High earners - how do you spend your salary?

[Citygirly]

DH and I earn just under £140k combined.

We do maximum pension payments (his is 9% as NHS) and we also give about 10% a month to charity.

Other than that, we plan to start overpaying the mortgage. We invest £1k a month (so £500 each) and save £1k for holidays. We of course do general/specific savings but then have a good chunk left over for disposable income.

AIBU to ask other high earning households how they tend to allocate their money? Just want to see if we could be using it better or this is about right for comparables.

What a depressing thread.

Home help, holidays and activities/ lessons

I love this

I wouldn’t call that particularly high earning

Christ alive.😂😂

Mainly savings and pensions. Our mortgage is fully offset (DH is a contractor, so no job security).

Holidays, eating out.

We’re not in London.

Neither do we know how the salary is split it might be 50k and 90k. I'm not sure anyone (outside of MN) could pretend 90k was an average salary!!
As well as the fact that plenty of nurses, teachers, police, retail and hospitality workers will also live in London and not earn that type of money...

No-one investing in property??

£140k combined is irrelevant.
It's take home thats more important due to the tax treatment on incomes.
Him £130k, you £10k vs £70k each would be very different take home.
Disregarding pension, its nearly £750 per month difference
£8.1k vs £7.3k which even at those numbers, it still a significant amount.

@justasking111 we considered it but it was too high touch vs return. Couldn’t make the business case stack up now the tax implications are much higher

Neither do we know how the salary is split it might be 50k and 90k. I'

She states DP pays 9% NHS pension. The upper threshold for this pension bracket in the NHS (they are fixed according to salary) is currently 47,845. So his proportion of the 140k income won't be higher than this. That leaves at least £92k as OP's earnings. Minimum.

Do you live in Wales?

Holidays, lots of holidays

Beyond £47,845 in the NHS you jump to 12.5% pension contribution automatically.

Or people just lie- particularly about earnings

@TomatoorChips

Well yes. Or that.

Good grief. What a truly unpleasant thread. At least there aren't any comments about 'giving back' and charitable donations. Then I might puke.

What a boastful thread and rather insensitive given the current financial situation a lot of people are facing. Why don’t you just go and pay a financial advisor to tell you what to do with your bloated salaries instead of bragging on mumsnet?

We give more like 15% to charity. We also take on more wider family costs, e.g., my siblings are younger, so if we want to go on holiday together I tend to pay the big-ticket accommodation cost, while my sibs take care of food and incidentals (which works well for us from a time and planning perspective, too, because we have 3 young DCs and they have none!).

We’ve shaved 7 years off the mortgage ahead of schedule, and contribute the max allowable pension contribution each year where we live, while also saving (a bit) for the DCs’ future university costs.

We have our nanny more hours than we technically need her, because we have no family nearby to help in emergency childcare situations (kid off sick from school or daycare… which seems to be 40% of the time… it’s relentless!)

We probably eat out a bit more than average.

When my best friend of many years lost her job early in the pandemic alongside a major health scare, I chipped in 50% of her rent for a few months to take a little bit of the pressure off her until she got back on her feet.

Beyond that, though, we really try to avoid too much lifestyle inflation or excess consumerism. A large portion of my kids’ toys and clothes are second hand. We eat a fair number of vegetarian meals. We buy groceries at our local equivalent of Asad. We live in a lower-middle-class neighbourhood and the DCs go to the local state school (which we adore!). We’ll only go on a “big” holiday (on a plane) every couple of years; otherwise we rent AirBnBs a 2-3 hour drive into the countryside.

Good grief. You do realise that is give or take well over 4x the average persons salary.

I think some on here live in la la land sometimes.

And todays insensitive goady post award goes to.........

Apart from opera, not much. Everything's paid for and the dc are grown up. Oh wait, half of ds's forthcoming wedding reception.

Still both working full time because we like work. There is nothing we need or want particularly so the money just gets reinvested.

Same as most people I expect
Mortgage
Bills
Childcare
Pension
Essential work expenses
Taxes/NI etc
Holidays/clothes/home improvements

Pension
save into S&S ISA so can retire early
overpay mortgage
holidays

IVF!

Not very post on MN has to be dedicated to austerity.

OP is perfectly entitled to ask this question.