“Mumsnet rich”

[Harrietta82]

I’ve seen this referenced a few times recently.

What do you class it as - I’m assuming 6 figures plus given how many appear to be earning it? Or do you also need a c-suite DH? I’m intrigued!

Half of what aoiears on message boards is fantasy. Not worth worrying about what others say they earn. 🤷‍♀️

I used to tell my kids, when they asked "are we rich" that yes, we are rich because we can afford to go do a weekly food shop and not worry about what the cost at the end will be.

Other people will use other criteria, whether it be private Yachts or designer handbags. 🤷🏼‍♀️

“Mumsnet Rich” (or any rich) is not based just on salary. (Tbh I would I say a single 6 figure PAYE salary has little to do with it at all nowadays). It’s the 4/5 bed detached house (barn conversion or period property) with space for cars on drive and lots of disposable income due to a combination of some gifted and/or inherited wealth, a successful business and perhaps an additional good PAYE job in finance in the mix.

Are you sure about this? It doesn’t fit in with the amount of SAHM judging posts I see here.

What Is a ‘c-suite husband’?

The fact that earning £100k in this country is now considered rich tells how the curse of low standards and aspirations has truly infected this country.

salaries are quite low here unfortunately

Well yes. That was my point.

@MidnightPatrol your reasoning is spot on. Next door paid 400% more for their house, it’s exactly the same as ours we just bought ours in 1999.

DH ended up a Professor and head of a University dept so no C in that title and no six figure salary, next door does in fact have the C as is CEO of a company. A junior academic, would never be able to afford to buy our house on just their one salary now with a 10% deposit which is exactly what we did.

We certainly are not flash in clothing, bags or cars the many holidays we have taken over the last 25 years is where our fun expenditure has gone. So there is nothing to see.

I feel poor on MN & I’m on £65K a year. The holidays, children in private schools, able to pay university fees etc etc.

Oh I see 🤣🤣

Dreadful…

struggling to maintain a middle class lifestyle including the things necessary to earn management salaries like nannies, cleaners, gardeners, and online grocery delivery.

This is interesting (though the rest of the post is a bit Reformy...)

If you earn high, in the fabled C suite corporate context, what you are being paid for is actually not your technical skill at coding or sales or report writing or logistics or accounting or whatever your company does. (maybe professions like being a surgeon or a KC are a bit different). But as COO or CEO or even CFO you are usually being paid for a sharply developed ability to manage other people, spot what's going on in interpersonal situations, manage your own emotions so they don't leak all over everyone else, and ability to use your experience from one situation to make good decisions in another situation.

These things are harder to do the more you have to 'code switch', and you're always on, always tired, and still have to manage yourself like a skilled psychotherapist, and do it without anyone noticing. So you can't be spotted on the train in a dysregulated way, crying, spilling Ribena down your suit because that's the only drink you found in your bag, and arguing with your spouse on the phone. In less visible roles, your time not at work is more anonymous, more your own.

Senior management is performance. Which means if you don't have anyone loading the dishwasher and sorting the washing in the background, it's a really hard performance, as you are operating on too many levels at once. The grocery deliveries aren't luxuries, they allow the essentials of your job to get done at all.

So I believe that the folks in this situation. who earn amazingly well, but now can't afford nannies and gardeners etc, are actually leading hard lives. Don't get me wrong, it's awful grind to work long hours cleaning and go there on the bus and have the constant crippling fear of poverty. That's totally worse. Much worse.

But having some money, but not quite enough to do your life properly, and living with the stress of that - that is a bit hard too. Someone has to be in the c suite and the senior management team and it comes with its own pressures.

So i dont think 150k and being a chief executive is rich. It would be rich if you had a small low stress part time job and the same money as you would be more time rich.

In many ways your example highlights the issue which is that higher single salaries are nowhere near as attractive proportionally as you might think.

Your household brings home roughly 53k after tax whereas a single earner on 150k brings home 91k.

If you have 2 young children you receive child benefit and 30 hours funded childcare plus access to tax free childcare. The person earning 150k gets none of those.

The total additional cost to the higher earner is around 20k.

That means a person on 150k has maybe 1500 per month more than a couple on 64k. That’s a handy extra sum to have each month but doesn’t provide anywhere near the enhanced level of lifestyle that you might expect for someone earning 150k vs a household on 64k.

