What is your household income, how much is benefits, and how are you coping?

[Gabrilla]

Genuinely curious after so many threads on here about benefit changes. Please feel free to name change!

I’ll start:

Salaries for both of us total 90k. Only benefits are £102 month child benefit, though we also get tax-free childcare and 15hrs free at nursery.

Total income is about 6k a month, mortgage and bills 3k, nursery 1k, commuting costs £500, groceries cost £500, husband pays CMS and other bits to his children totalling about £500 leaving us about £500 for everything else.

Feels like we’re constantly penny-pinching.

Or remove about a third of a millennium.

Quite a bit
no benefits
In the top 10% of people - we now have the highest tax burden in 70 years and it has to stop.

To put this into perspective £100,000 salary is the equivalent in terms of purchasing power of £55,000 in 2008 prior to the financial crash.

Depending on which in index you use: inflation since 2008 has been 80 -100%. Add this to the fact that tax brackets have been frozen for so long.

You're actually looking what used to be a good but not excessively big wage for a professional job.

I am 68, divorced, retired, two dogs and two cats. I get full state pension currently £884.80 every 4 weeks, plus a small pension from a job in my 20s, which is £283 a month. The total income is therefore about £14k pa, over the tax allowance so the work pension is taxed.

No benefits, just 25% single person reduction on council tax and it’s still over £220/month (Band E for a 3 bed rural semi, big garden). Mortgage paid off, a small emergency fund in a SIPP for when the ancient boiler, car, roof and washing machine all pack up. No debts.

Wealth and income aren’t the same thing. As a household we are probably still in the top 10% for earnings but we definitely won’t be for wealth as we only own about 50% of our house, which is only worth £5-600k & while our pensions are good we otherwise have limited savings. Older people who own their homes tend to have the most wealth but it’s not very accessible to them when it’s tied up like that.

Single parent, 1 teenager

Salary just under 31k (full time) & Child benefit, I give my daughter the child benefit to pay for her college costs, phone, clothes, etc
No other benefits (not entitled)
No child support (father not in UK)

I take home £1950 per month and mortgage/bills come to £1050. I pay £500-600 credit card bills (used for essential house repairs/maintenance) leaving £300-400 for food, petrol, eveything else. One 15 year old car.

In order to pursue the career that I want, I have several years more studying ahead by which point my son will be a little bit older and my mum has said she will be able to help out more as she will be retiring, so there will be ways to work in my chosen field in a more full time position, I was unable to go to university as my dad at the time was incredibly unwell and progressively got worse over 11 years until he passed away in January, so having to go through OU at the moment.

No it literally doesn’t though.
The average income in london is 47,454 so a family with 2 average earners is quite obviously nowhere near “EXTREMELY wealthy”.

Dying at the fact that you think someone earning 90k with kids can afford to live in Chelsea. You don’t have any experience
of the real world do you 😂

Do you also use terms like liberal metropolitan elite?

This is not true sadly. House prices are huge in London therefore mortgages will be too. Then add on nursery fees and it doesn’t make one rich at all.

Indeed

Income £3,800 per month
Outgoings £875 - car loan, council tax, gas, electric, sky tv, mobile, broadband, water, TV licence
Remainder goes on savings, food, petrol, going out, holidays, clothes etc
No mortgage, no kids, no benefits.

Have just been discussing this with DH. We are in our 40s and the pressure of life feels real and had done for a few years. He thinks it's why people had mid life crises. Young kids (and associated costs), paying off/down mortgage (if one has one or working hard towards getting one) maximising earning potential (always looking for the opportunities for financial increase) and older parents (health worries/bereavement). Feels like alot and regardless of what you earn and what the outgoings, these combination of things can make life tough. I try to remain positive. Hard AF sometimes though.

lol! 90k and living in Chelsea! Obviously never been to Chelsea - one cannot living in Chelsea on 90k a year! This has made me chuckle…..a decent two bed flat for rent will be at least 5k a mth…….

Well I'm shocked at where our money goes every month.

On paper we should have quite a bit left over but it just goes on god knows what.

So then don't live in London?

As you point out , older retired people in average house £290 000 , mortgage paid off , are unable to acess their main wealth and some of them may lose it in care costs of £50k a year / never pass it on to heirs .... Only 64 % of the population are owner-occupiers ; therefore the other third who own no property ( . ... many have no assets whatsoever ) skew this sum downwards . So a good 50 % of the UK population have virtually no liquid wealth or assets . . . . . . . . . Strangely Mumpsnetters above do seem to live in the fantasy land of SW3 with two Range Rovers , private education £35k or Highland estate and seem unable to imagine the situation of average Brit . . . . .

Hence this arrogant " let them eat cakes " delusion and repeated assertions that £100 000 is not well-off , but rather leaves them feeling poor and hard done by !

And a seemingly blanket assumption that most households magically contain two earners on well above average incomes ... where does that nonsense come from ?? None of these serial fantasists have heard of the minimum wage of £20 000 - £23 000 , and that many employers use numerous means of subverting the minimum wage , and diluting that £11.00 hr downwards

Ours is about £280 per month for 2 adults - not including alcohol 😅. But we are a vegan/pescetarian household, and my DH only eats fish about 3 times a week. Whilst I pay slightly more for things like oat milk, and the occasional fake meat, the majority of my diet such as lentils and beans is much cheaper than any meat.

Congrats you are winning.
Our joint salary’s are 30k more than yours and we bring home less than you and don’t get a scrap of benefit help, free money etc at all
We have 3 kids school age now. Finding things much tighter than we thought we would.
I would say you are winning.

😂poor low-waged , malnourished , destitute home counties / Middle England indentured serfs on ONLY £130 000 p.a

But if your household income is circa £120k, and bring in less than the OP, then surely you are spending somewhere, which will probably benefit you in the future?

Such a funny sketch 🤣

House?

We were evicted from our hole in the ground.

We had to go livin in lake.

..........You were lucky to have a lake !

There were 150 of us, livin in cardboard shoebox at middle o' motorway.

Cardboard box?
Nay.

You're lucky. We lived for three months in a rolled up newspaper in a septic tank