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?

To be fair it is relative to some extent I live in Bolton. on a minimum wage and tax credits etc ,w
ds is disabled so we also get his DLA and carers allowance however we live in social housing out rent although comparable to private rent around here is much,much less than people living in London and the South East ,we are skint btw but my skint means living from pay day to payday,we eat well enough ,have holidays albeit caravan type holidays somebody else's skint might mean not being able to fed themselves and their kids

But turquoise that's just it, it's not relative. It is absolute.@£100k is more than £28k.

You actually earn less than your cousin, but live within your means.

They actually are richer than you, or have the means to be richer but are skint because they spent it.

How rich people who have spent it feel might be "relative", but they are still rich.

I was really struck by @EdWinchester's post about having high standards they don't question.

Sure it could be a lot worse. But your example of buying a house in zone one is so far off that it demonstrates you don’t really have any idea of what a 100k salary lifestyle looks like in London

I was being flippant to make a point.

I lived in London with a combined income of £150k between me and DH (both high earners) and two dcs.

It was bloody plenty!

@NaomifromMilkshake don't be so ridiculous. I know very few people in the South on anywhere near 100k

OP, I have a relative who sounds a lot like your DF. They live in a 4 bed detached house in a lovely area, have a nice car in the driveway, go on numerous holidays each year...and yet constantly complain that they are hard up. I had to laugh when they said they couldn’t go for Sunday lunch with us as the pub was too expensive. They’d been home a week from a holiday that couldn’t have left them much change from £5k!

I generally try to ignore them talking about money but it does sometimes upset me to think that they consider themselves poor when they live in such luxury compared to many people.

Oh wow, it took 6 posts for someone to tell us how much more expensive life in London is compared to life for the rest of us plebs.

OP YANBU. This person sounds like a complete selfish dick.

Our family income is now less than half what it was this time last year. Due to ill health I've not been able to work and resigned from my role because I couldn't cope with the constant e mails from HR requiring an "update".
We now don't have enough income to cover our basic outgoings. We do have a large 5 bedroom House in a nice village but we have to budget very very carefully. Even though we are in deficit every month I still wouldn't regard us as "poor". Poor isn't just about money/cash-it's about standard of accommodation and not being able to meet basic human needs

As an old friend once said("everyone thinks they are poor!).I think differently to a lot of people. I think being rich can also mean having lots of friends, a large family ,gorgeous dog etc rather than a bank balance ending in rows and rows of noughts!.An old neighbour once told me I was rich, when my children were younger .I didnt know what she meant then .I also think the more you have the more you want !.Of course no one wants to be stressing over the Gas bill but if you are warm with plenty to eat that should be enough.

@dottiedodah you sound like my kind of person

MIL constantly says they have no money. Drives me mad, they live in a detached four bedroom house in a nice part of London and she hasn't worked for years. DH and I scrape by every month and just about have enough and I would never ever say we have no money, we have a nice life and enough to eat.

having at one time been at the financial stage where i had £15 a week (working) after bills to feed myself, now my circumstances have changed i feel rich going round aldi being able to put anything i want in the trolley so its relative

I never thought I'd say this. I used to be a single mum, worked and topped up by benefits. I liked my life and I felt like I had 'extras' sometimes, certainly wasn't flush with cash though.

Now I'm married and my husband earns a lot of money. But we live in a place that is expensive to be close to work as he works long hours, and our medical bills are high. I don't like the house as much as my old place, even though it's bigger and technically nicer. I think I worry about money more now. I feel like life got more complicated and less enjoyable with more money.

ladybirdsarelovely33 has hit the nail on the head with this: Quite simply, people like this are just not grateful. I bet they don't have an 'attitude of gratitude'

Some people go through life only looking at what they don't have, instead of what they do have. They make their own hell, actually.

And this doesn't just apply to people who have money. A lot of us are in good health with healthy families and we still feel hard done by.

Sounds a bit like my brother. He turned round and said to us, when dh was on long term sick, that he wasn’t much better off than us as he had lost thousands in investments abroad!
Then he went on to tell us about their £8000 holiday and the great deal they had got when buying a new car. They had got a big discount because they had bought 2, one for his dw and the other for his dd, however they hadn’t bought top of the range because they couldn’t afford it.
I just said what a shame!