Rich is so subjective, it depends on where you live and who you’re comparing yourself to every day. I’m a single parent on 38k but live in a cheap part of the UK, have a tiny mortgage and own my car outright so am able to save quite a lot, have regular holidays and actually am considered pretty well off in my circle of friends 😂😂 I do scoff a bit at the MN posts where people earn 150k plus and say they’re struggling but I guess if their mortgage is enormous, they have two big cars to pay off and their mates are all on 500k then they probably do feel like the scruffy impoverished ones. Context is key!

Agree. And we all know that comparison is the thief of joy so many will not even read this thread!
The more important question is whether or not you are happy in your life surely? And whether people value you for who you are and not for what you have.
Not sure there’s an award available for achieving ‘Mumsnet richness’. Think this OP is bored this weekend…..

@Whatsthatsheila its all very comparable, income is just that but how it’s disseminated is what really counts here is a handy though slightly blunt and imperfect tool.

https://ifs.org.uk/tools_and_resources/where_do_you_fit_in

I remember one of the Mums at the school gate was in a much lower income bracket than us but she was helped by her family a lot. It is stuff like that plus choices made with any disposable income and even then people will scrap about what is essential. Child poverty action group have always had a list of what they consider is required for a child to feel part of society. I first saw it as an undergraduate decades ago, access to being online was not on it, I’m sure it will be now. Times change but in the UK it’s more about relative poverty than absolute poverty.

Nice try, but no cigar.

Recently seen threads from MNs with small children claiming that £250 per week of disposable income to pay for child activities & 'supermarket toys,' lunch, ice creams and snacks wasn't enough!!!

I didn't even think it was much of a try, tbh.

Ok so…My husband does. But we pay £3.5k fees as well as £3.5k on our mortgage for a 4 bed terrace. I think that’s ‘mumsnet rich’ people would assume we’re rich if they heard his salary, but our outgoings are huge and not being spent on ‘luxury’. We have a 10 year old car and haven’t been abroad for a few years (except trips to visit family in a
non-glamorous location!)

what would probably make us ‘rich’ is that we will in the future have an expensive house as an asset and good pensions (his is more than mine, but mine is a teachers pension). And I suppose in a few years we won’t be paying nursery fees and I’ve not got the stomach for private school fees.

struggling to maintain a middle class lifestyle including the things necessary to earn management salaries like nannies, cleaners, gardeners, and online grocery delivery.

Struggling to maintain an online grocery delivery? Mine's all of £2 from Sainsburys.

People who are on lower incomes and can’t afford a holiday won’t be posting in those threads. Those threads defo seem competitive sometimes on how much money they have to spend

Quite often those struggling/on low incomes are on the COL or money matters boards asking for ways to make their money stretch and then are told to cut netflix at £5.99 a month by someone who is not rich on £££..

Rich means wealth, not income. I'm in the category of high income but bought a house in London in last few years. The interest component alone of my 2-bed ex-council house is something like £2.5k a month i.e. it's thrown away and nothing to do with wealth building. I spend a similar amount on nursery.

If we "only" earned £100k we would have literally nothing left after mortgage and nursery. As in nothing for food at all. We have no savings as it all went on the house deposit.

IF and only if we are able to maintain these salaries for another 5-6-7 years until the nursery years are over, we will finally have space in our budget to start to build wealth. (The house might appreciate, but our contributions to equity in the first few years of a mortgage won't be huge.)

We currently feel in a precarious position, because we have the potential in 10 years to be wealthy but we also have the potential for one of us to lose a job and be stuck with a massive mortgage and other debts. I also earn more than DH so our income is also subject to extra risks like my career becoming incompatible with children (many women quit around my level). We could sell, but it would be financially disastrous to be forced into it too soon given the 5-figures of stamp duty we paid.

We're obviously much better off than people on the breadline, but I feel we get judged based on this potential wealth that we don't actually have. There's a reason the "HENRY" community exists - it's a stressful time and the payoff doesn't always come!

'Mumsnet rich' depends on the framing of any given OP. You mention 6 figures, and there are lots of arguments on here about 100k given that there's a tax and nursery hours cliff edge there. So if someone posts about said cliff edge, 100k is a vast amount, but if someone posted saying they feel they have lots of money on 100k there'd soon be a load of replies about how it's not that much really.

I do understand that, after tax etc, the differences isnt anywhere near as big as you'd expect.

But having £1500 more than a household who already feels comfortable and fine is still a lot extra, it cant possibly make the poorer which us how some of these posts come across. Its not far off the entire take home pay for a full time band 2 heathcare assistant.