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.

Location. My experience of working in IT in London was that the streets were paved with gold. I hit £100k when I was around 34 or 35 years old. Having started working in IT when I was around 20 and with no degree (I dropped out of uni).

It was hard work but, tbh, the bit that was the hardest was being able to work in a high paced corporate environment - with all the politics and unspoken rules and gubbings.

At the time I thought anyone could do it but I've since watched friends and family try and struggle - not with the work but with the work environment. I realised I was lucky enough to enter that world young when I was maleable and I just grew to cope in it.

Until I hit a point (like some pp) where I no longer wanted that level of impact on my life. 4 hours commuting. Flying every other week. 4-5 hours a night sleep. No real downtime, even when I switched off every electronic device I still would be thinking through work challenges and trying to figure out what to do with them. So I quit, moved back to my childhood country and dropped down a few levels again.

I'm 36 and on £71k + 15% bonus working for multinational entertainment company in a marketing role. I have a degree but no specific qualifications needed. I've worked extremely hard working my way up in marketing, starting on £18k back in 2008 when I got made redundant after 3 months in my first grad role and then spent 6 months being unemployed and struggling to find another entry level role in the middle of a recession. I've been through a number of consultation processes (threat of redundancy) during my career but it's only made me more resilient and determined to do well. I do wonder how much I could be on had i not had all the setbacks along the way but I'm hoping to make it to £100k+ by the time I'm
40. I've just had my first baby so I'm also interested to see how being a mother might end up going against me as I try to progress.

I'm 30 and am on 100k

Creative Brand Director in Cheshire/Manchester

As others have said, these things can be very area specific. We live in a village where we know few people earning less than £100k. I would say that of my son’s class at the primary school, 80% of the households have at least one parents in that sort of salary area. Most work in insurance and finance. Others are corporate lawyers or senior managers for large corporations. Most moved to London as soon as they left university, secured graduate training positions and worked incredibly hard for years, and in many cases, they still do. To some extent, many have had some luck alongside this. The right recruiter has spotted their CV, or in DHs case, he was seen speaking at an industry conference and literally offered double what he was earning at the time to join a rival company.

I think to get these rolls, you have to bright, have a lot of confidence, be very resilient, have a real drive and be happy to forego many things for your career. DH, for example, barely saw DS1 in the first year of his life - he was out the house wary, home late, and regularly travelling abroad. Thankfully, now the children are of age they can remember, he is around far more, but that is largely because he has made the decision not to push any higher.

I've worked in and around law.

There are lawyers out there who make enormous amounts. There are other lawyers out there who don't make very much at all. It's often not the best ones that earn the most, in my experience.

I'd say there are some wealthy, high earning posters on MN, but you are more likely to meet them on the Education board or Style and Beauty than AIBU.

I never go on the education board and I'm more likely to post on the Purse Forum than on S&B so your assumptions are way out.

I am in the legal profession.
Most lawyers don’t earn anything close to £100k . It’s usually those who work in corporate finance , pensions, tax law etc who command high salaries . In fact I know solicitors who earn less than 40k and work in the South East.
However, you would be surprised by the occupations of those who earn over £100k.
My husband is an accountant and his clients include; builders, personal trainers, small business owners, electricians , locum doctors, care home agency owners. All of these people earn over £100k .

I earn significantly over £100K and got to where I am through a combination of bloody hard work and sheer good luck. I come from a very poor part of the UK, managed to get decent A Levels and so ended up at university. I pretty much fell into the career I'm in and seem to be decent at it. DH works for a start-up and earns around £30K. We live in the south-east and have 2 kids. Our combined income means that we certainly don't have to worry about money, feel quite secure (which, coming from poverty, makes me count my blessings) but we're not likely to go on Caribbean holidays any time soon either!

Also people on high salaries can & do burn out as it's not always sustainable. So it may be a cause of earning that for a short period of time.

I agree that there does seem to be a disproportionate amount of high earners on MN, and of course anyone can claim anything they like on an anonymous forum.

That said, I'm a professional based in London and I'd say from my friendship group at least one in most of the couples I know would have been on six figures by the time they hit 40 - lawyers, bankers, consultant doctors, senior civil servants, etc. In our 20s it was all quite different though, with many of us doing low paid internships or still studying and scraping by on loans. So time of life makes a big difference.

There are more posts about financial struggles. I would say it's not as high a percentage as it feels. It's just that a very high salary draws attention.

I bet if every member disclosed their income, you'd be able to see that the percentage of high earners isn't as high as you feel it is.

I'm a barrister in London on a high income. I grew up in a rural area and most of the people I went to school with still live there. I don't know the details, but I don't believe they can access anything like the level of income being discussed on this thread (although of course the cost of living is lower - but not that much lower). Location matters a great deal.

I'm not suggesting we all do, in case it read that way! 😁

In my experience I think location (mainly), industry, and the company you work for has an effect.

I didn’t choose an especially lucrative industry (dig marketing) mainly because I fell into it for first internship, found it easy and thought it’d be easier to carry on in same direction. I had no interest whatsoever tbh, but when I was applying for my first internships no other decent role was offered.

