Moaning about being ‘poor’ when rich

[freetone]

AIBU to think if you are childless, go on 3 holidays abroad per year and live in a 4 bed detached house on a private road then you don’t have the right to moan about being ‘poor’? My DF and his wife have been like this recently. He earns over £150k a year. It shows how far away from reality they are imo. Really gets on my nerves when there are millions of people genuinely struggling. Anyone else experienced people like my Father?

A quick Google tells me that £100k after tax is around £5.5k take home per month! Even after a very high rent payment, that's still an incredible amount of money!

NC.

From the audience at a conference about a social issue, I asked a Government Minister (& therefore an MP) what the minimum wage was. He had not a clue. The audience shouted out the answer for him.

Moments later, the facilitator, a well known TV presenter, went on to use an ‘average wage of 25k’ to make a point to the same minister - in a large conference hall where most of the audience were really struggling on income below minimum wage.

Some people have not a clue about the reality of income distribution & how wide the gap is between poverty & ‘feeling the pinch’.

Fair enough. I'm not keen on the competitively poor either.

It is all relative to the person, their circumstances, what they perceive to be necessary for living a comfortable life (holidays, nice cars etc) compared with the ability to eat, pay your bills, clothe yourself and your family and maintain a simple roof over your head.

I prefer to not engage with people that only see their own situation, regardless of which end of the spectrum they sit at.

DO something about your situation instead of fixating on it and moaning and if you really cannot improve it, learn to eek some positivity out of your life somewhere, believe me, the journey is a lot nicer for all involved.

why is the first line AIBU to think if you are childless i mean hes not childless and you should only have children if you can afford them

£100 k goes nowhere in the South.

Is that a fact?
Funny how many millions of people live there on an average (or less) wage then, isnt it.

Yanbu, I've encountered similar attitudes though on a smaller scale. People who can afford to overpay their mortgage every month, regular savings, go out for lunch nearly everyday, afford lots or hobbies and activities for their kids ....and then complain that they're so poor that they "only" have a couple of hundred left each month for personal use after all that.

Every time I read about how hard it is to live in the South on £100k a year, I always wonder how families manage on, say, £50k. Let alone on minimum wage. They must be destitute.

(For clarity, I neither live in the South, nor have a family income anything like £100k or even £50k).

I live in the south with husband and two kids on a wage of around £30k. We are able to live on this because we don't have expectations or desires for a fancy lifestyle outside of our budget. So yes £100k goes a long way in the south if you want it to, its a huge income. But yes, if you want to go on multiple foreign holidays a year and live in a huge detached house on £100k then no, with property prices around here you probably can't afford every thing you WANT.

Yanbu this should be a pinned thread and/or in classics

We are in the south too... 4 of us on our £35k. There's nothing left over at the end of the month, but we manage, and are going on holiday (camping) in a couple of weeks.

Of course it's relative. It depends on who you know and spend your time with. If you earn £100k but everyone you spend time with earns £250k a year, you're likely to think of yourself as relatively hard up. If you earn £40k a year but everyone you spend time with earns £15k a year, you'll probably think of yourself as wealthy. And if you earn £15k a year and spend time with people who live in slums in India with no access to health are, education or basic sanitation, you will probably come back to the uk and appreciate your relative wealth.

I try and remember to be grateful. We have done rich friends who have big houses, go to Disney for fortnight, big cars etc etc.

By comparison we earn lots less and feel bad we can't do for our kids what they have. BUT then I realise we are comfortable. We have a three bed house. It's nothing special but we love the area and it's plenty big enough. It's lovely inside and it's definitely 'home'. We have cars and enough for food shopping without worry. We can save a little. The kids can do some activities. We can have a weekend and a week in the UK each year. I have a happy home life and that's so important.

And I realise I'm actually really bloody lucky and very grateful for what I have. The flash house etc wouldn't make us happier.

I remember being poor as kids (my parents fed us rather than themselves on a regular basis) and felt the pressure, even at 6/7. Its made me risk averse and financially cautious as an adult.

£100k goes nowhere in the South

Would you care to break it down for us then? Maybe we can see where you’re struggling and help you make a few changes to your budget.

It’s relative. You can earn £100k in London, live modestly (no holidays, shop at Lidl and Aldi) and still be on overdraft each month after tax, mortgage, CC, utilities etc.

