To have expected more in life from working to reach this salary?

[grethrow]

I’m early forties and earn 75k. I know this isn’t huge money but it’s well above average salaries in the uk. I worked hard to get to this point (I’m not saying people who earn less don’t work hard).

I guess along the way I always thought I would be able to have a really comfortable life on this salary. I have one ds who is 11 but his costs don’t really factor in much as his dad pays for most stuff (ds lives with me so dad pays a decent amount).

I assumed going on holiday would be easy but renting a cottage in Devon in a nice area for a week is around 1,500, then there’s travel costs and food etc when you’re there! Going abroad long haul is extortionate. I guess these things are just about doable for me but it’s not easy.

I am having a privileged whinge. I know that. But I do feel sometimes like maybe at 18 I shouldn’t have bothered. My parents had a similar income (taking into account inflation) and me and my brother both went to independent schools, grew up in a large home and parents had very nice cars. It wouldn’t be possible for me to go and buy a nice car outright. I know people have it much worse but I still feel cheated and like it is a slog for very little, fair of me to feel this? Do others feel this?

@grethrow
Take home roughly £4.4k, plus support from childs dad, what are your outgoings that you can't afford a holiday?
Is the drip feed that you overpay a mortgage/pension?

Yes living standards have massively decreased for everyone in the U.K., whatever their wage.

I grew up in Scotland with a single mum on benefits and had a larger, nicer house than I do now on a very high salary in London.

What matters these days is not your income, but whether you inherited wealth from your parents, usually specifically whether they passed on the unearned windfall of the property price boom to you.
The single biggest determinant of wealth and comfort of living standards is whether the bank of mum dad bought or contributed to your house purchase.

As someone who didn’t get a penny from my parents after the age of 18, I can literally never catch up to my friends and colleagues who were luckier than me, despite getting the best qualifications possible and working in a high paid industry (which I did in order to escape the poverty of my childhood). I’m lucky to be able to afford a mortgage at all, don’t get me wrong. But that doesn’t change any of the rest of it.

Plus OP'S parents had a joint income and considerably lower cost of living. Housing especially as it's already been pointed out.
My late PIL were minted. Dual professional income, one child, were lent enough money to buy their first home without a mortgage. Never had debt or credit.
That generation could afford a family house from one working income. To have 2 would make life quite comfortable in professional circles.

But that 7.5k doesn't include things like free school meals and housing benefit. So while it is true, the discrepancy is not quite as big as the raw figures suggest.

It's not mega bucks but you should be able to afford a holiday.

Are you stuck in your thinking of what a holiday should be? We are taking a four day break in Brussels and Leuven in April. Total cost for two of us - £600.

We do go on long haul holidays (we went to Boston and NYC earlier this year) but we save and plan for them.

Your shopping bill seems high. We spend about £80 a week (inc. cleaning stuff) for two adults and always have a full cupboard and feeezer..

I honestly don't think it is that much anymore.

I can easily spend £10-20 a day on just leaving the house. 2 lots of school dinners daily is £160 a month. Mortgage £1500. Bills, water, insurances etc etc etc all push up 'bills' to nearly £3k a month.

Christ. You go to the corner shops for a few 'bit's and it's £20. Couple of one -two day food shops are £35 each.

Everything has gone up. Everything. £100 used to be a lot of money - even 5 years ago. It's like a tenner now.

I am convinced most of these post are from people who enjoy being knowingly ignorant.

OP, you're not the only one. My DH and I earn considerably more than you; so much so that back in the day I'd have assumed that anyone earning this type of income would be dressed in head to toe Chanel, flying everywhere first class and having a full time housekeeper. .
And yet, I'm still in Zara with a cleaner 3 hours a week and for the most part travelling economy.
I am grateful that we don't have any of financial worries and have plenty of disposable income, don't get me wrong but I suppose I assumed that my life would be more luxurious than it is.
My father earned less than me - and yet growing up we always had a lovely home in a fashionable part of town, 2 "prestige" cars, kids in private school, several holidays per year, house in France etc.
I think life is just more expensive these days, especially housing and school fees.

I earn more and feel the same. Think the 35k I spend a year on nursery fees and tax have a massive impact but still living costs are high

Agreed - I put my salary in that calculator and am in the top 15% based on salary, but bottom 40% once housing costs taken into account. Live in London, in a three bedroom ex council house in a not particularly expensive area. Which is a bit depressing!

Exactly. People in this country have a very very weird relationship with the top earners. This isn't about who has it worse. If the top % of earners in this country cannot comfortably go on multiple holidays abroad, whilst not living especially extravagantly, then there's a problem with our salaries.
The country subsidises the rental and salary market with UC, and this is a massive massive hidden problem. It's actually really difficult for companies to get talented workers on sponsor visas over here because they just don't want it. The salaries on the UK are tiny and if you're on a sponsor visa you can't access UC, making it very difficult to make ends meet, especially if you're renting. If you're in the top % of earners, you shouldn't have to count pennies, you should be able to afford holidays abroad and private school. That's the point. Not the fact others have much less.

