My professional salary only just covers my rent. How can this be?

[Rentmakesmepoor]

I am an occupational therapist in the NHS. I am a single parent. After tax, student loan and pension I take home roughly £1900.
I live in the South East of England. My rent is £1750 a month for a 3 bed, SMALL semi detached house with a courtyard garden

How is it that we have got to the point in this country that my salary literally just pays for my rent and nothing else??

I am permanently skint. I am not looking for solutions as I do nd claim everything I can (which is not alot).

But how can this be?

there are a lot of us. I live in zone 3 london and i used to work in the City. I don't technically work in the City anymore but work in fintech so salaries are roughly equivalent. Earn around £45k, DH also works for a bank and earns £75k. We are in early 30s. Most people in our earnings bracket live outside London if they aren't immigrants or third generation Londoners (like DH) so they commute from Chelsmford, Surrey, Herts etc.

'According to the figures published by the ONS for 2022, female wages in City of London average £67,196, and male wages averaged £117,516. Statistically, the average female earns £50,320 less than the average male, though this does not account for differences in hours worked.'

oh god its higher than i thought. well that s a combined income of £190k. can definitely afford average house of £500k and most of the SE. If your combined income is £200k and you had a flat in London before selling up, you can definitely afford a £1 million house in Beaconsfield.

Because ots are paid by the government the same in the whole of the uk and op could rent that property for about £600 in my part of the country. It would be incredibly expensive to pay everyone in the public sector as if they were a single parent to four children and lived in a large private rented family home in the most expensive part of the country.

How vile so many people have been, yet again on MN when people genuinely come here for support and advice .
What do you get out of being so vile !
To @CherryMaDeara just to inform you that many professionals on a low income actually work 12-13 hour shifts so living fairly close to work is the only way these shift patterns are sustainable! Using ,working in Westminster was a pretty disingenuous example…are you a Tory MP ???
So many nasty posters . Cannot remember all their user names but hopefully they have enough self awareness to know who they are !

Because life gets in the way, UC is a top up.
it all depends on your costs some people costs are a lot higher ie rent and amount of children.
You do know that some families earning 60k a year, renting and paying childcare are entitled to UC.

That’s absolutely untrue. I live in an extremely expensive part of the SE and am nearly 60. Forty years ago I had friends with professional PS jobs who bought homes here on one salary. And they could certainly afford to rent somewhere.

My young adult DC live off soup and sandwiches paying London rents on shared flats in zones 3 and 4 because they have so little money left over. One is a KCL graduate and the other has a Masters from Oxford.

Life is very hard for younger people now.

There are things that op can do to make her personal situstion better. It sucks for her to be forced to either suffer or move, change jobs, schools, leave family etc.
But the bigger problem is that there is an entire section of the country where people with degrees and professional jobs can't afford the basics.

There can't be many single parents of 4dc who don't need/get some social security.

There was never a time 5 people could live comfortably off one wage.

But salary would also be low there, no?

She hasn't come for support and advice. She's posted a thread, is a new poster (no posting history), has said she's not looking for advice, not mentioned her actual income, talked about being 'destroyed' by posters for wanting to move to a cheaper area away from her family and has now flounced after leaving everyone else to argue.

Not for the NHS and other public sector roles where the pay bands are decided nationally.

3 bed house is about £1300 here and all salaries are low (NHS and local council being the better employers here!).

Most children have to share bedrooms. Can yours share OP? :)

I hate posts like this

'Where is the father?' 'Why don't you get maintenance?'

It's so fucking victim blaming.

News flash, some men are arseholes.
Another news flash, some men hide it really well until its too late.

So sorry OP, it’s completely shit.

Your rent shouldn’t cost more than my mortgage on probably a similar 3 bed semi. I also live in the south east so assume comparable costs.

My son with SEN has the most wonderful OT so I think you and all health professionals should be paid proper liveable wages.

I don’t know what the answer is but feel free to rant here

The NHS needs to bring back staff quarters like many hospitals had decades ago. It makes sense to keep such key workers close to where they have to work especially given the unsociable hours. In other countries like Sweden you don't see medical staff having to commute for an hour, they live near the hospital.

Oh sorry just seen you have 4 children! It's a shit situation and only relocation will make it better.

It's been like this in Cornwall for years. Back in 2012 my take home pay didn't cover rent or nursery fees. And yet salaries are the same as they were in 2012 and rent is double.

It's awful.

So many nasty comments, I agree with OP that a professional job should pay enough to house a family and pay bills. Rents are extortionate in a lot areas now .

That's it, in a nutshell.

When I was in my early 20s I started wondering how it was possible for someone to be in work full time (in any job) and not be able to afford the basics - housing, food, heating.

This was almost 30 years ago. It's being getting steadily worse since then.

I often wondered about the sustainability of constantly driving up profits (for the shareholders) and brining down costs. Spoiler - it's not possible.

@Purplewarrior Please stop trying to eradicate my experience and say it's untrue.

In the early 1980s I had a friend who was promoted to a deputy head of a primary school.
She was just (and I mean just) able to buy a small 2-bed Victorian terraced house for £19K. Her annual salary was just over £7K.

I had another friend who'd been teaching for 4 years (same area, Outer London) who was not able to get a mortgage because 2.5 times their salary left them £5K short.

Obviously there are professional salaries that have a range of incomes. And if two people are buying together, that makes a huge difference.

Nurses were even in a worse position to teachers because then it wasn't a graduate profession and their incomes were lower.

This is what @IslandsInTheSunshine needs to see.

that would be the 'etc. but admittedly was focused on the 'professional salary' focus of the thread. But it's true: if even highly educated professionals can't afford to live in the Southeast, who can?

Could it be because you live in the south east of England?The point of this thread is what, exactly?

there's a need for OT's in the SE, presumably?

What the fuck is wrong with people? Are we not allowed to come to Mumsnet for a bit of a moan and solidarity now?

We definitely need more info from OP

No, you don't. She explicitly said she wasn't here for advice.

Seriously some of you need to wind your bloody necks in and stop taking it as some sort of personal slight that this person who has posted is unhappy about something. Especially when it's blatantly clear that they are not posting hoping for someone to come and magic their problems away.

That’s London, not the SE.

I'm not in the Uk so have no idea what your salary would be pretax etc but what you are coming out with as a qualified professional is shockingly low to me. A quick estimate of what an entry level occupational therapist would earn where I live is £2700 a month after tax. I have no idea why people are having a go at you, they also complain when they or their loved ones are stuck on waiting lists because qualified medical professionals leave and move somewhere they will actually be paid enough to live a decent life.