To think getting less than 50% of your pay is crazy?

[rampe]

If someone earns £15,000 a month. They have a student loan. They pay in 10% into their pension.
They take home less than £7,000 a month.

YABU.

Thank you I will. Quite a few of us senior medics are....

My DH is (well, £14k). He has an accountant.

Oh sorry - I was about to have sympathy when I read that as £15k per year not month…

Defo wins the award for Stealth Boast of the Day op!

Well if you’re earning 15k a month your student loan repayment will be high, but cleared quickly. My son is going into a finance career, has a graduate loan lined up for next September after graduation (via internship). Fortunately for him, his dad is funding his uni so no loans, but if he did need to repay it, he would have low outgoings the first few years when living at home so could save a lot of salary and pay off loan faster. As he will be a high earner, so makes sense to pay off student loan as fast as you can. Contrary to popular opinion that its not something to worry about, the interest rate is high, so unless you’re going into a lower paying industry (nursing for example) its better to just get it paid off as quickly as you can.

Once you hit 40% tax, your salary is massively reduced

road upkeep comes from general taxation - after all we all use them - for waste, ambulances, police, etc

Not an option for everyone sadly but if I could I would - if you think of it as a tax it effectively puts me on the same tax bracket as someone earning £50k more without a degree (and, I don’t mind paying it off as it was a loan, my issue is that despite having been paying it for 7 years the balance is going up 😅)

You should invest in a good accountant.

How do you propose an employed Dr avoids PAYE. You absolutely don’t know what you’re talking about. There are many employed people on PAYE paying that tax. Drs are one example. Tech engineers that companies don’t want to outsource are another.

Correct me if I am mistaken, but I doubt very much he pays the rates of income tax the OP is quoting.

You may not want to openly admit however as it is a touchy subject for some on here, there are plenty of legal loop holes to reduce your tax burden.

Perhaps find out what the OP does for a living, do the legwork to train for said job (if you’ve got it in you) then you won’t need to cry. ☺️

I really feel for you. I went to uni the last year before the first fee hike (to £3,000 per year) and I borrowed £11,000 in total, which increased to £13,000 in six years before I started paying it off, and then I cleared the whole debt in the next 6 years. Even people who started the year after me got a much worse deal, and those who started post 2012 have been completely screwed over. Fuck Nick Clegg and the Lib Dems.

My husband and I are both high earners. We essentially lose 50% of our earnings. It's not a popular position on mumsnet, but my husband is a cancer research scientist and I work in Alzheimer's research, so I like to think we give a lot to society in addition to our enormous tax bill! There are definitely days when I question why we work so hard. We'd have a better quality of life if we worked less and got below the threshold!

By the time they’ve paid higher rate tax and their NI along with the student loan and pension contributions it would come out at take home of less than half to be fair.
but they’d be saving for their future ( Ie the pension ) and saving some tax by paying into pension ( which comes out before tax)

I would be proposing different solutions to those problems. Rail privatisation was done badly, in the same way Thames was. Network rail and Thames are too big to regulate and should have been split up, Thames should never have been allowed to load up with so much debt. If we were able to run public infrastructure in the same way as Singapore runs changi airport state ownership can work very well indeed (albeit with a state owned profit making company underneath running the infrastructure). I don't actually care as long as it works properly.

House prices/asset bubble is caused by quantitative easing and tax and regulatory systems which incentivised bank lending to real estate rather than productive investment in capital and growth. House builders making money from land trading rather than house building also doesn't help. Green belt planning system is ridiculous and stamp duty stops people trading down into smaller houses when they arguably should. There would probably be less foreign ownership and investment in UK property in those circumstances.

100% marginal tax rate as I said above depends on personal circumstances - eg when you lose any free childcare when you go over the 100k income threshold.

This!!

I understand you're getting at the whole tax thing but this person is very well off by today's living standard so they should pay more tax.

Almost 60 per cent is lost to tax in our household.

We need a separate board for household earnings over £100k.

Had enough of jealous people giving their tuppence worh when they haven't got a clue what it means to work hard to get to a stage in life to earn that amount, and not burn out. Not that amount is really great compared to contemporaries in USA / Canada.

Not everyone is born to survive this life some of us are destined to live it.

😂

At the end of my career I earned this kind of money. Honestly I get what people are saying regarding it being debt repayments (student loans) and savings (pension funds) but the point fundamentally still stands. Yes, I think it is immortal for the state to appropriate more than 50% of someone’s earnings. I refer here to marginal earnings not overall because at the marginal rate it absolutely happens. Not debt repayment, not pension savings, just tax. When I left, I left in part because, for various complicated reasons, my marginal tax rate was 87%.

Yes I still took home a good amount. But at these kinds of levels one must understand you don’t get paid for nothing - there is the stress, workload, inconvenience and impact on personal life of these kinds of jobs which most people are not willing to trade. The tax levied is part of that calculation. In the end I decided I was no longer willing either. Taxed less I would have continued - for a while at least. This is the reality - government now gets 87% of zero - not really a win for anyone.

I was the first year of the £9k fees - on 3 years tuition, the bare minimum maintenance and a small masters loan I now owe £56k - and that’s with having paid every single month since I graduated my masters 6 years ago 😅

They could just close their business/office and make loads of people redundant! Wooo!!

How much did you owe when you started repaying, out of interest? Has the outstanding amount gone up or down?

MORE tax? They already foot most of the UK tax bill!

Must have been about £47k ish so it’s gone up! After I graduated I was only paying a few £ towards it and the last few years closer to £150 ish a month, so wasn’t expecting to have cleared it, but for it to have gone up that much whilst being paid is just a shitty system.