To be so annoyed at this woman's financial incompetence

[LovingLimePeer]

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/money/mailplus/article-14476595/six-figure-salary-rich-comfortable-heres-why.html?ico=mol_mobile_home&login&signinStatus=registered&signinMethod=google&dataCaptured=true&flowVariant=social_registration_nosubscribe#

For 1 person:
£500 on food
£750 on car expenses
£650 on cost of dog ownership
'a few holidays per year'
£250 cleaner

£200 pension (not enough!)

I'm just so fed up of all these well-paid financially illiterate people writing sob stories for the telegraph/daily mail about how they can't survive on their salaries.

This woman complaining about her £100000 salary not being enough could save £2100 per month if she bought a sensible car, didn't have dogs/a cleaner and took in a lodger.

With £2100 she could pay off her 23 year mortgage in just over 5 years OR
Retire at 68 with a pension pot in today's money of ~£1460000 (i.e. retirement income of £58000 per year in today's money). Not including money already saved in a pension.

If I assume she has saved £200/month into a pension for her whole career, she would have ~£427000 at retirement, enough for £17000 a year private pension, which given her extremely high expenditure.is simply not enough.

She thinks earning £20000-£40000 more would be enough but this is an expenditure, rather than income issue.

I'm just fed up of these people complaining. I suspect they'll end up poor in retirement, having never learned to live within their means with the rest of us paying for their stupidity.

👆100 % this - it seems that unless people spend their money in the way that the OP finds wise and acceptable, then they are either stupid or illiterate. OP keeps going on about financial comfort and early retirement and having a good life after retirement but cannot understand that this person may want to have a good life now, not when she retires. I find her judgemental. OP if you cannot enjoy life a bit on your 190k household income, then you have a problem too. Do not project your pathological fear of spending money to enjoy life on others. Work on yourself.

Well we had a lodger back in the day we had a household income of around £110000 and no children.

The money from the rent a room scheme was tax free. We have children now so wouldn't do it while they are still at home, but if a single person the woman in the article's age paying 40% marginal rate put £600 in their pension per month, it would be topped up to £1000.

£1000 extra pension contributions per month in a SIPP (self-invested pension) for the 24 years she would have left until retirement would give around £534000 total, or assuming a drawdown rate of 4% annually, ~£21000 in additional income in retirement in today's money.

I would argue that it can be immensely valuable for a single person paying higher rate tax to take a lodger, assuming they are comfortable with doing so and their circumstances permit it.

You sound like the exception rather than the rule. Most people don’t want a stranger in their home, and don’t work hard to earn a salary of £100K to come home to a shared space.

OP have you ever been single and worked in a high pressured and stressful job?

There no one else to share the cooking, or organising the bills, or gardening, or cleaning, or dog walking, shopping, meal planning

Bring single is expensive and being single with limited down time is even more expensive.

You've revealed your own pathological issues with money rather than hers

Thanks for response. I probably need all sorts of therapy for other reasons but I'm probably not as worried as I'm making out. We do spend money on some sports/hobbies that we enjoy and had an overseas holiday last year. I just couldn't even contemplate using up all our take-home money for a few months - it would be such a different way of thinking for us as cautious people.

I actually do get that house prices and childcare costs have meant salaries don't go as far as they used to.

But the Daily Mail/Telegraph also continue to tell us that it's possible to live the high life on the very small sums available to people disabled etc and they're generally not keen on building more houses!

If we keep doing the things that make us poorer - Brexit, austerity, getting rid of social housing - then eventually everyone gets poorer even if they think that it's other people who deserve the poverty and not themselves.

As an accountant, I am always astonished by the amount of people who are really high earners, yet do not save anything, or make use of tax deferral/tax saving options to plan for the future.

On another thread someone was complaining about "the singles tax" and how much more expensive everything is when you're on your own. Many posters pointed out that you do have the luxury of your own space, and that is the trade off for having no financial back up, and paying more. Now you don't even want single people to have their own space.

