High Earners on MN?

[BitOfFun]

How? The actual leader of my county council doesn't earn more than £100K- where and what are all these super-maxed out occupations? I genuinely don't understand how mumsnetters (often relatively young) access these magic jobs I've never heard of.

YABU- they are there for the taking, you just made poor choices

YANBU- people here are very creative and there's an outside chance they may be lying exaggerating.

I didn't realise it was a common thing to discuss salary. My friends and I have never discussed our earnings, so we'd all be making an assumption. Judging by this thread and some of the comments, I'm glad we don't!

Husband and I have a total income of around 400k a year through work, and live in London. We also have other investments. We work hard but I don't think we work harder than the average person. I do think it is partly down to luck and just choosing sectors that pay well. I know for a fact I could never be a teacher/nurse, something important like that, but my work pays much much better (undeservedly so).

I had no exams, dyslexic, started on a YTS scheme. Worked in retail. Promoted many times to operations manager £100k

I’m a high earner but you probably wouldn’t guess from the way I live, because we don’t spend much of it on ourselves.

I do think women are generally too shy about money.

I am not in London, and am in my late 40s.

I think when you can easily see your worth - in monetary terms it becomes easier to argue for a higher salary. Our specialised staff are sold to clients on a high day rate - the staff know their rate - it’s all very transparent, they know how much money we make from them. If they worked in industry they would be well paid but nowhere as well paid - this kind of situation will occur most obviously with the professional services like lawyers, accountants, auditors, tax advisors, financial advisors, it consultants, management consultants but I’m sure many more.
A similar situation is created in high value specialist sales - monetary value of input/output is very transparent. In jobs where it is hard to work out your financial worth to the company - you are more likely to be on lower pay. When Dh worked for one of the big four - his day rate was often £4000 a day, the most junior person on the team will be on a day rate of £800 - with little experience but very bright, quick to learn etc. They won’t receive anywhere near that in salary but you can see how they can argue they deserve more, they know their monetary worth- especially when they move jobs.

@Lobelia123

I used to think like this and thought it was through unfairness, lack of opportunity etc that I was in a midlevel position. As I got older and matured I realised that actually every job I ever had, no matter how humble, was an opportunity that I wasted because I dismissed it as 'just' entry level, or 'just' something to pay the bills at the end of the month. I was more invested in my life outside of work than I was in my life in work. That was natural for where I was at that stage in my life. Now Im in a space where I fully commit to work during work hours (instead of planning my weekends, horse shows, chatting with mates etc) and the results have been incredible. People notice hard work, enthusiasm and ambition and all of these things are freely available to us all. People who copped to this before I did have a head start in the fabulous well paid job dept, but its never too late to get going and make up for lost time!!! Adjust your attitude and stop doing the bare minimum and youll get it back in spades.

This wasn't the case for me. I went freelance and did the same amount of work but earned three times more! I did lots of unpaid overtime...the result being that I was seen as someone who would always get the job done by my firm, whilst they reaped the financial rewards. I set up on my own and reaped them myself. Having said that, I'm due to be finishing my maternity leave soon and my industry is getting decimated, so I think my earnings will be far from £100K or even £1K! I'm a project manager.

For clarity, when I say I worked hard:

1. I mean that, relative to most others in my profession, I worked very long and intense hours and produced a lot of output. I do not mean to suggest that my work was 'hard' compared to that of say a nurse or someone who works with children with SEN.

1. I don't mean to suggest that working long hours is the sole reason I now earn well. There are many, many other factors, chief among them having parents who expected me to build wealth, being able to go to university and developing a very niche legal speciality. Working long hours did, however, mean I got lots of experience in a short time. It also made me more valuable than some of my peers within my profession as my firm was selling my time and every extra billable hour I worked was cream for them, because their fixed costs including my salary did not vary.

My choices when I became a single parent to an 8 month old were:

1. give up work and go on benefits and stay in rented 1 bedroom flat for several years until school age, then try to get part time admin work at a school or something similar and rely on tax credit top ups. Imagine salary would be about £10k

2. put baby in full time childcare 5 days per week, pretty much break even financially (for years) but continue to build career.

I chose 2 and now I have a mortgage and comfortable salary and no more money worries (for now) and my son has just started school.

It was really really hard but my son has turned out lovely and doesn't seem to have missed out.

