To be in this job and feel poor?

[fedippp]

I trained for seven years, reasonably large student loan etc, to end up age 35 on 58k, and barely anything left at the end of the month!!! Mortgage is 1300 for a 2 bed semi, (up from 800 last year). Student loans are still hundreds a month. I have a car on finance as I couldn’t save house deposit and car deposit, need car for work. I eat beans on toast 3 nights a week. I feel like an idiot. I missed out on so much in my twenties to get into a decent job that I thought paid well and it seems to have been a waste of time! Does anyone else feel this way? I feel so disheartened.

You are far from poor. You are the product of 14 years of Tory government and only in last four years getting a taste of how the lowest earners live their entire working lives.

Yes, I noticed that including 170 for a special kind of dog diet. Interesting Guardian article. I suppose they picked people with 20k on credit cards etc who are in a cycle of not quite earning enough. Even the first one annoyed me as he left an 80k job for a 40k one in London so no surprise to anyone that he found it harder to mate ends meet.

Also, your insinuation that your years of training qualify as having somehow worked harder than others in simple jobs is condescending. Everyone that works, works hard as a rule. Your qualifications do not mean you have worked harder than the postman, retail worker, or carer earning minimum wage.

Yes, people have loans. Student finance is about £200, so the £400 was by choice. Many families have less than £1300 to live on after housing costs. OP is buying their own home, an appreciating asset, and has chosen a car on finance and the associated costs. We all make our choices, and if OP had chosen differently she might well be in a far worse financial position, and unlikely to be in a better one.

She has worked hard at a particular career path that pays better than any of those jobs pay. Do you think everyone should be paid the same?

But surely the reason people spend years training or at university is to earn more?

do you think a retail worker and a barrister should earn the same wage?

But surely the reason people spend years training or at university is to earn more?

Have you been to university? People go for many reasons - because they want a high paying job (probably a minority of them), because their friends are going, because their ‘keeping up with the Jones’s’ parents practically force them to go, because they can think of anything else to do, because they love learning, and so on.

Yes. The expectation from most of not all was that a university education would result in a higher paid career. That is what he statistics show.

Everyone in the UK should have the opportunity to earn a decent living wage, that would afford them a reasonable quality of life. The UK is a wealthy country and the levels of inequality are disgusting.

During an economic downturn everyone suffers. Years of wage stagnation and recent inflation mean that all of us see our money doesn't go as far. The middle class are not exempt from that.

So many people in the UK have been struggling to pay the bills for so long, but a lot of people only seem to care when it starts to affect them too. Which is surely why we've had 15 years of a Tory government, most people didn't seem to mind when they were only shitting on people less fortunate than themselves.

I don't think every full time role should have the same salary, some jobs have much more pressure, responsibility and impact than others. But I don't think those on lower wages should be the only ones needing to cut back in the current economic climate.

The job market is just that - a market. The more people capable of doing a particular job, the lower paid it is.

the argument that lower earners should be paid fairly is not the OP. It’s that someone on a fairly high salary (top 9% in the country as per someone else’s post!) expected to have a more comfortable life on that salary and is disillusioned.

@upthehills1 that is why salaries are rising for childcare and care home workers then to fill all those vacancies?
If you take just a market approach, people will only pay so much for a service. So nurseries are closing or standards are reducing because nurseries can not attract enough decent staff on the current pay rates. Parents will not pay more to enable salaries to rise to a level they are attractive.
Markets do not operate in the simplistic way you state.

I know we're going round and round in circles on this and I don't want to irritate you as I do agree with you/see your point in a way. House prices are outrageous these days, rent is also crippling and is it awful that so many people have to spend such a large portion of their salary on rent/mortgage.

However, to me the OP's situation is comfortable, in that she owns her own house, has more disposable income after mortgage and loan repayments etc than many other people have (based on my understanding of the info provided anyway, I could be wrong).

I was trying to find a post earlier in this thread that illustrated the point I'm trying to make, but I don't have time to keep looking back through. Someone said they have a combined salary with their partner of over £200k and even they are still feeling the pinch. I think most people would agree that £200k between two people is pretty comfortable. But people tend to live within their means, they find ways to spend more money and get used to a more luxurious baseline. Then when rampant inflation happens and their money doesn't go as far, they find they have to cut back. Nobody likes having to find ways to cut back.

