Does everyone on MN - except me - have a high flying highly paid highly stressful job

[IamtheMistressofmyFate]

Is anyone a hairdresser married to a mechanic? Nursery nurse married to a delivery driver?

I keep reading about women having to go back to work or they'll fall off the career ladder and never recover. Everyone seems so BUSY and STRESSED and high flying. Or they've burnt out and have downsized so they can bake bread.

Is anyone else just pootling along like me - not setting the world alight with their brilliance and ambition?

I'm a f/t admin/marketing assistant on £19k a year which is a good wage for the part of the country we live in. It is pretty stressful though as we're understaffed. DH is a groundsman for the LA. We manage. A couple more K a year wouldn't go amiss though!

No high flying here either I work for a charity and DP is in contracts admin.earn around 50k between us. no kids though so all our money is our own. I am aware though that things could change any time so I'm always careful to save etc. just in case our circumstances change. Can afford to have a couple holidays a yr (short breaks with airbnb) and to eat out etc. but we don't have very expensive tastes. I feel very lucky tbh because I graduated just after the financial crash and was earning really low amounts for ages.

Just under 6k average take home between two ( 60k is based on bonuses which aren’t monthly and other benefits ie health plan and car allowances etc which are not straight up cash) .

BUT I am planning to help my brother buy his own property and support parents ease into retirement - they haven’t been high earners and want to help them ensure the house is in the best place etc . I suppose yes we could afford to have 1 but I’d not be able to help out my family how I’ve planned . Just something important to me as they sacrificed a lot to get me to where I am today .

We also have a one bed apartment which there isn’t room for a child in frankly unless we put it in the cupboard where the washing machine is . There is no room for a cot without losing the tiny table we have and no room for a changing table etc . Cost of moving to somewhere more suitable and then increased travel costs .

i haven't worked since 2003 and ive only ever had the one job as i started there in 1999 at nearly 19 straight from college

i left work(well on the sick) when pregnant as i was bed ridden for 7 months then left officially(well they fired me the day i gave birth) to be a sahm then in 2012 became a official paid carer as child has many disabilities and still am (im literately a 24 hour carer as he doesnt sleep)

i also have a 8 y old with many disabilities that my oh is the official paid carer to(hes 24 hours too)

between us all we get quite a bit per week(roughly £750) off the government so even though we dont officially have a job i see it as i work a 24 hour job as kids are home ed as well as educationally wise they are failed as they have no where to go(cant do mainstream not severe enough for special school and there are none around here anyway) so i had to keep them home

Me: PT administrator, DP: FT mechanic.
My job fits in around school hours so no wraparound care to worry about. Not the most exciting role in the world by pretty low stresd

tor8181 are you sure your figures are correct? because what you've just described works out to more than £4,400 a month gross salary - surely that can't be correct?

namechangedforanon well it’s admirable you want to help your parents out & tbh moving may not be a bad idea. We toy with moving further out for more space but my mum is around the corner which makes such a difference with kids.

I was a manager in my old job, left to become a SAHM, starting a job soon as a part time administrator. I take pride in everything I do equally; work does not define me as a person.

Also don't forget that Mumsnet isn't the only large parenting forum.

Not high flying here, me on health benefits and DH self employed in a factory. He finds it pretty stressful with the noise so hoping that might change. We manage, sort of.

Eilaianne presumably she means total household income - £750 per week is £3250 per month, £1625 per adult as they are both 24 hour per day carers, one for each child. I don't know whether thats what they actually get, but all in with the children's allowances and carers allowance and tax credits it sounds possible especially if the children's disabilities cost money in themselves (special equipment as well as round the clock care).

I don't know, obviously, but maybe.

blueskiesandforests then i think we're interpreting her figures the same - but that equates to more than our gross income before tax. if we're taking net, i.e. what you see in your hand, it's more than earning £4.4k a month gross... which surprised me, hence checking in case it's a typo/i've misinterpreted. it doesn't equate to a lot of the entitledto.co.uk calcs that i see being spat out on the budgeting forums so wondered how that could be.

Eilaianne I actually just googled out of interest and because I'm procrastinating and should be doing something else and the benefits cap per household in the UK is £23k per year. Even though the .gov.uk site says disability benefits are exempt it does seem unlikely that a household with 2 kids is getting £13k more than the cap.

So perhaps the figures are wrong.

Highly paid - yes, £52k. I will bare-knuckle fight any idiot who says that isn't well paid

Stressful? DEFINITELY. Sole full time member of leadership in charge of a bunch of people who hate each other, and have stupid, counter productive stressy fights all the time. Have to cram in doing my actual work as if it's some kind of sideline.

Long hours - no. 40h working week. For the past year, I dig in if tasks need extra time, but I'm damned if I'm doing overtime refereeing fights.

High flying? Jury's out. Big fish in a small pond. Did some very high profile work (ran government project contract, result used in entire region of UK on a daily basis). Working on making my skills more transferable, because the internal politics that takes up a lot of my time is not exactly the sort of role I'll look for in the future.

thecatsthecats - you don't meet the MN criteria for highly paid or high flier.

Support worker married to another support worker here.

I don't think the cap covers disability benefits etc? I may be wrong. Besides, that figure replaces the couple's ability to work, as well as covering education and carers. Much cheaper than the alternative and also covers housing etc.

It certainly feels like everyone is in high flying careers when reading the S&B topic, and posters think nothing of recommending a handbag that costs more than what I earn in a week!

This could be outing, as I'm very senior.

JK LOL I have a relatively low profile job and only earn enough to cover childcare. (Still stressful for me, because I'm an anxious type.)

I'm 100% dependent on DH.

you don't meet the MN criteria for highly paid or high flier.

What makes you say that OP?

Earning over fifty grand, a career rather than a job, of course that’s ‘high flying’. What on Earth is your threshold if not below that?

IamtheMistressofmyFate

Well, I agree on the high-flyer(ish). To me, high-flyer ranks as 'I make decisions that could impact upon a number of lives in the hundreds'.

When I was running the government project, that was true, and still remains true - the decisions I made had real life effects affecting tens of thousands of people, and they're still using my system effectively (little brag: there were initiatives to launch this same thing in the other countries of the UK - mine is the only one that succeeded, to budget, and delivered on time).

On the highly-paid one, well I'll have to meet the Mumsnet Criteria in a dark alley, because it's flat bollocks

I'm a SAHM...but I was mid level flying when I was employed.

It's pretty easy to make yourself sound better than you are, though, isn't it? Both of the following are true:

I lead on the delivery of government contracts and have presented the findings of my original research at national and international conferences.

Nothing I do at work affects anyone's life in any major way and I only do presentations to 'talking shops' which are not capable of delivering meaningful change.

Not me. I'm just a boring office worker in a school. I used to be fluent in two other languages so would love to be a translator or interpretter!