Yes, completely agree.
Definitely more to do with it being one salary, not the amount.Many people, with a good lifestyle, mortgage, holidays etc it’s possible because there’s 2 good incomes.

I hear you! I earn less than you but still what's considered to be a good wage and I don't think I have any better standard of living then I did when I earned half this amount! Ok, the mortgage is smaller and the end is in sight on that, and for the last couple of years i've increased my pension contributions (mainly to avoid tax) but I live in a 2 bed flat with no prospect of moving up the property ladder in this city unless I get some inheritance when my parents pass away, I don't splurge on beauty products or treatments, my car is 8 years old and far from flashy, clothes are all high street, and the only way I travel as much as I do (which admittedly has been a bit too much this year and I'm feeling the pinch for it!) is because I don't have kids and go outside school holidays.
People also forget that 2 combined salaries of £75k are worth more than one due to the tax free amount. I also have a lot of friends with more impressive properties because both partners had their own place in their late 20's / early 30's bought before the market went bonkers, and hence had large amounts of equity to put into a joint property.

Agreed - I put my salary in that calculator and am in the top 15% based on salary, but bottom 40% once housing costs taken into account.

But plenty of people who earn less but have no housing costs will tell you to check your privilege.

If you Google childhood poverty rates pre and post housing costs, it gets even more scary.

Yup.

Yes true but it's still a very high salary.

after your tesco shop and car (by your numbers are taken out), 66k left over is not bank breaking, look where else your money is going and sort accordingly

People need to stop looking at the £ they earn, inflation makes it incomparable.

Better to try and look at:

• what job did you parents do? What does a similar job earn now?
• what proportion of your parents monthly wage went on the rent/mortgage
• did you parents have any other help you might not have been aware of? My friend thought her parents were earned a lot, she hadn't realised her grandparents paid her school fees.

I think far more people have expensive marque cars now than they did when i was a child (80s/90s). Back then everyone had vauxhall, peugeot, renault, ford, VW, rover. You never saw a bmw, audi or mercedes, let alone a jaguar or porsche, now far more people seem to drive those.

@Foxesandsquirrels DHs company pay almost double for his role in NY vs London.

I agree with you OP. Seemingly normal things like a week in Devon which every family did when I was at school in the 80s / 90s is now a middle class, expensive thing to do. Two weeks in Mallorca in the school holidays is easy 5k. Madness.

But I think the main reason you feel you’re behind where you should be is because you’re a single Mum. If you were still with your DH and he earned the same as you or more, you’d be in a very different position. But as you’re on your own, everything falls on you.

I think the point of the post is that it's a bit weird the top earners in the country have to budget. The whole idea of being the top earner is to be very comfortable, no? If you compare UK salaries to other countries, they are miniscule. The point is, 75k shouldn't make op one of the highest earners in the country.

Not sure how it isn’t obvious that 1500 just for a week holiday without food or travel is difficult

It is difficult if you want to stay in the UK and be rained on, and I know you said that long haul is extortionate, but since you've posted twice now about holidays what's wrong with somewhere nice in europe?

The OP, or any of us, could do any number of small tweaks to adjust our outgoings - or choose to count our blessings, and so on.

But as a PP said, we can also zoom out a bit to understand this feeling of "I'm not doing as well in life as I thought I would be by now ".

Is it objectively true that middle class income earners in wealthy countries like the UK (and everyone else with a "normal" income at whatever level) can afford less? Yes. Houses more expensive, COL more expensive, salaries not kept pace etc. I myself find it's only now, like the OP, I recognise what my own unconscious economic expectations have been all along - when they are not met. I think of it as the "where's my new kitchen?" feeling, because I've never had one and I want one! This doesn't preclude me or the OP understanding that many others can't have a new kitchen and I might never get one. It also doesn't stop me doing some kitchen DIY to improve what I've got. I'm just recognising that my own mum and dad, in completely average "non-career" jobs could afford a new kitchen extension in the mid 1980s whilst me - who by comparison earns more in a "career" job - can't, without much more of a stretch. IMHO, one version of this "where's my new kitchen?" feeling is driving the swing to the hard right in wealthy democracies.

At its most fundamental level "where's my new kitchen?" is about rising global economic inequality. The richest rich people are much richer now relative to everyone else in the world than they were 50 years ago. They have invested their wealth by buying a lot of land (mostly in the form of houses on the land), pushing up prices for everyone else, including everyone on MN. I say 'invested' but in some cases I mean 'hide'. There is a vast global shadow economy (all those shell companies in the Caymans and so on) which is at best untaxed and at worse the money-laundered proceeds of global crime.

What can we do about this so that everyone can get better kitchens? Well, that is a subject for another thread 😎

Yup, when I worked in the private sector this was the same. The only way we managed to get specialists over is by agreeing to pay their rent for 6 months out of the 12 as part of their package. They were still worse off but we're usually young and wanted to experience Europe. There was one time a guy came over with his family, they struggled and left early.