What do you think is a ‘good’ income these days for…

[Greenlp]

Two adults and one child?

I am constantly being told that our income is very good (from online sources, media etc, small talk with friends who don’t know our earnings but make general comments on income/standard of living). I feel like our income is not good enough for a good standard of living. We constantly have to cut back.

Definitely.

One often sees the 38k median cited in threads on here where OPs are struggling on a high income, but the fact is that there's huge generational variation in access to housing. Where and when you bought, if you did, matters just as much as your income. Someone who bought a house 40 years ago and has never earned much is potentially much better off than a higher earner privately renting the house next door.

I don't think that income is very good if you are paying school fees. I wouldn't be paying for private at that level. But in general terms it's fine.

We bring home about £5k. One child. Kent, 40 min from East London. Save 1k a month

Tbh I wouldn't describe take home of £5K for two people to be very good. That's £2.5 each...which is a Civil Service HEO salary. That's not much anywhere in the South/East/West I wouldn't have thought...

We have 2 children and a joint income of 40k, our rent is basically my whole wage so there’s not a lot of room to make savings but we are trying, we never go on holiday though and do still have to budget.
I think 60k plus a year would be a comfortable wage to live on. I doubt we’ll ever earn that high which means we won’t ever get onto the property ladder as house prices keep rising.

Well done to your son
But I totally agree. Private school does not create a clever child. State school does not create less clever children. The child and parenting is the most important factor than what school.

I hate this rating system because there are schools by virtue of the area they are in have a disproportionate number of students that have limited interest in learning which brings the score down when the reality is if a child is clever and wants to learn, they will succeed.

The minimum wage at 37.5 hours is over 22k

i agree with other PPs that it’s soo subjective!

You could have 2 families who both bring home 5k a month for example. Family A pay £700 a month for their mortgage and have free childcare from grandparents. Family B pay £1400 a month for their mortgage and also have a monthly childcare bill of £1600. So just from those two factors you can already see a big difference in disposable income. There are a hundred other variables.

It’s why it’s a bit pointless when posters come on mumsnet and ask ‘is this enough money to live on?’ with no context- it’s all about the outgoings!

The world doesn't evolve around London. 2 people on minimum wage wouldn't be near 50k.

Okay so livinng where I do (nondescript midlands/northish town) I think that £60k combined salary would be ‘enough to be comfortable’ and £80 would be ‘very good’.

This is probably way lower than most answers, knowing mumsnet, but where I live would get you a lovely house and a nice summer holiday each year.

I think you not knowing where the money goes might be part of the problem! You need to sit down and look at your spending and make a proper budget. You will feel rich after a couple of months switching from mindless to mindful spending :-)

Full time minimum wage is about £22k, so 2 people would be about £44k. I think I'd just about put that in the category of "not being miles off £50k".

@SophiaSW1. Honestly, just send your children to the local comp. I went to a terrible school and honestly it was the making of me. If your child/ren are well rounded, resilient and enjoy learning, they will most likely be just fine. Their social intelligence will be amazing.
Think how you could enrich their lives with an extra 20.5k every year!! Honestly, there’s so much more to life and to educating your children than school.

NMW for 40 hours a week is nearly £24k pa, so twice this is £47/48k pa, which does qualify as 'nearly £50k'.

I went for 37 hours a week which I think is the minimum to count as full time.

I was privately educated. It was a stretch. Parents were teachers (dad uni lecturer, mum college lecturer). Dad's income kept us. Mum's paid my school fees.

I couldn't go on most of the school trips, my friends had several foreign holidays a year, we had a week in a caravan... I never felt like I properly belonged.
If the fees are a stretch now, it's going to get significantly harder for you, and your child.

It depends on lots of things but like others have said it probably isn’t enough for private school.

We’re on £7.5k (after putting 13% each into pension) and couldn’t afford private school without sacrificing pensions and savings which doesn’t seem sensible.

We’re in our 40s and have a big mortgage (£1.6k a month) on a modest semi which we’ll be paying well into our 60s, we bought later together due to divorce etc.

Then there’s nursery fees, high commuting costs, LISAs, house maintenance on an old home, putting a little aside for future uni costs, it all adds up.

We also have additional costs associated with one of us being from overseas and that side of the family being overseas.

We’re certainly not scraping by, we have a nice life, we can buy the things we need, we’re making over payments on the mortgage and we’re putting money aside for the future, but there’s nothing obvious lying around for private school fees! We can’t just splash out on a holiday without thinking about it or just buy a new sofa or fridge, we have to save or take from other areas. We’ve had one overseas holiday this year, sharing a villa with friends, and the rest have been camping trips.

So much is down to:

1. Circumstances. I’m sure someone else on the same take home who met earlier, didn’t have a divorce behind them, had kids earlier, bought together earlier, or just lived in a less expensive part of the country, would make our income stretch a lot further and would be able to fund private school fees.
2. Priorities. If we really wanted to prioritise private school fees or being mortgage free sooner or just have more money for fun stuff then we could downsize to a flat or smaller house. But that would mean no spare room for family to stay or space to work from home.

Combined household or single person?

Good question. I was thinking of a single person, but I suppose it would work with just two adults as well.

For the first 10-15 years, as the children’s were very young, we just had a very modest lifestyle. Needs must. What we required was food and enough to pay our (modest) mortgage and the annual holiday. Eventually a small car. And furniture, furniture was nice but the near-empty living room allowed us to have a really large Christmas tree

Well when you choose to spend 80% of it on private school fees yes it would be

But that's not something you need to live, it's something you elect to do, and it doesn't stop 60k being, in the grand scheme of things in terms of buying power for life's ESSENTIALS, a very, very good salary

A single person earning 70k would be "lower end salary" to you?

Commit this thread to classics as we've reached peak mumsnet

Private school fees are an extravagant waste of money.

There's always someone with more, so if you're comparing yourself to more it's easy to feel 'average' we have a household income of £7k a month after tax which I think is a good income, there would be no end of people happy to swap especially as we have jobs where we can switch off after 37 hours (if that)

So your left with 2.3k per month to pay all household bills. This to me is a hell of a lot. But I’m a single mom who gets less than this a month and I have to pay a £700 mortgage plus £500 childcare fees. I suppose you get used to what you have though.