Honestly this is repeated again and again on Mumsnet and it’s such a myth! DH and I live in London on a combined salary of around £60k and manage just fine. We take one holiday a year, shop at Sainsbury’s and Waitrose and eat out a couple of times a month. We’re not rich by any stretch of the imagination but we don’t have any debts (besides the mortgage) and have a good life. If we were on £100k we would have a very nice life indeed. Saying you’d need to live “modestly” in London on a £100k salary is just not true IMO.

That’s in very poor taste. It’s ond thing if they are living hand to mouth (some people who are objectively rich do for example if they have debts or a lot of children) but it’s very odd to moan about having disposable income.

Always makes me laugh when friends say they are skint and they got savings and a good couple of hundred in their bank accounts.
When I say I'm skint I mean I have 20p in my purse to last me x amount of days

@butterfly do you not have children? We have a similar amount coming in and could never afford London. We often end up not able to pay bills and have to find extra money somewhere.

Laiste if people on higher incomes had any type of gratitude then they would never say that 100k was not enough.

Ditto those on anything over the average wage. You can have gratitude on even the lowest incomes as its not about how much you have but about your attitude and your appreciation of what you do have.

I could happily live on 25k a year and be grateful for it. I live on less and as I was lucky that I bought property years ago, I'm able to live on far less than is norm. Yes it's a struggle and I can't do as much or buy lots. I bought too much before at points in my life so living with less is actually calmer.

I'm grateful for what I do have and yes I'd like to change my car then I remind myself that's it's nicer than a lot of people have and that I'm lucky to afford food and bills. Even if I have to be savvy and budget to the penny to fit everything I want to do into my budget, I still have choices and I'm grateful for that.

It's about attitude. Someone earning other 60 or 70K that moans about how poor they are, is lacking gratitude, lacking critical thinking and they don't know how to budget or simply have too high an expectation of what they should be able to afford.

Comparison is the thief of joy. Some people on higher incomes have forgotten this or never knew it in the first place and so are not content.

Learning contentment should be a life skill.

I think people on 100k who say it is not enough (in any part of the country) are simply not smart enough to budget and spend better.

Yes it won't go as far in London as it would in some other places but it is still a good amount.

I’m disabled and can’t work. As a result I have to live on benefits. However, now I’ve Finally managed to pay my credit card off we can afford food and I feel Rich! It’s all relative. My mother on the other hand, tells people how poor she is constantly. They own their house outright and have more coming in with pensions than both their old wages! It’s very irritating! X

Oh behave to the posters that think 100k isn't much in the south.

We live in the south - dh commutes into London. We earn around half that (used to be less (mid 30k) but dh has had pay rises in the last few years and I am working more now the children are older. We have a comfortable life. Two children. We can't do everything we want to but we don't feel entitled to because we try and live within our means and don't keep up with the Jones'.

We live in London on a family income of just over half of £100,000 and I don't consider myself poor.

YANBU, a CF friend (who I see as little as possible) was like this. It was a control issue for her, she could afford everything she wanted and nothing that she didn’t want to pay for. It was a great excuse for her to get out of stuff she didn’t want to pay for so either doesn’t have to do, or blags for free.

Example 1: group of us want to go to nice but not super expensive restaurant for dinner... she couldn’t afford that because she was saving for a Caribbean holiday and just didn’t earn as much of us (who weren’t having Caribbean holidays).

Example 2. Friend got married abroad, one other friend lives there and CF friend makes sure that she and her OH bag the spare room for a week because they “can’t afford” a hotel room together. Overlooking single friend who earns half as much and had doesn’t have anyone to share the cost of the hotel with. Meanwhile whilst they’re there they are planning pretty extravagant restaurants, day trips and flight upgrades. A couple of weeks later she sends everyone a message asking for advice on which super expensive sound system to buy (think 3k+).

I have found, that friends who are on very high wages, seem to say they are skint much much more often than people who, for example, are on diasability benefits. Yeah, people could have a massive mortgage or whatever, but being able to go abroad multiple times per year is not exactly skint.

A few of my mates had a HUGE falling out a few months back as one was saying she hadn't had any money since going onto UC and was really struggling. A friend of ours who earns a seriously high amount started going on about how the past few years have been so hard for her as she has not managed to get to Florida with her kids, which is a regular thing for them. Making out she was on the breadline because she had to not go on one holiday thats they usually do, meanwhile going on another 3...