To ask if you can afford to live on one salary?

[coffeeforone]

I'm currently on mat leave and due to go back full time soon. DH found out last week that his job is at risk of redundancy.

We need to do the sums to work out if we would be able to manage on one salary in the short-medium term and if not, what cutbacks we need to make.
I was chatting to a family member earlier who is very shocked that we do not already know with confidence we can live on one salary and should already have been living within the means of the lowest earner in case of this eventuality.

AIBU to this it is ok to need to spend more than one salary if you both work?

The families who manage to live comfortably on £30000 per annum... how on earth is this possible? DH and I bring in over £100K combined but I could never imagine doing with only one salary. Is your mortgage super low? No childcare costs? No holidays abroad? No car / travel costs? No restaurants?
Our mortgage is £1500 a month and childcare is £1600 a month. I’d love to be a SAHM but we just can’t afford it.
What’s the secret?

Well childcare costs would disappear if you were a SAHM. And yes, people have much, much smaller mortgages than that. Mine is also pretty big, but that's because we're in the SE (as I guess are you?). I have friends in Nottingham, for example, who bought a considerably larger and nicer house than ours for literally half the price. So they have an extra £600 a month floating around straight off from that lower mortgage.

Absolutely no one I know who lives in London can afford to live on one salary. I know a few people who do it in our slightly shitty commuter town - moving out here was the price they paid to do it though (and they all have DHs with mega commutes but high salaries)

We could, but I am not sure why we would want to.

It's important to have a reasonable level of savings in case something happens, but DP and I have worked in reasonably well-paid jobs for 20 years. If we had lived on only one of our salaries for all that time, we would have had much less nice lives and over £500K sat in the bank which we could never ever touch unless some kind of emergency happened. I'd rather spend my holidays on a beach, than sat on my sofa, admiring my bank statements by candlelight.

@mariekondo Our wage is way lower than £30,000, and yes no restaurants, car or holidays. My husbands disabled so sahp, mortgage free house so that helps.

Is your mortgage super low? No childcare costs? No holidays abroad? No car / travel costs? No restaurants?

Yes.
Almost. (one day per week. DH and I both work pt so usually one of us is available)
Yes (nice holidays in the UK though)
We can afford a small car
We can afford to eat out (neighbourhood restaurants, not fancy)

In all seriousness: part of my job is helping people through the practicalities of going from two incomes to one (illness, unemployment, death etc). You could do it if you had to. Worst case senario: You would lose your house and need some heavy duty debt counselling.

Absolutely no one I know who lives in London can afford to live on one salary.

Yep, as far as I can work out, there are two ways to live in London.
You are either wealthy. Or you keep your income deliberately low enough to continue on Housing Benefit.
The thing a lot of people miss about London is that the majority of people there have a disposable income at benefits level because rent takes everything else.

My DH is in a similar position unfortunately... We can just survive on my salary, but it wouldn't be very pleasant!
If the situation was reversed, we would have to choose between food and petrol, or move to a much cheaper area.
Luckily in France unemployment benefits are more generous, and DH will find work quickly...

We could manage on only one of working full stop, but for us it would be highly unlikely that we would have to so. I have two well paid part time jobs (2 days a week at one working from home, 3 at the other on site - not very unusual in my line of work), DH works full time, and has his own business in his field as well. We’ve engineered this situation as I have a health condition that may mean I cannot work outside of the home in my field - we’ve been incredibly lucky to be able to forward plan in this way as not many other people in my situation are, so we’ve tried to future proof as best as we can whilst saving as much as possible so we can maintain our standard of living.

There is getting by and living you may be fairly comfortable on a single salary or have all the treats on two. One salary is very possible but life throws curve balls and sometimes one salary it's really hard as there is no wiggle room e.g car breaks down, washing machine pet gets sick etc. Single parent so no choice about one salary in our houee.

We live in London in a lovely 4 bed house with large garden but it does cost a fortune. Luckily we have no debt but if we went down to one salary then we would have to sell up and move far far away. Most of my friends are degree educated with professional jobs and I only know 2 people in my immediate circle in London who can afford to only have 1 parent working. These people were lucky to be able to put down huge deposits on their houses (from parents or bought and sold smaller London properties at the right time) so only have very small mortgages.

We could if we got rid of our childcare (nanny). Mortgage is £££ but the numbers would work out. Only one old car, we could reduce living costs fairly substantially (less nice wine, less organic veg, less nice buthcers meat), we don't have much in the way of foreign holidays anyway. Probably wouldn't be able to save much and DH pension contributions would have to go. And our old London terrace would continue to disintegrate around us.