To be irritated by this £100k a year whiner

[Viviennemary]

On Question Time tonight they were talking about subsidised childcare and the new benefits for younger children. Then a woman came on with a boo hoo sad face and said she wouldn't be getting it. So I think Fiona Bruce said because your income is £100k a year plus Then she said that it wasnt fair as there was only one wage. And their household only had one earner.

Well tough. Folk on just over £12k a year are paying tax and this cheeky woman thinks her child care should be subsidised. It made me mad.

The system is designed so that the 90% turn on the next 8% and leave the richest 2% alone. Yes 100k is a lot of money but it should be people earning £1m plus who get our ire, not just people who are smart and do valuable jobs like surgeon lawyer dentist or PR guru

And some people are high earners, fall on hard times and then become high earners again. Just because someone earns £12k once doesn't mean they always have or will.

It's always foolish to make judgements. People on low incomes can work just as hard or have just as stressful jobs as people on high incomes. In many cases more so.

Bitter and ignorant is a heady mix.

I once received a 20k bonus and due to already having maxed out on pension contributions I actually ended up worse off than had I not received it.

I lost 62% of it in tax and NI, lost funded nursery hours and also lost the option for tax free childcare savings.

However you look at it the system is broken if such a scenario is possible.

I guess the question really should be:

Why should someone earning £100-125k pay an effective tax rate of 60% (and over 100% with nursery aged kids) on their last £1 taxed when Rishi Sunak (and others) paid an effective rate of 45% on his last £ of salary and 28% on his last £1 taxed of his > £2m income?

The point is it's discriminatory and particularly against women who are the majority of single heads families

like child benefit. I am a single parent and began loosing mine at 50,000 but my sister and her husband kept theirs at a combined income of 98,000

But assuming the person on 100k is also in a two parent family, they only have one commute, one work wardrobe, one person having lunch out of the house, no need for full time or wraparound childcare, one lot of work stress etc etc

And mostly, the proportion of the country who are providing the services that everyone is moaning about.

Nah, it pushes the higher earner (usually the man, as you state) to go part time and take on some (more) responsibility for the children and house, rather than opting out because of Big Job Busyness.

Which is a good thing.

Whereas here childcare would be approx £800 plus £700 for a decent house leaving nearly £3500 per month on that salary.

I agree OP, it's ridiculous.

Then no one would get the services. On 60K you pay maybe £15K tax on £100k it's more like £35K.

But most GPs are not salaried. And those that are work fewer hours than partners and usually have a better work life balance, which is the appeal of being salaried. Work fewer hours for less money but also don’t have the issue of hitting the cliff edge for tax

It’s all smoke and mirrors. The low earning have a go at the higher earning, while the truly wealthy are laughing all the way to the bank.

Sunak paid just over £500,000 tax on income of over £2m last year. An effective tax rate of 23%. While people earning £100,000 - £130,000 pay an effective tax rate of 60%.

But you’re ignoring the costs they have.

As has been repeatedly mentioned, two in childcare can cost you £4k a month in London - so £48k a year.

So once your childcare costs are paid, you have more like £20k a year left. This is equivalent to earning a £25k salary in terms do

This means being excluded from tax-free childcare and free hours suddenly becomes very significant.

Regarding ‘don’t have children you can’t afford’, two thoughts:

• if the top 5% can’t afford two children, the economy is v broken
• by this do you suggest we should removed these benefits for everyone, as no one should be having children they can afford?

The issue isn’t that £100k is a low salary - it’s that the cost of childcare is so extraordinarily high.

on a salary of 12k pa for tax year 23/24 you would pay no tax or NI. In fact, that salary doesn’t use up your whole nil rate band allowance. You could earn 12570 before paying tax or NI

I don’t understand why if there is a non working parent, they would need much childcare? If a couple feel they can afford to have a SAH parent, then what’s the beef? Obviously a working single parent needs childcare, just as two working parents do, although they may have more flexibility.

However, I think any subsidies should be based on household income just as benefits are.

It is unfair. I'm on 30 and DH on 70k and we don't get child benefit. Seeing as it was me claiming and going into my bank account I thought this was massively unfair. We weren't married then and I was only on 21k

I think the point is being missed here, the issue isn't that high earners don't get childcare paid for or don't get child benefit, it is the unfairness that it is done on single wages rather than household.
If you have 2x people in a house both earning 45K each so a total of 90K they get full child benefit
If you have one earning 60K and one earning 30K still a total of 90K but they lose 100% of the child benefit - that's the issue.
It's not whether people earning 100K are classed as rich or how much spare income they have, a lot of that will depend on personal circumstances.
The fact is it is highly unfair done as it is and needs to be looked at.
Also with the child benefit threshold that hasn't been reviewed since 2012, so 60K isn't worth now what it was back then.

I agree with other posters that it should be based on household income, I don't think any house on £100k should be getting subsidised.

However this is mumsnet where apparently people struggle on that amount so.....

It was £90 each per day when my twins were in nursery and that was over ten years ago so entirely feasible.

That totally misses the point.

It is not so much about affordability, it is about what behaviour the system encourages.

If it becomes a disincentive to work more that is bad news for everyone including lower paid people as overall tax receipts fall.

As a former PR “guru” I’d seriously question that it’s a valuable job.

What is your point? Surely it’s the same ‘choice’ for everyone. So why should some get subsidised childcare, child benefit etc. and not others?

I don’t disagree that the cost of childcare is too high… really it’s should be accessible to everyone. but what do they think people on £35k do? They still have to pay fees up until their kids are 3 (the term after they turn 3)

my oldest is a September baby so we only had 2 terms of 30 hours free, which is fine I was grateful for it. We still had 18 months of paying full fees before that? And a mortgage etc etc

this issue is universal and you can’t deny that people who just about manage & are repeatedly told to cut their cloth accordingly don’t really want to listen to people who earn double that and want to complain that nursery fees are expensive.

the “do t have children you can’t afford” thing I actually do t agree with because like many have said, circumstances do change so it’s irrelevant really. It just frustrated me that people spout it all the time to lower income families but give higher earners carry Blanche to complain about the cost of childcare.

FWIW I think a percentage income tax across the board would be more appropriate - bonuses over a certain amount taxed separately. That way everyone is contributing in line with earnings.

Whenever I read these types of threads, I always come to the same conclusion. Most people still think a salary of £60k and up is a decent salary.

Money doesn’t go as far as it did a few years ago. I think we all need to agree that and stop having crab bucket mentality. £100k sounds good, but when you break down the cost of everything, especially childcare, it doesn’t go that far anymore.

I say this as someone who is on £45k a bear and I still don’t believe £100k is a high salary.