To be fed up with all the threads about high earners feeling poor

[trekking1]

It's always the same condescending "I've worked so hard and only have a 3 bedroom house in a great location and an expensive car", as if 1. that's not a lot 2. people who make 5 times less do not work as hard!

And the suprised pikachu face that having a degree did not magically get them a 500k job. That is not how capitalism works folks

You can disagree with it as much as you like, but those are the facts on the ground for anyone taking multiple years off. Which explains why people generally don’t, even if they would be financially much better off leaving work and going on UC for those years. Which you apparently didn’t believe could possibly be the case a couple of pages back.

Hopefully now you understand why people stay in work anyway despite being much worse off in the short term.

Correct. It's not a "high earner" wage

I've always understood why that is the case for surgeons, but not all careers are surgeon careers. You've taken one specific career where this is true and pretending that makes it true for all careers. It doesn't.

That poster gave 4 alternative examples. I'm not sure why you're pretending to struggling with this concept so much.

£50,000 is not a small pension pot when the average is £37,000 on retirement.

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/money-mentor/pensions-retirement/private-pension/pension-pot-amount-average-uk-how-much

It’s tiny - read the article, it would give you a pension of £1500 a year. Peanuts.

yes, op is not particularly pleasant. In my particular profession, part of the issue is losing current knowledge but also there’s a stigma which tends to stop you getting senior roles with any kind of career gap. I don’t think that’s necessarily justified, but either way, if I’d taken years out, I would have been lucky to get another job in my profession. That’s just reality

it will generally be true for any high earning competitive professional career. It’s obviously not something you have experience of. It’s fine not to understand but stop the sneering

No, it won't be true for any, you are just assuming it will be.

Not pretending to struggle with the concept, I am disagreeing with the claim that any high professional career will be dead after taking a few years off. Obviously there are exceptions, but it is not the rule.

How would you know? Are you speaking from personal experience or just assuming?

And how many career breaks have you taken in different high-paying careers so that you claim there is no chance of getting back into them?

That's a no then.

That's a no then as well.

Because it doesn’t fit with her idea that professionals earning £50k spend their leisure time swimming in pools of gold coins like Scrooge McDuck.

I gave examples in one of my previous posts. I have several friends who found it impossible to return to their positions in Tech, Fianance and Law after taking years out to have children. All have two children and previously held senior, high paying roles.

They tried to resume their careers and found that their qualifications and skills were not up to par. But studying to upskill often didn’t help because they’d been out of the workforce for a while and employees generally prefer to recruit someone who is currently working.

Of course it is not impossible for them to re-enter the workforce at all. There are likely jobs in supermarkets, warehouses, zero hour jobs etc that they could do. But that isn’t the point I’m making. It is the fact they cannot pick up where they left off within the profession they are trained in. Bottom line is, resuming work after a break to raise children incurs significant financial and professional penalties.

I’m not sure why this particular debate began. Was it because you said leaving work for a few years, living on Universal Credit and then returning to work is a viable option? It really isn’t for most people.

I think this will be true for any profession where you need to be "licensed" in a way.
I took a break for 18 months from my career, and even that was quite a headache to return from. My CPD, membership fees and professional liability insurance, to maintain the registration, were around 3K all in all, and there was no employer subsidy for these - and I am pretty sure that would be a significant sum for someone living purely on UC. On return, I was grilled to an extent where I needed to provide detailed bank statements to evidence how I was supporting myself during this time.

Fully agree with all this. There's power in numbers. It does none of us any good if people refuse to identify structural problems because they happen not to sympathise with the people impacted by them.

And yes, people do actually need to take some responsibility for not clicking on things they know are going to bother them. There is an issue that comes up on here sometimes that I find very hard, so I make sure not to read threads whose titles make it 100% obvious that they're going to be discussing it. That's what you do when you're a grown up.

"Oh, and not liking the topic of a thread is a ‘you’ problem. That you can’t stop yourself from clicking on, reading about and engaging with topics that annoy you doesn’t in fact oblige anyone to stop talking about said topics"

Exactly. Some people seem to assume a weird ownership or over-identification with AIBU. They seem to have internalised an image that everyone here is like them, or should be. When in fact, this is the internet and, as such, will obviously reflect people from all walks of life.

Engaging in threads is not compulsory OP. This is not your home or family or friends. AIBU is not solely about you. It's millions of people.

This thread is hard to follow because everyone is talking at cross purposes.

This thread reflects what’s wrong with MN. The OP is very aggressive and doesn’t want to hear anyone’s view that goes against her own despite not having any life experience on the other side of it. Debate is great but tearing people down is not. Chill out. Don’t click. Be happy.

£50,000 is a very small pension pot. Assuming a person worked for 25 years, and not factoring in compound interest, it would mean the combined employee/employer contribution was only £2,000 per year, or £167 per month.

Speaking to friends and family, I always recommend people put in at least 5% of their salary, which a lot of employers match. For someone on £30,000 per year, that would be £3,000 annually into their pension pot, which when compounded would make a huge difference to their retirement.

In law you can generally come back after a career break but many firms knock years off your pqe. So say you leave to have a baby when you have been qualified for 6 years. You might go back after a break and be treated as 3 years qualified (if you’re lucky).

I’ve never known anyone make partner after a significant break. Not to say it hasn’t happened but I can’t think of an example. It may be unusual for a woman who has taken a career break to want to make partner of course.

If you’re senior in law and in an area where businesses development is important you will lose much of your network and clients during a career break which makes it essentially impossible to go back at the same level.

I have known solicitors with a specialist or sought after skill set come back successfully after a break but they were paid as if they were barely qualified for years despite their work not reflecting that.

Ah troll's favourite thing to do on mumsnet - call women aggressive for expressing their opinions

As a high earner I am definitely suspicious of these posts and have come to the conclusion that they are either from trolls or fairly low socially intelligent ppl. By the latter, I mean high earners who have clearly made money by not needing to have much of a brain but are well skilled at what they do and can charge well for it or book smart people whose degrees have gotten them through good universities and into well paid jobs but again lack any wider intelligence (to be frank I think most politicians and civil servants fall under this category).

Surely people who start troll threads are by definition lacking in intellect or reason.
I don't think all these posters are necessarily trolling, just feeling the pinch a bit, and they're not used to it. So they feel that things are getting tough and want to vent.