To think if you earn a huge salary then long hours are expected?

[dignifiedlazyness]

I have a cousin who work 60-70 hours minimum a week. Yes this is a heck of a lot, and I’d hate that. But, he is on £400k a year. All he does is complain how many hours he’s putting in, but seems to forget that with fewer hours there would be no business class 5* weekend breaks to New York etc.
I feel like telling him to shut up, or make do with less!

To be honest I don't think anyone should be working those hours, including teachers.

If the role requires 70 hours a week that is two people's jobs, so the firm should be paying two people £200k each, not one person £400k.

I have no problem with people earning high salaries, but the salary should reflect the responsibility, knowledge, skills, quals and experience of the employee - not the number of additional hours over FT they are putting in.

In the case of teachers, most of what they are doing is monitoring and data, and prep work that they should be released from the classroom for, but that's a whole other thread.

YANBU OP

if he finds it a problem he's got plenty of other options

for that salary, those hours are fine. If he wants to battle for fewer hours at work, no one is stopping him.

Loads of ppl work those hrs for nowhere near that much money. It's not what I would want personally but presumably he is used to that level of income and the lifestyle that goes with it now.

I’d like to see the stats - I don’t think lots of people are doing 60-70 hours per week in a light week for small amounts of money.

stopwoofing When I was a FT teacher I regularly had to do those hours. Did 90 hours sometimes

I wonder if he works in patents / trademark law? I know a few people in this area and am amazed by the salaries they earn!!

I think a problem is that people tend to socialise with others in similar positions to them economically. And so someone on £400k pa could spend lots of time with people on £500k pa and do feel hard done by in a sense. While at the other end someone on £30k pa could socialise mainly with people on £20k pa and feel pretty rich. It’s all relative.

I have a teacher friend and she said she couldn’t do her job in less than 60 hours a week in term time - I was talking to someone at our council dept though and they said average teacher hours reported was 48 per week - so high, but not 60/70 hours as a light week.

Personally I couldn’t sustain anything more than 50 hours a week long term, but if the long hours are worked in a training/investment year it’s a bit different.

Have I seriously just seen someone describe a salary of 400k as not that much?

Just what I thought porker!

Even if he dropped down to half the hours he would equate to 200 grand/ year - I wouldn't kick that out of my bank account!

Just trying to work out how many years it would take me to earn £400k on a social workers salary....Yep, I'd be dead before I got there. Substitute social worker for basically any job which requires lots of extra paperwork/ admin/ unpaid overtime and so on.
I think £400k p.a. is an unbelievable amount of money.

It fully depends. I work 70 hour weeks and don't even get 10% of that figure. Dh is in the high end tax bracket and rocks up at 10 unless there is a 9am meeting and leaves at 6. On a Friday they are all in the pub (opposite my work!) By 5 and he has never worked on a weekend or holiday. A toxic work environment doesn't always tend to be down to money

MN is so stupid sometimes - it’s completely inconceivable on here that people could really earn that much. Why?! I can fully believe a senior lawyer is on 200k post tax

For those that mentioned they are on a HGV pay. Don’t ever think you have reached your ceiling. DH was a Class 1 driver from being 22, drove all over Europe, As a result I brought our children up alone. He is now an Operations Director of a very well known transport company and earns 100k basic and 75k bonus most years.

Not bad for a council house kid with zero qualifications.

F me! Yeah need needs to stop whining or change his life. I know WC people working those kind of hours on minimum wage juggling 2-3 jobs to make ends meet. £400 isn’t that much!! Who said that? There are law jobs that allow better work/life balance but at a quarter of the money...

I’ve done a couple of 60 hour weeks recently as very much a one off.

It’s a miserable way to live IME. I wouldn’t do it on a permanent basis for any amount of money.

£400k is a huge salary and far more than necessary to have a great standard of living. More fool him (and others) for putting money ahead of actual life.