Forgot to add when I said 'break even', my take home was around £1500 and childcare was also £1500 per month so I received government help for childcare and also some housing benefit despite working full time. Now I'm a higher rate tax payer and don't even qualify for child benefit anymore.

How do I go from nursery assistant to someone earning high wages?

What are the steps?

@Jobseeker19

How do I go from nursery assistant to someone earning high wages?

What are the steps?

We had a decorator come to us who used to be a nursery assistant - by running her own business as a painter - she earned £50k a year quite a bit more than her previous job - It’s one way!

How do I go from nursery assistant to someone earning high wages

Take courses that enable you to get promotion , supervisor, management , director of a nursery, regional director of a chain of nurseries, ask to be paid in shared, become a partner.

Move into high end nanny-ing, then start a nanny agency,

All the time writing a blog (fictional / annonimised) with childcare tips that are practical and fun and get paid by advertisers.

I’d take it with a pinch of salt - of course there are tonnes of high earners out there and on here too, but they’re a small-ish percentage of the general population..

And I wouldn’t take any notice of what the head of the council earns - public sector salaries don’t mirror the equivalent positions in private sector.

There’s something that’s been studied a lot called the ‘online disinhibition effect’ which means people often play different roles and become disinhibited under the cloak of anonymity we have in these forums..

So with that in mind I’d say yes some are of course being honest and open, more open than in real life perhaps - but some are also likely lying/exaggerating or playing out a fantasy.

People do lie. Some things just don’t ring true. It can be a whiff of trying too hard. Someone was being very “considerably richer than yow” on a thread and an AS seemed to contradict this.
Then the was the legendary time someone tried to claim a plush hotel room was actually their bedroom... until someone did a reverse image search.

How do I go from nursery assistant to someone earning high wages

Strangley enough I know someone who started off working in a nursery but is now a live in nanny for very high net worth families. She took numerous courses, BTEC in childcare learning and development, first aid courses and basic foreign language training etc. She earns a tidy sum travelling with families all over the Europe. Not for everyone as the travel aspect is very demanding but she has virtually zero overheads so has saved a fair whack and has rented her flat out.

Raining, I was going to say the same. Also if you want to fit into a rich family as a live in nanny have a look at what other women in those jobs wear and how they speak and try to copy that. I know women who have set up nanny agencies by the way. I am not sure if they started as nursery assistants but obviously you don't need any exams or qualifications for that, whereas parents often want NNEB type qualifications for some nanny jobs.

However we don't know JS19's situation eg probably has children although one of our nannies we let take one and then 2 babies to work with her of her own. A lot of officer worker parents forced to work from home and with school children sent home for more colds and coughs than usual need child care often on a casual banked basis so an agency able to provide that kind of thing like the existing emergency nanny agenices might be a good business idea at this point. You would need a web site and to do loads of marketing. Eg once I wrote to about 70 publications of all kinds and sent them an article about my area and 50 published it, some paying me (free marketing). I just kept on and on and on doing that kind of thing.

However none of us are saying every person in the UK can move to earning £100k no matter what their situation. Sometimes it is worth a try however. £100k will be £5553 take home pay a month, no child benefit and if you pay student loan/graduate tax will be less so the £5553 will be covering your rent and full time childcare cost. I am not saying that does not leave much but just bear in mind £100k is not what you keep and about £33k goes in tax and NI.

@Jobseeker19

How do I go from nursery assistant to someone earning high wages?

What are the steps?

Improve your qualifications- a degree if you don’t have one, perhaps. Fund it with evening work. Or part-time work whilst studying.

Defer children until on a higher salary.
Take on additional responsibility at work to show abilities above current role.

Look at other professional roles for degree focus- paediatric nursing, midwifery, teaching. Once qualified work up the career ladder. Early year teacher in a primary school, deputy head, head. Get extra qualifications along the way - management or specialist, career boosting ones. End up a Clinical nurse specialist or Director of Nursing, a MAT CEO, or owner of a chain of nursery schools. Won’t be millions each year, unless you invest wisely and double job much of the way to the top, but will be a whole lot more comfortable than a nursery assistant.

@Quandaries

Not being goady, but I think I’d struggle to name many people in my high school year who are on under £80k, and that was in a fairly standard rural non-fee paying school.

While there are some who went on to be SAHMs, retail workers etc, the majority went on to university and now have 15+ years of experience behind them.

Off the top of my head, there’s two dentists, lots of specialist accountants/senior business people, three solicitors, and at least seven pharmacists- there was a big push for pharmacy around the time we were applying for uni.

