.

catinapoolofsunshine

But a young couple today not 5 years ago with a similar income to you would find it very hard to have all the things you have just listed.

And we are going to have to tackle it at some point puppower. This is not a sustainable situation. And yet people seem to focus much more on income than wealth.

Someone upthread mentioned the millions of London households that have an income of less than 60k, which is true. The missing part of that comment was the level of wealth and the distinct possibility that many of them will be wealthier than people earning more but who are a couple of decades younger.

After school childcare is not a luxury.

Politically unpopular to tax wealth (older voters are in the majority).

Someone upthread mentioned the millions of London households that have an income of less than 60k, which is true. The missing part of that comment was the level of wealth and the distinct possibility that many of them will be wealthier than people earning more but who are a couple of decades younger

Exactly that’s why the whole “your in the 10% of earners, you should be grateful” is unhelpful. I’d happily earn 10k & be born a decade earlier (although 80s cartoons were fab).

Dozer

Yep particularly with an aging population. I just don’t see how it’s fair to heap more burden on future generations & for them to be taxed to provide services they won’t ever see.

As Paul said I think it’s unsustainable though, I’m sure I read that income tax is just not going to be able to raise the revenues needed for pensions, nhs & social care so govs will be forced to look elsewhere.

It is dozer. That's why I think things will get worse before they get better. Long term, not doing so isn't an option unless we fix our housing and land costs.

I wish I earned £60k-70k!

puppy yes, but not as hard as someone on a lower income.

I agree about intergenerational wealth gaps and the taxing of wealth, though it is hard to see how to actually do it. My next door neighbours live in a huge house worth over a million (including two separate flats on the property, one of which the wife's mother lives in in return for childcare and one of which they rent out commercially). The building plot was gifted to them, and they had help building it too. They are a school cleaner and a game keeper, but he is from a large farming family who were able to get planning permission for plots within the village boundaries and give one to each son as a wedding present! Yes, sometimes that feels very unfair!

I just think people are being incredibly disingenuous claiming they are not comfortably off because they have to pay for things which other people can't afford.

After school care is not a luxury but I didn't say it was - I said some people can't afford it. If you live rurally (so need cars to get to work) and your main earner is on a minimum wage zero hours contact, your potential second earner can't also take a minimum age zero hours contract because between you you couldn't cover the two cars and after school child care needed to allow you both to work jobs with uncertain hours and income.

Might not be a luxury, but its something some people can't afford. So lucky us, that we could put child care in place in order for me to return to work and increase our family earnings. If we hadn't been able to afford to, I'd have had to stay home several additional years.

This is a point that has been mentioned before but there are 'easy' 50k salaries + and there are difficult ones.

So I am mid-end career and have worked my way up to 50k in a pretty low paid industry BUT I work flexibly with no pressure in an easy job where leaving early is no issue and there isn't any stress.

Very different to an early career stressful career like law where they can be earning heaps but working 12+ hour days in an unsustainable way and the flexibility after parenthood is rubbish.

Salary isn't the be all and end all.

I agree with Yolo

There are plenty of people in London who couldn't even dream of earning even half that figure.

We live in Yorkshire. 2 adults and 2 young children.

My wife is a manager in a store and is on a salary of £20,000

I am a stay at home mum. I have a Etsy business but it's only just taking off so although doing well it's not a big contribution at all at the moment.

We still manage to save £500 a month. That's with paying £600 a month rent, all bills and food.

We do get about £250 tax credits on top.

£60,000 would be amazing!

I think a lot of it is down to how you grew up. My wife says we're poor quite often but the. She grew up in a 4 bedroom family home and went on plenty of holidays.
I think we have loads of money but I grew up moving from council house to council house and living off pasta and beans on toast 😩

Housing costs in London and the south east are £££

Agree that childcare costs can make it difficult for a low paid 2nd earner - usually women - to stay in work, to their long term financial detriment.

It's fucking loads!
Those people do realise that there are families with two incomes that only total about 25k and less??!

It always fascinates me how different people’s thresholds for high incomes are. We only get about half of that as a household total but we manage to pay for childcare, a car, extracurricular activities, an annual holiday and basic luxuries like sky tv. We food shop at Aldi though and buy clothes from Primark or secondhand, and I never get beauty treatments etc. I work with families who are classed as being below the poverty line and are mostly unemployed - their children often have the latest trainers and tracksuits, and they have money for tattoos, cigarettes and daily trips to fast food places. At the other end of the spectrum, my husband’s boss who is on about twice his salary and has a husband with a good job had to return to work after 3 months maternity leave as they couldn’t afford for her to take any longer. It’s all relative I suppose.

Who will, if in London like the person in our OP, will be getting at least housing benefit unless they've managed to buy or inherit a home. And wherever they are they'll get tax credits unless they have only one child and no childcare costs.

I mean, not to say that wouldn't be extremely tough. Hell, I wouldn't live in the south east for OPs 60-70k. You'd have to add another zero and even then I'd only go reluctantly. But if we're comparing let's do it properly.

puppower, it's difficult to say what comparable houses are going for now, as ours is one of three built around the late 70s, and the most recent transaction was nearly 15 years ago! Given the ups and downs in the property market between then and now, it's quite difficult to say it would be worth £xk. I do know that we could not afford to buy it now!

Fine but "couldn't afford" is not going to be objectively true in that case.

I had a friend years ago who had two babies close together, about 18 months apart. She returned early too, from both maternity leaves. She didn't want to, in fact after having the second baby she wanted to go part time, but her DH was adamant they couldn't afford for her to take the SMP part of her leave let alone cut back her hours.

They had a new-build detached 4 bed "Executive Home" right at the limits of their budget, and both drove expensive cars, and used the last part of her leave for a holiday. Its all very well if that's what you want, if you can afford to spend your money that way and choose to then it's nobody's business. However it is a choice. Spending money like water doesn't mean your salary's not good, it means you're either not good with money or you are choosing to live at the limits of your means.

They could have afforded to give themselves some slack by cutting back. They could have planned for it in advance by buying a more modest home and not booking the holiday. They chose not to.

Most people live to their means, but they are not compelled to, and it's ignorant when they pretend to believe that they have no choice but to spend more than someone on a lower income, as if they couldn't possibly survive if they had to slum it in a smaller house in a cheaper area driving an economy car, or something. Aside from directly work related expenses, mostly limited to work clothing, there is no objective reason why say a single person on 70k needs to spend more than someone otherwise equivalent in terms of work location, age and health on 18k.

Having a choice is the luxury. Higher salaries bring the luxury of choice. More things might "feel" essential, but they can't be if you'd have to do without them on 18k.