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.

I read that your rent/bills should be 30% or under that of your monthly income otherwise you will have a very uncomfortable lifestyle. Your mortage sounds hefty and disproportionate to your income. Also £1k in nursery fees? What age is DC? Do you get the 30 free hours?

We have a combined income of £5300 and mortage and bills come to under £2000 which gives us a lot of wiggle room. 2 DC, one in nursery part time. We are lucky though as we WFH.

Just under 24k, single, no DC, work 40hrs a week
Stuck in my job as nobody will employ me with my sickness record. Enough money to live but nothing for emergencies, holidays etc and if my car dies then I’m fucked
Can’t get a second job due to health conditions

I can totally imagine how hard it is for the average Brit as one of those lucky SW3 dwellers….given its very far from SW3 where I am from…..having said that 100k wouldn’t touch the sides in SW3….100
k is a great salary, but it’s all relative. When day care is 2600k a mth and housing costs are extortionate then no, 100k isn’t that great…..and yes I get that sounds tone deaf. To live in SW3 now, a decent comfortable life, to buy one would need at least 500 k deposit….and then the mortgage is going to be incredibly high, add in kids….its not people earning 100k a year living in SW3, if they are they don’t have a mortgage! And probably have a private income as well.

. . .tone deaf certainly , ( very euphemistic ) ... how about " priveliged beyond all imagination " ( narcissistic ? ) ....AND/OR lacking intelligence-education or alternatively lacking social conscience

According to AI : median London price £510 000

"The average property price in London region is £673k, the median price is £510k. The average price declined by £-46.1k (-6%) over the last twelve months."

So this is where I am different from others. We take home 100k (plus maybe 10-12k bonus) as a household, but my mortgage is £500 a month (nice house in nice area, but in a super cheap part of the country)

To move from my 3 bed detached to a 4 or 5 bed detached in the same area, my mortgage would go up to about 1500-2000…I literally would rather boil my head than lose more than a grand a month.

But I seem to see people getting better jobs and earning decent money, but rather than enjoying it with holidays and general life, they get a bigger house, a flashier car, an extra car…then end up in the exact same position if they hadn’t doubled their wage.

You are supposed to stretch when you are young, not when you are at your highest salary/earning potential. That’s when you enjoy the comfort that the extra earnings bring, not go bigger and bigger until you end up worse off than you started. And that’s why people on decent wages end up struggling and in debt, whereas sensible people with lower incomes don’t make the same mistakes.

What are you storing?

So how do you think something is “extremely wealthy” when the average salary is £47k and the median property is £510?

The same rock as you clearly.

if you are in receipt of means tested benefits and get your rent paid - you are best to stay not working.

you do not have to be out of work to claim means tested benefits and help with your rent. And as I already said, UC is designed so that you get more help the more you work. If you CAN work but choose not to, your entitlement is so heavily capped, you are not enjoying any sort of lavish lifestyle.

You are paying a lot for mortgage. Probably London?. The salary is not high for London

I never understand such threads. Cost of living is super high, and it varies by a huge margin depending where you live. Taking a mortgage on a family home in London right now and it will easily cost you at least 4-5k a month, if not more. Nursery: 2.5k a month. Bill...Commute! Then a 90K household income would not be sufficient to even cover these costs.

I read that your rent/bills should be 30% or under that of your monthly income otherwise you will have a very uncomfortable lifestyle.

We have a combined income of £5300 and mortage and bills come to under £2000

Sounds like your rent/bills are over 30%

Can you tell me what high expenditure on there was 'her choice' ? Her mortgage and bills? Childcare? Food?
So she should stop working so she doesn't have to pay for childcare, then she won't have a house to pay for and get herself social housing?

90k household income is not low but it is certainly not high - OP should not be bashed for saying that at this joint income, they still have to penny pinch.

Not nearly as unusual as you seem to think. You aren't high earners.

There is, unfortunately, no income bracket where an MNer can post about noticing their money doesn't stretch as far as it used to without getting panned. 9k, 90k, 900k, people will still queue up to miss the wood for the trees.