OP, your dd sounds a bit like one of my relatives who's was complaining that when they retired, they would be in poverty and just didn't know how they would manage to survive. Relative was single, owned own home outright, no children, new car every two years and several long holidays abroad each year. At that time, their income would have totalled around £30 000 (private pension, state pension and income from investments). I pointed out to them that it that time, Dh and I had a combined income of around £25000 , a mortgage, two children no discounted council tax plus of course, travel expenses to and from work. And we live in the London area whereas they live in a much cheaper area of the country. Their response was to tell me I couldn't possibly understand how hard it was to find the money to pay the cleaner, feed the numerous animals and fund a holiday in just one income. No understanding at all on their part that we were a family of four, managing on far less than their one person income.

FWIW, whilst housing is ridiculously expensive in this area, other costs are not too different to everywhere else, so housing cost aside, £100k anywhere, including London, is definitely not poor. It's only poor if you choose to make spending choices that make you poor.

Friend got cross with me when I moaned that we were going to struggle to buy a 4 bedr house (we had 3 children). We stopped being friends after that.

Friend had struggled to buy 2 bedr house. Had to borrow deposit from her parents to do it.

So you all can hate me, too, but you know what? Friend was 40yrs old, had previously been a property owner but after she sold her previous house she blew the money on travelling (would often say how much fun she had, no regrets). I never once criticised her for being foolish with money.

So that's how I read this thread. Wondering what are the envious not saying.

Jeeeeeeez, I live in London (zone 6, admittedly), and earn £15K a year and am a single parent with three kids under 5 and even I don't think I'm in poverty!! We can manage one caravan site/camping holiday a year, and there is always food in the cupboard and the bills are paid.

100K is RICH. End of. It's not relative in the slightest 😂 If you can take home 5.5K a month, you have money that some people couldn't even dream of. Yes, you may have chosen higher outgoings, but those are choices that those of us on minimum wages don't have! You're all "oh it's such a struggle to afford private school uniform", whereas I currently have to cut the bows and frills of my daughters vests to pass them down to my son rather than buy new vests for him!

Trouble is, there's always someone richer for them to compare themselves with!

Agree OP. Someone in my workplace was moaning about being poor. He is on £150k. The average wage where I live is £25k. Most people in the office are on less (I process the wages so know).

I'm not saying that £100k salary is not well-off, but I wouldn't say it's rich. It's relative though but for example my work car park has Range Rovers, Jaguars, Porsches, even occasional Maserati or Bentley. I'd imagine someone with Bentley is probably rich.

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.

Only if you aren't sensible financially - you'd be living beyond your means if credit card debt and a mortgage were pushing you into debt because you'd have a house that was too expensive for your income and a spending habit on credit cards that was too much.

I think the word 'rich' is also annoyingly often used for anyone who earns more than average. Whilst 100k isn't poor, I wouldn't say it's rich either.

£100k goes nowhere in the South

It goes a long way if you live relatively modestly, don't have new cars evry 5 minutes, go on expensive holidays etc.

DH and I have a household income of less than £40k, recently dropped from over £50k when I reduced my hours massively. We live in a very desriable part of Sussex but have no mortgage. We go away a lot at weekends, but in our motorhome, not in 4-star hotels. We've just decided not to replace one of our cars, because DP is now working locally and we don't need it, so we've only got the 18-year old Audi which is cheap as chips to run. We have paid off our mortgage and are debt free, and have savings . We eat out a lot and are never short of money for clothes or household items we need.

£100k won't go far if you're one of those people that has to move house every few years, to somewhere bigger/posher/nicer area, have the latest car/phone/kitchen, expensive resort holidays etc, or spends £100+ a month on beauty treatments.

I think the word 'rich' is also annoyingly often used for anyone who earns more than average. Whilst 100k isn't poor, I wouldn't say it's rich either.

An income of £100k puts you in the wealthiest 1% of people in the UK. Tell me again how a person whose income is higher than 99% of other people isn’t rich?