To ask those who have high earning partners......

[Hollypies]

I’m shocked by the amount of women on MN with very high earning DP/DHs and I wonder, how did you meet and what is your life like? I can appreciate this is a little nosey, but after years of dating/being in relationships with men who are very low earners and with no ambitions in terms of their career....I’m very curious. I’ve always assumed that highly successful men/women usually mix with their own kind and meet an equally high earning spouse through their work or social circle... but thought it’d be interesting to ask!

NC for this.
Depends if you mean high earning on MN/London/SE or high earning IRL/anywhere else. £50k/yr buys a decent lifestyle in selectively chosen places outside the SE. Less than £100k in London doesn’t get you very far.
Met DH on holiday in an exotic place. Previously dated a few very high earners; met all of them on nice holidays (ie unlikely to meet low earners on said holidays as they wouldn’t be there in the first place). DH was a very high earner then and is an even higher earner now. Last year he earned 10x my salary and our household income almost hit £1m. Most of my female workplace contemporaries earn around £100k; they are mostly the breadwinners in their households and met their DHs at weddings or online.

My husband earns £106k plus bonus.

He did a degree in his field (Business/Finance), got on to a grad programme, and has worked his way up in the same company since then, securing several promotions. He’s at director level now. Hours are long and it’s a stressful field, but he’s happy.

I earn £104k plus bonus.

I studied in an unrelated area, pissed around in a few jobs I hated, before I joined a start-up very early on and my income has almost trebled over the past 6 years. I’m at senior manager level, and work long hours. It can be stressful, but I love my work.

We met in a pub and had a one-night stand when I was 19. I really enjoyed it, and his company, so I asked him out and we’ve been together 17 years.

We didn’t get together because of our jobs or earning potential. We’ve just been very fortunate. We both like working and he, moreso than me, is the type who’d sweep the street with a toothbrush rather than be idle. I really admire that trait in him.

We live in a nice, normal house. The location means it’s expensive but we’re saving a lot currently so we can buy our forever home, and rent the current one out. We live very comfortably on his salary, and save mine. We also have a lot of investments and shares, but they took quite a hit last year so not counting on them too much!

We hope to retire in 15 years’ time- we’ll be early-mid 50s.

lots of two doctor couples will have disparity with earnings, if one has chosen a lower earning specialty e.g. A&E dr (no private work) vs plastic surgeon - or if one has gone part time for kids. most will have met at med school.

Both of us grew up in households with annual income of less than £12k

I only know one person on more than 50k per year and that's my FB - and he just retired age 51.

I think he was actually on about 500k as he told me he has to pay HMRC 100k for the last tax year.

I believe he's been with his wife about 25 years, so before he was earning the big bucks, but it was clear where his career was heading.

(They are poly, swingers club etc, I'm not the OW!)

I think a lot of women married to big earners have made a conscious decision to "don't ask don't tell". Hopefully they've also made steps to protect themselves in the event that "DH" decides he deserves a younger model.

Dh in top 1%. Don’t have to worry about money- just one less thing to worry about.

Thank you for sharing and I’m sure that’s lovely for you but not quite sure why you posted as you don’t answer the original question.

I think £100k+ is plenty for most people tbh! Nobody should sneer at that. It’s more than our total household income and we manage to get by in one of the most expensive parts of the country

I agree, but I see it a lot in these sorts of threads. “Oh that’s not even that much, we earn £500k and we only have a tiny cottage with a 10-year old car” kind of comments.

I told my DH that the more money he earned, the less housework he had to do. It worked a treat.

On Tinder. We had roughly matched incomes when we meet. He had said he was an engineer just not what type.
I had a surge in income and jumped into the high bracket overtaking home. He took a new job where most of his colleagues were American and assumed he had the trophy wife until he pointed out that his DW earns more than him.
He has now got promoted and earns more than me.
I had a DC from a previous relationship his 1st DW sadly died young and they had not been able to have children. He would give up every penny tomorrow for his own DC, but he treats mine like his own.

DH and I met at university - we did our PhDs in the same department. He earned more than me immediately after graduation, but I’ve out-earned him for at least the last decade, and I’m the one with a 6-figure salary (I earn roughly twice what he does at the moment). We’ve realised that it is perfectly possible for both of us to have a great career, but you can only focus on one career at a time and have to take it in turns.

AlexaAmbidextra I did indeed answer all but briefly, in that I just don’t have to worry about money. Meaning that my life is much the same as anyone else’s without financial worry.