I have a degree and around 2 years experience in my industry, but live in a northern city.
I’m on roughly 25k (not in entry level role) which is about the same or even less than starting salaries for entry level roles in my industry based in London/SE.
I would love to relocate down south one day.

Also, I’ve noticed that there is a huge disparity in pay for similar roles to mine depending on company e.g., some prestigious firms which ask for a similar level of experience will pay a LOT more.
However, better paying jobs at such firms are much more competitive as you’d expect, so I’m sure the candidates will have a much better background than I do.

Out of curiosity I just googled the average salary in my industry, and according to Reed it’s only £29k. Interesting how experienced managers in my industry who work e.g., up north for medium sized company may only get £30k which is the same as some graduate schemes.

I do worry a lot about money and have tried switching industry before but have never been successful in applying for other roles

I'll admit, it does annoy me when you have posts like "DH and I both earn upwards of 100k but we're in London so it's not that much really". The average FULL TIME salary in London seems to between 37k to 42k depending on where you look. If you're in the city of London it will be more but the median salary is nowhere near 100k.
And it's this disingenuousness of "But everyone we know is on at least 80k! Surely the average has to be somewhere around there?"
So, these people are either incredibly sheltered or just a bit dense that they cannot conceive that (even on the apparently gold paved streets of London) their nurses, their cleaners, their bin men, their builder, their children's teachers might be on a different pay scale.

Husband is in medicine, earns over 100k and in his 40s. Works his saggy backside off for it. I work my arse of for considerably less

I don't have any trouble believing the make-up of mumsnet has a higher than average amount of high earners.

Mumsnet posters have access to the internet, smartphones/lap tops, generally very high standards of SPAG etc.

Probably not at the moment but when I was an administrator at a solicitor's firm our solicitors seemed to spend half their lives on trains to visit clients/meetings/court...plenty of time for mumsnetting! (The worked on the train sometimes but the signal isn't always good enough for work).

@BitOfFun

I think location must be the main factor. I’m up north, and I can’t say I know anyone personally on that kind of money.

I’m joking about my choices, btw- I don’t see success in money as a main motivation for me.

There was a thread on here recently and they found a report which showed that the SE( not including London) had salaries 20% higher than the NE after adjustments for higher housing costs

I take some posts about income with a pinch of salt tbh. People don't necessarily tell the truth on anonymous forums

I take them all like that.

There are jobs out there like that obviously, and I know someone who does have a job like that. They don't have the time to spend their days on mumsnet, they are always working or doing stuff outside of work. They don't even have kids either. Yet all these people on here earning that much money, have kids and have hours of free time to chat nonsense on mumsnet? Yeah sure. Not working very hard then.

There are public sector roles that do pay well. A few of my teacher friends are on 60k & 80k, one is a HOY & one DH. Whenever I've posted this people have said I was lying.

They are many high earners in London, in fact I don't know many families with 2/3+ DCs where at least one partner doesn't earn a big 6 figure salary. Life is so expensive especially with kids at private school.
A private secondary day school these days will cost ~£20k p.a. (some do cost more) and a boarding school costs ~£40k+, not including all these extras. So with 2 kids in private day schools it means a salary of at least £100k pre tax is required to pay just for school fees, uniforms, trips etc And this will go up with 3 kids, boarding school etc

I don't think high earners on this thread are making this up, I am pretty sure they do genuinely exist otherwise who would be paying for all these expensive schools? Some will say the GPs help but it isn't that common around us. In our culture (we are European), GPs don't help with school fees!

Many families in our circle earn £1-2m, most of them work in banking.

It depends how you define "high earner" but I assume you mean six figures. It's achievable - but you have to work at your career consistently and never give up, then over a number of years it's achievable. I'm an IT Consultant (f), but have invested a lot in my first degree, and MBA and a 2nd postgrad MSc. I actually feel my poor upbringing helped me because it made me experience how shit life is without money and I vowed to never be like that myself.

Why are you saying leader of county council like that’s the pinnacle of earning potential? I would’ve thought working for county council wouldn’t be that well paid.

High earning jobs: accountants, solicitors, barristers, finance professions (CFA qualified usually and in some parts earn insane money! I’ve a friend who wanted to leave his current company. He earns 200k and was put on gardening leave for a year so he earned 200k that year to not work!), Some areas of IT, some areas of marketing, pharmacists who own their own pharmacy can make over 100k. That’s just who I know of I’m sure others can point to more highly paid professions. I work as a public servant and earn 70k at a medium level - my bosses are all on 100k plus too so also high level jobs in public/civil service.

Self Aggrandisement.

Those who earn over 100k talk about it. Those who don't, don't talk about it.

VettiyaIruken I think you're right but whenever there's a thread like this, I think it's important to show that women can earn very high salaries even outside of London, and they can do this with a flexible career that fits around family life.

So many posts start 'My DH earns...' and I just want to groan because men are always perceived to be the high earners.