The OP titled this thread AIBU to feel poor in this job, and after 21 pages, I still think she's minimising what being poor really means. I understand why she feels disappointed and I would have had more sympathy if she had worded the post differently. But I still think it's ridiculous to say she feels poor.

I see what you mean but there is a difference between people being capable of doing a job and being willing to do a job for the pay offered. Highly skilled jobs and those requiring specialist training and experience quite rightly pay more

So you're buying a property and you run a car. You're in a professional job too.

Sounds pretty good tbh.

@Bjorkdidit

"It seems to a lot of people that their definition of 'poor' is 'not being able to continue spending on whatever the hell I like whenever I want to'."

NAILED IT

as the recent strikes show, a junior doctor actually earns LESS than a cashier at aldi. Can't blame people for thinking what the point is.

But that is temporary. The whole point of my argument😊. Salaried GPs can earn over £100k. Consultants about £140k. That’s the point!

yes they always seem to pick the least sympathetic people who are clearly just shit with money which doesn't really support the point they are trying to make. All of those four had large amounts of credit card debt which in most cases had been building up for years, i.e. well before the COL.

I have a lot of sympathy for people on low wages who end up going into the red paying their essential bills each month, and then it only taking one big thing (car/boiler breakdown etc) to screw them over and struggle to get back to zero. But pretty much all those people were on very good wages but still living beyond their means spending money on crap. You don't get to £30,000 of debt by defaulting once on your electric bill on an £73k salary. It is, however, remarkably easy to build up if you see spending £540 a month on your dog, another £750 on your car, and £90 on a phone every single month, as essentials, ffs!

Also YES to your final sentence. It's always rolled out on here that children should be taught better financial skills in schools, and yes there are a lot of things that could be useful. But unless you're a complete idiot you shouldn't need to be 'taught' the most basic rule of finances and easiest way to avoid debt is that if you can't afford something (that isn't an absolute essential (like a new boiler in winter, car if you need to get to work) then don't buy it!

but that can take another 7 years/much longer particularly for women if they go on maternity leave - which given by the time they graduate most doctors are already nearing their mid twenties is going to happen.

'Temporary' indicates a short period of time, not a decade or more!

Expecting people to spend more than a decade working every hour under the sun, on a comparatively low wage, with huge deductions (its not just student loan but registration fees, exam costs, union dues, etc.) for a promise of a fairly (albeit compared to other countries still meagre) salary IF they don't burn out in the meantime isn't a great sell, and no wonder people think fuck this and exit to the private sector/other countries as soon as they can.

I think you are having an argument with me that I am not having with you!

my point was very simply that people do go to university or study for long periods of time or have long periods of training on the expectation of high wages. That all.

I wasn’t defending doctors starting salaries - merely defending OP who thinks after a long period of studying she should have a better standard of living.

carry on arguing - but not with me please 😊

Can be similar with law too - 4 or 5 years of full time study (no salary) , then some people even do after that 3 years as a minimum wage paralegal and only then get a training contract which can outside London pay £30k a year. Some of these professions are not as high paid as people think.

No, you’re not being unreasonable. You worked hard, money doesn’t go as far as it used to. I did a budget for you and it’s not looking terrible, however if you had kids and had to include nursery fees… well you couldn’t really do it and that’s a bit rubbish.

I’ve realised I’ve missed council tax off the budget, so that makes it even tighter. Obviously there might be outgoings that cost more, eg. Car finance, fuel, phone bill, energy bill. I’ve done it based off my own outgoings, however I have a child and another on the way so our food/home shop is a bit more. Perhaps you pay a bit more into your pension so your take home salary might be a bit less. Car insurance has gone up, although if you’re savvy and shop around you can mitigate the extra costs. If you have pets, you will have food bills and pet insurance to add on.

If you want more you could look at increasing your revenue streams, eg. Side hustle, investing, etc, or ask for a pay rise?

I would wager OP isn't coming back

Hopefully because she's sat down, looked at all of her outgoings in detail, and identified that she is just severely mismanaging her money.

And probably feels a bit silly at saying "aren't I poor"

She apparently has a professional qualification loan or similar for a brutal £600 a month and the mortgage it turns out is now £1,500 and not £1,300.