If you are married to an orthopaedic surgeon (not private practice), how well off do you feel as a family, if you don’t work yourself?

[Yunall]

Just wondering as DP is a surgeon (just made consultant). He doesn’t do private work and I would say we have a nice lifestyle but only because my income tops it up. I’m used to a lot of luxury and had a privileged upbringing (don’t mean to sound like a dick I’m just stating a fact) and I wonder if we had kids if I would actually have to continue working to have a decent lifestyle. Not something I talk much to DP about as he came from a less well off background and understandably I would come across ungrateful!!!

Not sure how much it goes up or how fast.

I mean, if he asked the question at work, they'd be far better placed to answer it than Mumsnet 😳

I don't understand the point of the thread really.

This is a joke, right?

Private school is completely out on £110k a year! It costs about £25k per year per child. So two kids would be almost half his salary!

Even with £190k it wouldn’t be a doddle

£110K is the spot at which taxes are highest in the U.K. as you lose your tax free allowance, giving you an effective tax rate of 67% on earnings over £99K a year. Also parents of preschool children lose access to funded nursery and preschool places, giving them an effective tax rate in excess of 100%. It’s a mad system that would make it worth her husband’s while dropping to 90% pro rata. His take home pay would be much the same and he’d get funded childcare.

I would hope OP’d DH knows! The pay scales are widely available:

www.nhsemployers.org/system/files/2025-02/Pay-and-Conditions-Circular-%28MD%29-5-2024-R2.pdf

Dh is not an orthopaedic surgeon. Actually he works in a traditional trade and earns about that. 😂 But he is the company director.

Can we live reasonably comfortably on that income with a very nice lifestyle and a big house with dc in state schools? Yes. We do. We live very well, with 2 dc, big detached house, land, horses, expensive hobbies, though we drive secondhand cars and mostly go camping (personal choice, rather than financial).

Would we have gotten all of this on only one income? No. Would I want to have no fallback? No. We are currently living on one income because I’m out of work due to cancer. Financially it’s fine. We don’t struggle.

But we’re very fortunate that it’s me who got the cancer.

Dh, in his much more physically demanding role, would absolutely not have been able to keep working. Me keeping us all afloat on my £40k a year income and my set working hours would not be the same as dh’s £100k+ and very flexible hours. It would have been something else entirely if he was the sole earner.

If this past year has taught me one thing, it’s that it’s a very tenuous position to be in for the whole family to rely on one person’s income for survival. Because one day you can be well and earning and the next you can be staring at a long period of sick leave and unemployment.

Your income should match the lifestyle you want, not his! Why is your income topping it up instead of covering around half? You don’t have kids so your lifestyles should be fairly equal!

This thread is such an obvious wind-up 😂

sorry you are in the 100k ballpark and you can’t have netflix??? what?

To be fair - no one said you couldn’t just that you wouldn’t have the same lifestyle. Which is accurate. I wouldn’t have had kids if my household income was 110k. I love travelling too much. 🤣. People have different views and priorities. And that’s ok. No one is wrong or right.

It also depends on the family’s childcare needs. A family with two working full time on £50k each and 2 children in nursery would probably be worse off than a family with a £100k income and a SAHP. Obviously the nursery years don’t last forever although the family with two full time working parents will still need to pay for after school and school holiday childcare whereas the family with a SAHP will not.

I know couples like this with kids.
Its fine BECAUSE
their parents paid for their house either in full or largely so the mortgage is small

The parents pay for the GC private education

the parents pay for all the 5 star hols

Often they pay for extra curricular things too.

Consultant pay in NHS only is going to be pretty flat
If your parents wont fund you you will struggle and you'll either live a simple lofe and not work or you'll work too andyoull have a sort of MC lifestyle
Okays hols but no flash cars no 5 star lifestlye

You will need to carry on working as long as he doesn't do PP. Even if he does it will take a while to build up the practice and you will be heavily taxed when your income is just above £110k. Get your ass back to the office OP!

My DH earns similar, we have two teenagers and a big house ( no mortgage) and I have to work to allow us to have the nice holidays, meals out etc.

I don't really understand this, are your dc is private school? 110k with no mortgage should allow for meals out & holidays...

Then I really don't get why the OP is asking a parenting website lol.

If I was your husband I'd leave! Wanting luxury you don't work for?!

We're on the same money as you guys and both need to work to do nice things (nice holidays 1-2 times a year, restaurant meals/takeaways, decent monthly savings/investments, etc). Our kids are in state school as private would wipe all those nice things out.

If only one of us was working, the SAHM life would be very basic, i.e getting groceries and cleaning/tidying pretty much. Definitely not lounging around a country club or getting my hair/nails done every week, if that's the sort of life you're envisaging...

Oh, all my previous comments were about surgeons focusing on private practice, but I just re-read your original post and realized he doesn't want to do private practice; he wants to work for the NHS exclusively. That's fine. The NHS salary is quite good at the top, but it can take a while to reach that level depending on the circumstances.

Even with high salaries, NHS surgeons often struggle to afford private school fees for more than one child. Moving further north, opting for a private prep school followed by a state school, or starting with a state primary and later transitioning to a private school can make it more manageable.

OP, think about becoming self-employed or freelancing. Look for a work-from-home job with a decent income, set your own hours, and meet client needs—you'll be fine. It’s a smart way to complement his salary and have your own money to cover personal expenses. That is, if it’s something you want to do.

NHS consultants no longer earn the salaries that used to support owning a big house with a tennis court, sending three children to private schools, going skiiing every winter and having a long summer holiday in the south of France every summer

Most jobs do t fund this nowadays. What helps is often generational wealth.

Yep, none of the consultants in my department with kids in private schools pay the fees themselves! All grandparents.

I felt very confused as to why my standard of living was so much lower than theirs despite earning the same, until I realised 🤣

The ones in big houses are all 10-20 years older than me, and bought when prices were much lower.

Yep & quite a few consultants would come from that monied background.

Humanity points? What a cynical view.
I admire the OP’s DH. His salary is perfectly fine. Private medicine is less so.

Please don’t do this. I never kept my well paid career going and after ten years at home no bugger will employ me. I’m 50, have applied for 37 jobs over the last two years and not even had an interview. The real stinker is I was only an sahm for this long as my son was really autistic (now not so much bizzarely)

I don’t want to work either to be honest, many people don’t. I earn £100k and DH is similar but there is no way we could drop a salary without a significant drop in lifestyle. Of course we could live, but we holiday very well, kids in private school etc… it’s just about priorities. If you’re happy in a smaller house, average car, one holiday a year and state school then you could easily drop to just his salary and I’m sure you’d be just as happy honestly but it’s a difficult compromise when you’re used to living a certain way.

And some, like OP’s husband, have some morals. Private hospitals train nobody. They don’t deal with any emergencies (which can arise from even routine surgery). They are entirely dependent on the NHS.