There’s one woman who I’m not in contact with but we’re connected on LinkedIn and I’d guess she’s on £500k+.

Outside of this, I work in a business discipline and the lowest paid person on my team is on £75k.

I genuinely think we need to start talking about salaries more, especially to girls and young women. There’s plenty of high paying jobs out there, but you have to know about them, and you have to know how to access them in terms of uni choices etc.

A lot of people kid themselves that everyone is on NMW. You see it on MN a lot- “my neighbour works in an office and is on three holidays a year” and people reply “she’s obviously in debt up to her ears” instead of trying to determine what her actual job is.

Agree with a lot of this save for I question if your school being fairly standard adds much insofar as there is a huge difference between state schools tbh and the people who attend them. You mention being in a rural area and my (to be fair annecdotal) experience of living in a town with a rural area not far away is that those who attended the rural schools have ended up more as you describe but were from more affluent families hence affording to live in the more rural areas. I imagine many people who live in such areas are wealthier than those who live in a standard, rather than particularly affluent, big own. Few people in any of the schools I knew of in my town could be described as high earners. Pretty standard.

I may be wrong just it occurred to me there really is a huge gap in types of state schools and, even if all are equal in terms of provision, the people who attend them depending on area and affluence.

Accountancy has been mentioned as a profession were you can gain a high salary. To the accountants on this thread; did you start out on a very low salary or a fairly good one? I'm retraining while working full time and keep hearing from others studying to be accountants to expect a low salary in the first few years

Not the case where I went to school in rural Wales, @Newmumatlast. The townies and the country kids all went to school together as there wasn’t a choice of secondary schools. There was one very mediocre secondary school with the next closest being the Welsh language secondary 20 miles away. I think my version of rural and yours are somewhat different.

@Asterion

They access these "magic jobs" by training and getting experience in industries that pay those wages.

Lawyers, management consultants, IT consultants, marketing, etc etc. Also entrepreneurs.

Even high-up public servants and charity bosses get those sorts of salary.

Indeed. I used to work for Marie Curie Cancer Care and the chief exec was on around £180k whilst saying nurses should work for free and the privilege of caring for the dying. The board always excused it by saying he would make four times that “In the city”.

It’s disingenuous and dishonest to peddle the myth that anyone can command a six figure salary. Statistically it’s impossible for the entire population to be able to achieve a salary level in the top 2%. The message we should be giving our kids is that job satisfaction is the most important thing and no amount of money is adequate compensation for decades of being miserable at work.

Realistically only a tiny proportion of women are in the top salary bracket and to pretend otherwise is just setting them up for disappointment and a sense of failure.

www.theguardian.com/society/2016/sep/27/women-poorly-represented-in-top-1-per-cent-uk-earners-study-finds

Many years ago when I was a young woman coming from a (very) disadvantaged background a boyfriend’s dad pointed out to me that the U.K. is swimming in money. And that it’s not that hard to get - IF you know how, AND you’re willing to do the necessary.

Information and acting accordingly is everything.

[quote VinylDetective]It’s disingenuous and dishonest to peddle the myth that anyone can command a six figure salary. Statistically it’s impossible for the entire population to be able to achieve a salary level in the top 2%. The message we should be giving our kids is that job satisfaction is the most important thing and no amount of money is adequate compensation for decades of being miserable at work.

Realistically only a tiny proportion of women are in the top salary bracket and to pretend otherwise is just setting them up for disappointment and a sense of failure.

www.theguardian.com/society/2016/sep/27/women-poorly-represented-in-top-1-per-cent-uk-earners-study-finds[/quote]
it's not though. Of course if EVERYONE was fighting for them, only the very top would achieve that and the rest would just fail.

However, many many people are not that bothered. They might like the idea, but they are not prepared to put the work, fit in the environment and put up with the pressure. It's not even purely about your work load, it's about intelligent working too - and realising very quickly that WHO you work for matters more than your actual job title too...

You have to make a choice at some point.

Professors in education can earn over 100k. They do bring in a lot of money in to where they work through their name and research.

Rapunzel on accountancy my sons' friend graduated this summer and has a full time accountancy job with one of the top 3 firms. I am afraid I don't know his salary but he was telling me the other week that even though he is on-line he is doing 12 hour days as he has the work, plus studying plus exams. Even so I am sure financially it will be worth while. (He has no children yet).