@ShesABelter. Totally agree with your post. My husband works an average of 70 hours a week! He's just had to do 12 weeks straight of 84hrs a week (with only 1 day off in the whole 12 weeks which led to quite a few arguments!!!). He earns around 60 thousand a year, which i know sounds an awful lot to many people, but when you take into account the amount of tax and ni he pays out of that its huge. Also its means we lose entitlement to anything. No child tax credit, no child benefit, no married persons tax allowance, no jsa if he's out of work (he works in an industry where he can go into work on a Friday morning and be out of work on a friday afternoon). I am a SAHM, have one child at school and a young child at home, no family near by and in my job (previous to children) I'd have to spend more on childcare than i would earn!

I would imagine that my BIL earns that sort of money. He’s either at work, at home working, travelling for work or about to do some work. My sister is left almost entirely to her own devices, although she also works.

Their kids are at private school and they do 1 blow out holiday a year but other than that they do very little as he’s never around.

Years ago as a junior solicitor I worked on a deal which meant long hours in the run up to Christmas.

I have never forgotten the Partner in charge of the deal buying 3 laptops for his young children as Christmas presents. He/ I were working all hours, he would have barely seen his children in that time.

He didn't seem to enjoy it, he seemed miserable. I thought at the time that his children would rather have him than those laptops. He could have chosen a firm with shorter hours for lower salary.

That deal was one of many in a year. The hours were ridiculous.

I left the law.

Hours worked does not correlate to monies earned. Really it’s just down to the industry and luck. My husband works very normal hours and earns £90k - picks up daughter from nursery twice a week, no weekends etc. I earn £70k and am the same.

Anyone going into a big Law firm knows the score re hours. But I don’t suppose he can now rock up to his boss and suggest be halves his salary to work less hours can he? People become trapped in toxic work cultures and it’s sad.

My husband works very normal hours and earns £90k me too

I imagine it depends in which sector you work... Both DH and I work in IT/finance, him 9-6 with lunch at his desk most days(so no lunch break really) for 125k. He stays until 7 maybe once a week but not more.
Me, part time 36h/week for 100k (and I leave on the dot every day as I have to pickup the DC from school).

For 400k I would work crazy hours though - as long as one of us can cut theirs so the DC don’t spend their days just with a nanny.

It’s more tax efficient to have two parents working less though than one person working crazy hours and one at home, if you can find that balance...

I don’t see the point of huge salaries if you don’t have the time to enjoy them. People seem so driven by material things nowadays. I work about 15 hrs a week on average and my spouse works none. I have worked harder in the past and earned more previously but have got myself in a nice position where I pay no income tax, my spouse pays no income tax and we clear about £3k a month between us.

If I wished I could earn much more but I don’t see the point. How much does anyone need? Walking the dogs gives me more pleasure than working.

@Stopwoofing, i totally agree but it's not possible for us. I do enjoy being around for the kids tbh (my mum was for us). I went back to work part time when my eldest started school and then became at SAHM again when the second was born ( i will probably do the same when the youngest starts school). My husband doesn't have the option to pick and choose his hours though. He mainly works away from home, he works on power plants all over the country so he has to go where the work is and work the hours they state. He occasionally gets 'a quiet job' where he can work 45 hr weeks and I'm happy with that. He usually earns about 40 thousand in those years but it doesn't make much of a difference because he's paying less tax, less ni, we get child benefit and he can use my married tax allowance so we're not much worse off. It just frustrates me that we have family and friends who both work and their household income is far higher than ours but they are still able to claim all of the 'benefits' but we suffer because I've decided to stay at home to care for my own children rather than paying someone else to raise them and my husband works his butt off to ensure that we can still live a decent life

@BTQ67 because if we all got comfortable paying “no income tax” the country would pretty much go to shit!!....yes more than it already is!! That’s hardly an aspiration either 🙄

Surely that’s not why people work long hours though? So that the country doesn’t grind to a halt! Self employed people have been making use of their “allowances” for years. I’m no different.