"We're on good money"

[FunionsRFun]

When a poster says they are on good money or a good salary, what figure comes into your head? For me it's £70k for an individual, and £100k for a household.
For what it's worth I am not on good money!

I'm not telling people mine and DH's joint salary, but my DC are on two and a half times our salary. They have done really well for themselves. They have higher outgoings though. And we are mortgage free. But they have cut their cloth, and they have small mortgages and don't squander money, and have decent savings. They are doing well and are sensible with money. They will be in a position to pay off a big chunk off their mortgage in 3 or 4 years. AND if they decide to have a baby, they have plenty put by to weather the maternity leave period.

I must admit it boils my piss when someone is on £100K+ and they claim they still struggle financially. 🙄 and bleat 'oh but our outgoings are soooo high.....' This usually comes from people who have a house with 2 or 3 bedrooms more than they need, (in a swanky area,) and a brand new car, loads of overpriced luxuries, and name brand everything. Unless you live in London, don't try and convince ME that you are 'poor' when you have a household income of £100,000 a year or more. Just stop it!

(Actually even living in London, you will be doing OK if you're on £100,000 a year!)

That post by @SweetBirdsong exemplifies perfectly the type of cluelessness I was referring to!

I earn in the early 30's, and to me this is 'good money'. I find my job worthwhile and I feel I'm making a difference. I'm a single parent, yet I can pay all my bills, and I have a good work-life balance. I spend a lot of time with my daughter and though we don't do extravagant activities, and have only been abroad twice, we have a nice life, I think. I'm actually really grateful!

East Midlands; 63k single income with 1 teenage daughter.

I take it to mean that they are comfortable enough that they don’t have to worry about every purchase. Since housing costs and expenses from number of children can vary so much, I think of it more as not needing to think about grabbing an impulse purchase when buying groceries and knowing that you still won’t have to worry about money at the end of the month.

I think it's £100K for a household.

It does always make me laugh though that everyone is minted apparently, but then when people post photos of their Christmas trees/shellac nails/ dogs etc, the house always looks like my very very working class grandmothers

Although I actually also think it depends where you live.... recently saw an NHS Dr on the news who also does private work, and he's on a staggering £600k, and admits he couldn't live a comfortable life in a nice area of London without that kind of salary.

I live in Hampshire and our household is over £100k and we are comfortable (to me, that means not worrying about the heating and lights being on, not worrying when filling up trolley in Sainsbury’s, kids can do all the clubs they like), but we are certainly not rich compared to others in our city, there's no way in a million years we could afford private school for instance.

However, the city im from, with our income, I'd have considered us 'rich' as a kid.
FYI - I was a very poor kid.

Your kind of post makes me wish there was a '♥️' button.
Lovely x

Beautiful post

Hugs 🥰😍🥰

I'm in an area where a matchbox is almost 2million and rentals average 4-6k. So good money would be in income of at least 150-200 each.

Good post.

OP, as you must be aware, ‘good money’ is a completely meaningless, subjective concept.

DP and I earn 90-100k jointly, and I consider this good money. We live in the north too, so cheaper housing etc.

⬆️⬆️wrong thread, sorry. No idea how to delete other than reporting

@Jennyjojo5 I started working in UK when I was 35, before that, my earning was negligible (born and grew up in a developing country). So I had a lot to catch up in terms of pension, buying a house, etc.

Sorry - I was more commenting on the different perspectives here compared to how I've always heard it used, rather than disagreeing!
And I do see your point on 'luck/privilege' v hard work, as I see it a lot when office workers are discussed vs trade workers. There's a lot of division about people in 'cushty' office jobs vs being out in all weather's, that disregards the fact that office jobs cover a massive range of specialisms!

I will say that personally (as someone who makes 'good' money in one of those aforementioned office jobs) that while I have worked hard, and do not come from a moneyed background, I do personally attribute some of my (very minor compared to some of the jobs/salaries) success to privilege. I am white, found school relatively easy, am not disabled in any way, local state school was decent, and while there was some turbulence had an overall stable home life. A decent start. Not everyone is so lucky! So while I also worked hard, I also have privilege. I would (and do) disagree with anyone telling me that it was entirely down to hard work, as much as I would disagree with someone telling me it was entirely down to privilege.

In my group of friends I'm the only one who still qualifies for child benefit. All the others are in 2 income families, where (at least) one person earns more than £60k.

I worked this out as they were moaning about having to repay child benefit (and some didn't know how much child benefit was because they haven't had it for so long!)

We also have the smallest house. All of these friends will inherit well. DH and I will inherit nothing.

However I still feel like DH and I are on "good enough" money. (Though our mortgage fix ends later this year and DC goes to Uni).

We've eaten away at our debt, over paid the mortgage as much as we can, save into our pensions and have some disposable income to spend on little luxuries, ourselves and our DC.

I count myself lucky every single day. I'm very grateful.

For us good enough is £80,000 gross pa.

this! When i was in shropshire and earnt 30k i felt like it was good money.

Now i live in london and earn 70k and after my childcare costs/mortgage (£1850 - 3 bed small terrace) /travel - don't have much left over. I have a smaller house, longer commute and work far more hours. However i would say it a good salary.

No. I don't gain any financial advantage by gifting £3k except it won't be included for inheritance tax if I live 7 years. My DC won't have to pay tax on it either because it's in the exemp category as only £3k. I've already paid tax on it as it's included as part of my income.

Oh no- I grasp it. I was just interested in what assumptions people make when they read that phrase. Like you said it gives very little information, especially when asking for financial help

My instinct is good money is over 60k for an individual, I think that’s comfortable but not luxurious. No idea about wealth.

This ⬆️ is the problem: people are not interpreting "good money" to mean "a decent salary". They are making inferences that a "good salary" means somebody is financially comfortable. All you can tell from a salary is the net earnings per month. It tells you nothing about whether someone is financially comfortable, as the many examples in the thread demonstrate: you can be very comfortable with far lower earnings or really struggling with far higher earnings because that other factors that impact your overall financial position cannot be inferred just from income i.e. cost of living where you are, how much childcare you require, housing costs (very different if you bought many years ago so have low/ no mortgage or can live in a cheap area/ have social housing), whether anybody in the household is disabled, whether you are a single parent so paying all costs alone and taxed more on your income, etc.

Nobody would purchase a business because it has high revenues without knowing its costs or whether it makes a profit. Likewise looking at income alone for a person and not considering costs tells you nothing about whether that person is comfortable financially and it's astonishing really that so many posters have made this false inference from earnings alone to believing they can ascertain someone's lifestyle or financial position from that alone.

I earn just over £30k which is very good money in the job I’m in. Most are on minimum wage.

My reply probably reflects how I feel living in the UK right now. I earn £70k and my other half about £120k. Seems a ridiculous amount of money based on where we live (Yorkshire). Don’t get me wrong, we’re very comfortable but do I feel well off? Not really.

Household income of over £200k. We are on good money compared with the majority of parents at our kids school and our wider family experience.
I am the worst off of my friends whose family income varies from £300k to £2 million + a year. It's all relative.
They live down South. We moved up North.