She said they were having to penny-pinch. Horses for courses.

My husband salary around 55000-60000 pounds per year, my salary 8000 per year and benefits around 750 a month.

Mostly people choose to have children and/or to get together with someone who already has responsibility for children.
There also must have been some element of choice to have a mortgage of about £2000.

How on earth are you getting benefits on a possible £68000 salary 🤷‍♀️. It beggars belief

Why are benefits being given on this type of salary?

Dla and cares allowance. My son is very disabled

OK fair enough. Thank you for explaining.

Some is going to pension (not a huge amount though!) The tax is crippling. Over 100k you lose your personal allowance. DH earns £118 and I earn 12k. We feel no better off at all from him earning 95/ 100k to now. In fact it somehow feels like we are worse? Take home from him is 5.5k. After commute, 1.8k mortgage (which went up hugely at end of 2023) food for 5 including 3 teens and all bills etc there is not much left! We worry about money every month, can’t save, and if something goes drastically wrong with the car / boiler / house which it seems to every month one way or another we are sweating - either using any spare we have or putting it on a credit card.
I know there are many far far worse. But honestly - most people would think 130k wow you must be very well off. Doesn’t feel like that!

There is always someone worse and better off. I think some who have their rent paid by the rest of us through our taxes don't appreciate how little net pay is these days with no personal tax allowance for higher earners, no 30 free hours childcare for 9 month year olds, often 9% or even 15% graduate tax so upper rates in effect are well over 60%.
It may be wiser to talk about net pay after deduction of tax NI and student loan.

I just put £101,000 into a net pay calculator with student loan and post grad loan (as I am a lawyer so a lot of people doing my job also have a masters loan) - they bring home about £57k a year (£4720 a month). In other words the state takes about half to keep other people who have never had a job in their lives, defend the realm against most threats etc. Ou4 £4720 person probably cannot afford to live in inner London (we couldn't even in the 1980s so I have lived out here in zone 5) and others are further out so there will be a lot of travel expenses say 300 - 400 a month and then some work clothes you might not need if not at work so let us say that takes them down to £4k net. Full time childcare for 2 babies in London is about £30k per child (I kid you not - I have 4 grandchildren and even in my day we spent 50% of each of our net pay on full time childcare in 1984 for a daily nanny).

So after childcare and before mortgage our single mother with 2 babies who works full time has zero. Of course more likely her husband works too and they pay half the childcare each so probably more like £2k each. They will have about £2k rent or mortgage and probably more.

Anyway it is not that hard on £100k to get to the same package the lady's twin who is on benefits with 2 babies and does not work gets with her outer London rent paid and her other benefits.

What I say to women however is leave £100k far far behind - go for much higher pay as then the marginal tax is more like 50% including student loan and 47% tax 2% NI without.

I think a lot of people are in disbelief about households with 100K + income and still feeling squeezed.

This is because our notions of what lifestyle a 100K + household income should buy are out of date. Our ideas of the connection between salary and lifestyle have not kept up with massive jumps in inflation, steadily rising housing costs, unaffordable child care etc.

We are like frogs slowly boiling in a pot of water and wondering why we are feeling more and more uncomfortable? Can't be the water we're sitting in, it feels fine!

I've said lots of times before:

£50,000 - £55,000 is the purchasing power of your 100K salary back in 2008 before the crash.

People are not living the 100K+ lifestyle because they only have the power to buy what everyone considers to be a 50K lifestyle, and if in the household two people both work they are really only on £25,000 each. This used to be a very ordinary wage before the crash.

On paper your salary looks amazing: 6 figures! In reality your tax and outgoings have gone up exponentionally more than your income.

The majority of households now spend >40% of their take home pay on housing and essentially bills! Just keeping that roof over your head and stopping yourself from freezing to death. We haven't even started talking about your food, your childcare, your commute costs.

It's not people moaning about their "terrible" life, its that genuinely after all the essentials have been paid for, people have almost nothing left over to spend on actually living their lives.

It's not a cost of living crisis, it's a cost of surviving crisis for everyone.