I think the point of the article is £100k a year is a lot of money, no one on that sort of salary should be having to budget or cut corners. It's an insane time we live in

@Everanewbie
How've you leapt to that conclusion? In my line of work, I'm painfully aware of how difficult life is for young people and the ones I know wouldn't be running to the press to tell how they can't afford to live on 100k. They're trying to survive on the £834 you describe as 'only'.
This woman isn't a 'young family'. She's a middle-aged self-employed divorcée with no kids, a 3 bedroom semi, huge garden by the sea and 2 dogs who hasn't managed to make sensible decision about her own future and expects sympathy. Not exactly Cry me a River is it?

Yes, earned low £20000s annually working 48 hour weeks with many hours of unpaid overtime. I worked 6am until 11pm for weeks on end at times.

It was hard. Paying for everything I needed as a single person was incredibly hard BUT, my problem is not with what she spends (that is entirely up to her). She has every right to spend whatever she wants on things that I wouldn't choose to and I would never judge anyone for making different choices to me.

My issue is that she has complained to a 'newspaper' about £100000 not even being enough for a single person. It's pretty tone deaf when so many people are struggling. The extra £40000 she feels is needed to reach the point of comfort would not be the solution here. She is very well paid.

Sadly, I'm an accountant and feel the same. Some people just won't listen to reason. There's so much financial incompetence, and education/intelligence doesn't come into it. I've had some very senior/intelligent/educated clients who can only be described as financially incompetent/illiterate, including some very high earning IT consultants (who should be Mathematical wizards given their job and earnings) who not only don't know how to handle money, but don't show any interest when advice is offered and despite earning shedloads of money seem to waste a huge proportion of it due to financial mistakes.

I get it. I'm single and earn min wage so I don't know how she thinks I (just about) cope when she can't on nearly 5 x my wage

My stepson spends about that

Apologies for my assumptions on your post. The person in question does seems to have let her expenditure run away with her to a degree, and I've confused by general point with talking directly about the subject of the article.

But what I see, generically, £100kpa is not the dream life that people may imagine. If I were to shed tears, it would be for the homeless, or those struggling with disabilities, not a single woman on £100k struggling to pay her gardener. But the cost of living, the £100k trap and the freezing of thresholds has meant that £100k doesn't run a family as well as you might think it would. Many people, especially those that are perhaps in their 60s and beyond, don't appreciate how hard it is to hit the heights that they did given the financial climate. I mean, if i hear one more boomer talking about 15% interest rates - it was for a few months on a loan 3-4x the average salary at a time that you were getting inflation busting pay rises!!! The average house price is now 8-10x the average salary with interest rates at 5.5%, sustained, with no immediate prospect of significant cuts.

No worries @Everanewbie .

Yes. I haven’t had a holiday since 2017 because I simply can’t afford one.

I think it is a case of the more money you have coming in each month,the more things you find that are 'essential' to spend it on. I mean,if you've got in the region of 8 grand a month coming in,then you're probably going to spend £250 a month on a cleaner,buy expensive food from Waitrose and go on expensive foreign holidays every year. Then when the cost of living starts creeping up (as it has lately) then slowly but surely,those luxuries become unaffordable.

I would focus on getting that therapy OP rather than getting yourself in a tizzy about a DM article written with the sole intention to get easily influenced readers such as yourself in a tizzy

£100k brings in £5713 pm assuming no pension contributions or student loan. A basic of £159k is needed to hit £8k pm, again assuming no student loan or pension contributions. That’s a big salary to achieve a relatively modest lifestyle.

Good points about tax differences but £500 on food - that my spend on 4 people. Hello fresh? I could live like a king on £150 and put the rest in a pension.

She's tone deaf to real poverty, which is fairly typical of people on larger than average salaries.

Her doggy daycare, food bill, cleaner, gardener for grass cutting, person to do her ironing means she can only afford a few holidays a year. Fine, her choices.

Wondering if just a story to drum up business for her legal work.

@tropicalroses I think the point of the article is £100k a year is a lot of money, no one on that sort of salary should be having to budget or cut corners.

This is completely naive though, every income has a budget.