Most of my friends who I have known since childhood have met their partners/husbands either at university or in the first couple years at work. They are all successful with jobs in London earning around 100-120k (the females) and their husbands earn 125k upwards. You can definitely see the gender inequality.
We are now all early to mid thirties and starting families. No divorces yet. I'm sure the dynamic changes in the 40s when divorces may start to happen and highly paid husbands find new partners.
Personally I met my husband at university, he studied for a lot longer than I did for his field and i have always earned 4-5 times what he does. Household income is nearly 300k a year.

Met him on the Internet. We’re both high earners. Life’s pretty sweet.

HTH.

We both met at an Ivy League university (grad school, different departments). He went the finance route and I was in medicine.

As someone else has said upthread, the downside of living with a high earner is that most people have to put in a hell of a lot of time and effort if they are earning the big bucks. My DH has taken incredibly good care of us financially but our lives can be ruled by the demands and whims of his clients. If they are pissed off in any way they will take their business elsewhere. His employment contract requires him to be accessible 365 days a year, 24 hours a day.

In real terms most clients are perfectly reasonable people most of the time and things run smoothly , but it still means very long working days being available to people in other time zones with other public holidays when needed, a lot of meetings and phone calls at odd times of night and the awareness that if a crisis blows up he might have to leave a family event or holiday at a moments notice. I remember the time he had to rush off on house move day to negotiate something vital that couldn’t possibly wait until after the weekend, leaving me to close up the old house, load up the kids and pets, collect the new keys and meet the removers at the new house on my own. I was furious at the time but in all fairness, if he didn’t work that hard we could never have afforded the new house.

I had dated a Greek guy from a wealthy background at uni, but just ended when I was about 22.

Not long after, I met DH randomly in a bar in Covent Garden. I hadn’t meant to go out that night. I thought he was gorgeous and I loved that he was quite old-fashioned and a perfect gent from the outset. Money didn’t come into the equation as he was just out the marines and not from a wealthy background by any means - his parents had been refugees from a ME country.

He somehow got into banking / options trading and I remember when he got his one if his first bonuses when he was about 28 for £250k - it seemed like crazy money at that age. I followed his job to New York and Hong Kong over the next few years. We were married when I was 27, he was 31. We had 4 DC and I’ve always been at home since midway through the pregnancy with our first, who is now 16. DH set up his own company with several friends when he was 30 which they sold a few years back for over £1 bn, of which our shares were worth over £40 m . His work certainly became a way of life for us all, but I never resented supporting him or not following through on my career through the years. Luckily it paid off and we survived. He still works, but it’s mainly investments and non-exec roles now.

I know many wealthy / very wealthy men and they mainly met their wives either at uni or just after. Very few have divorced either, but they do tend to have wives who are SAHMs because it can all get too much otherwise.

Met through a friend - he was out of work at the time and I married him never having known him work

A year later first DC born and that was enough to coax him back to work

Been married 16 years this year. I paid off his mortgage and bought him holidays in the beginning, now it's the other way round

Whatever, we are a team.

Depressing how many of these posts start with 'I was the high earner when we met in our 20s but...'

My DH is in the outdoor education and training field, I'm a teacher. Not even close to 100k but we'll away from London. Would love to know how people just 'change careers' i.e. it sounds so simple but very few careers convert into others and it's hard to secure training in a completely new field in your thirties.

Also, do said career changes take place with higher earnings in mind. How can we know what the high paid jobs/careers are if we don't personally know people in them?
Also any career suggestion for me and DH also welcome! He is freelance and earns well but seems hard to make his business jump to next level passive income without a huge cash injection, I don't know how people do it!

@NoughtpercentAPR might not be that much money to you love but it is to a lot of us!!!

When I met Dh I actually earned significantly more than him, 3 lots of maternity leave and part time work has seen his career sore whilst mine is just getting back on track 10 years later!

We met at a wedding 18 years ago. We both earned around the same then. We were on one salary for 7 years while I was a SAHM so had to cut our cloth accordingly (we were skint), then I went back to work so that he could take a pay cut in a job with less hours, which allowed him to study in a more niche area of his profession. He then took a bit of a chance and went out on his own about 5 years ago now and it's gone better than either of us could ever have anticipated.

Ahhhh the professionally offended are out in force tonight!! Go be offended some place else!

@popsadaisy - you always get comments like that on these threads. They are either from people who have NO idea what's going on in the real world, or who like to belittle people who think that 100k is 'not that much'. We earn very well now, but we have also been utterly skint worrying how we would pay the bills, so I know how insulting it is for people to make comments like that.

Met through work over 5 yrs ago. He's a banker £500k+ but also a lot older than me. I'm early 30s, H mid 40s.
I'm a sahm.