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.

Here is my personal view on it:
Good salary - 100K and up
Median Salary - between 70K & 100K
lower end salary - between 40K & 70K

You have a very "personal" view of "median", which is defined as the middle value, the value where 50% of people earn more and 50% earn less, Your "lower end salary" is still above the median, ie the majority of people earn noticeably less than the lower end of your "lower end" salary.

We are paying out similar in school fees and have a mortgage (including overpayments) of £2200 on a total income of £6500. We are largely paying for the school fees from savings ATM as our income is not covering it.

I don't think 5k a month is enough to comfortably fund private schooling. Our take home is slightly higher, we feel comfortable, we couldn't afford private for our children.

@MidnightPatrol because you can pay for school fees on less than 300k and still feel comfortable.

Private education is a privilege but there is this weird narrative on MNs that you have to earn the equivalent of 20k a month to make it comfortable which as I said is nonsense.

Bit like the narrative that all houses in London cost 1m unless it’s a dump.

OP I think your income is average/ok
You don’t have much spare and how decent are your savings?

5k take home is not enough for school fees. Not to be comfortable. Our mortgage is same as yours and we have take home over 7500 and concluded school fees would not be comfortably affordable.

It’s a how long is a piece of string type question I’ll grant you, but my point was that there are few circumstances in which spending £50k on school fees is a necessity, it’s a choice and a luxury. You can only do that because you/your partner earn a lot of money/have a massive inheritance or whatever.

Why did you cut of the rest of my post? Now you're just creating a strawman argument. I did address below 40K and I did not discuss averages of what people are actually making. I discussed what you actually need where I live in order to live a high, median or low end lifestyle.

Combined? £200k per household, I'd say

It completely depends on your outgoings

It’s the school fees that are making you feel this way. We do earn quite a bit more a month, our mortgage is similar but we would never consider paying for private school. Our joint income is around 123K and I would say that’s good, but we live in the north-west which is cheaper than London. We do however have quite large pension contributions and I’m still paying my student loan off. Plus the dc do quite expensive extra-curricular activities so I wouldn’t say we feel rich or live a lavish lifestyle but we are comfortable. We could definitely manage on less. I think you’d be fine with a joint income of around 80K near me, but no private school. I’d want a joint income of well over 200K to afford that.

Depends on your outgoings doesn’t it. £300k is more like £14k a month not £20k.

And of course how you are paid - if it’s all a bit unknown due to bonuses etc, your monthly income might be a bit lower / affect how you think about it.

Schools in London are now getting on for £30k at secondary with the VAT increase. So that’s £5k a month for two.

A £700k mortgage would be another £4k a month.

That’s 70% of your £300k spent.

latest available figures for household income (2022), from ONS:

Median household disposable income (ie after direct taxes) in the UK was £32,400 in the financial year ending (FYE) 2022, a decrease of 0.3% from FYE 2021, based on estimates from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) Household Finances Survey.

Median disposable income increased by 1.6% to £66,000 for the richest fifth of people -which rather puts into context some of the figures being suggested in this thread.

We take home £4.5k per month between us and between mortgage and loan repayments (for home improvements) we pay £1.5k per month. £750 per month for nursery and we are literally always spent at the end of the month. Very stressful as we aren't able to save up a cushion and we have another baby on the way. We have a second hand car each but no other luxuries.
We could probably scrimp more on food shops and netflix/disney+ subscriptions but as we can't afford a holiday we want to enjoy some things in life!

Cost of living is so high right now that I think it has crept up on everyone. If you're used to a certain standard of living, it's much harder to keep up with that now

It sounds doable, if you fully accept that your choices have limited your disposable income to that of people who much earn less in the short-medium term. Overall though with the £400K equity and the £50K cash coming in you're not in a bad position.

Incentive to go for those promotions - to give you a bit more breathing room.

Discussion on this point, which I think some posters forget sometimes, is only meaningful on the basis of net take home pay for the household. Gross pay split between two earners will result in much higher net pay than the same amount earned by only one person, because of the tax and NI rules.

Indeed - but the OP's family are on less than a third of that

Totally agree about the London house prices by the way. It's such a nonsense. Lots of decent stuff between £500k and £750k

@MidnightPatrol you said 300-400k a month & lots of people on those salaries aren’t on PAYE so the tax is different….

Im not sure why you have set the parameters at a 4k mortgage & with 2 dc in secondary at the same time.

I simply don’t agree you have to earn 15-20k a month to afford private school comfortably, there would be a lot fewer dc in PE if that was the case. But you can disagree.

@LostittoBostik yes which is why I said she was feeling the impact of fees.

50k for us

A squillion quid ??

These sorts of threads become obnoxious really quickly because they just become a boasting round. If you are stupid enough to live in London, (and you’re not from there) then jokes on you. Most people have normal income / normal houses / normal lives and are on 5 figures or even 4 figures.

The median for a family with children will be higher.

The Rowntree Foundation said in Sept 2024 a family with two children needed to £69,400 to afford a basic standard of living. That’s 2x average salaries - about the same as OP’s income after tax.

Why did you cut of the rest of my post? Because that wasn't the point I was answering.

I did address below 40K only by saying it was poverty level where you live, and since I don't know where you live I can only take your word for it.

I did not discuss averages of what people are actually making. You dismissed as below "lower end" salary the amount earned by over 50% of the population and misused the term "median".

The Rowntree Foundation said in Sept 2024 a family with two children needed to £69,400 to afford a basic standard of living. That’s 2x average salaries - about the same as OP’s income after tax. You're comparing average salaries before tax with OP's income after tax.

It depends on what you class as a "good". To have enough disposable income to contemplate private education you absolutely have enough for a "good standard of living".