To think it’s unlikely £300k is the median household wealth in the UK

[Justacigarette]

saw this on Facebook: apparantly the telegraph are saying that median UK wealth is £300k per household.

From who I know personally, i find this so unlikely. Sure; some people do have wealth over this amount; no doubt about it. But I know many many more people who have a lot less

Just think, the full state pension by itself has a PMV of £240k per worker.

And that's one of the reasons we cannot afford it, the vast majority do not pay enough tax for the state pension & free healthcare.

@Bumblebee72 but why would you think the average public sector worker would have a pension well over 20k?

The final salary schemes pretty much all closed 20 yrs ago

I agree that house prices will have a significant contribution to this.

Also, it says the median is less than £300k. 20p is also less than £300k 😉

Sounds right to me.

It doesn't have to be for the numbers to work, Even in the average public sector pension is £10k that a £250k plus a bit of property, a car, doesn't make £300,000 look unreasonable.

My understanding is that households are split roughly 1:1:1 rented, mortgages, owned outright. Given that the last group tend to be older and more likely to live in more valuable houses (bought when much more affordable) this figure sounds feasible. It’s somewhat immaterial though because it’s not a liquid asset.

"Sure; some people do have wealth over this amount; no doubt about it. But I know many many more people who have a lot less"

Yes.....that is how averages work!

Not to mention "people you know" doesn't automatically extrapolate to "representative proportion of the UK!"

What's more likely, that the FINANCIAL TIMES has completely fucked up/misrepresented their stats (bearing in mind the figure for 2020-2022 was £293k so the new one seems entirely in line and hardly anomalous) or a random MN user with a close personal circle of less than 0.00005% of the UK population isn't completely representative?!

I wish people would look beyond the ends of their noses and accept many people have very different lives to them, Just because something is YOUR norm doesn't mean it's THE norm

Im in Scotland; so for the majority of the population, equity in their house would be a
lot lower than it is in the Southeast or London. For example the average house price is less than £200k. And many are not home owners (or have paid their mortgage off)

salaries of £300k are very rare: possibly the top 5% of the population: so you’re seeing this from a completely different angle

one thing I hadn’t considered was the pension pot of those on defined benefits (for example, my husband has a DB pension), so I wouldn’t have even included that in our net worth.

Equity in a property is the one enrage if it’s value that belongs to you, not the amount you have paid so far. It is what you’d have in your pocket after repaying any remaining mortgage if you were to sell it.

Wow, calm down.

Well a very large proportion of public sector works will be on the civil service pension scheme which makes it very easy to accrue large amounts (although it's given as a set amount yearly not as a "pot.")

For example I worked for 4 years in a job with csp. Despite only earning about an average of £27k over those 4 years that pot is already worth nearly £5k a year - so if I lived for another 20 years after retiring that's £100k just from that one, not particularly well paying job. That's at today's money of course, I won't actually be able to claim it for another 30 years but its supposed to increase in line with inflation.

Calm down?
Literally what about my post wasnt calm? Did I shout at you? Swear? Call you names?
I'm horizontal in my pjs right now if I were any more relaxed I'd be dead!

If you can't provide a reasoned or intelligent response you can just say nothing, you know. There's no reason to pretend the other person is irate just because you can't think of a rebuttal!

Property wealth is surely a huge part of that, especially in the SE? Round here you won’t get a three bed semi for less than a million, so even on a 90% LTV mortgage that’s £100k equity, and you would expect that to go up as more gets paid off. An aging population means a higher proportion of people with properties they have had time to pay more of the mortgage on (and therefor will have more equity), with pensions they have had years to pay into, etc.

You are being rude. You don't have to swear to be rude. All those exclamation marks, capitals, multiple questions, interrobangs.

the overuse of upper case and exclamation points gives the impression you are very much not relaxed.

plenty of people have disagreed on this thread, but don’t appear to be so worked up about it as you appear to be from your writing style.

Yes, quite.

London alone has nearly twice the population of Scotland. Scotland makes up less than 10% of the UK’s population. So it’s hardly surprising that London and the wider South East dramatically drag up average wealth figures.

This thread has gotten out of control!

it’s clear a lot of people aren’t used to looking at statistics. Don’t go back to the source when they see an article and assume it must be wrong because it doesn’t match their experiences.

people are still debating whether the office of national statist could be wrong and speculating about what might and might not be included. Instead of looking up facts, some people are throwing numbers around and just making stuff up.

OP acknowledged they didn’t really research this at all, just assumed it must be wrong. Now they have looked at the source they see how this is actually true (so no need to sack the statistician or journalist

Yeah, absolutely. I’m just explaining my point of reference: where I am in Scotland, house prices are fairly low comparatively. I’m not sure I know many people earning £300k after tax.

But it's not about earning. It's wealth.

I probably have about £300,000 in equity in my house, with a mortgage of about £130,000.

I don't earn anything near £300,000 pa. I would love to! I could pay off the mortgage in a year.

I also have a meagre pension pot.

I earn enough to pay my bills every month, and have a little left over for emergencies.

My 'wealth' will only kick in if I downsize, and then will go into the lack of pension.

You are confusing income and wealth.

I'm not confusing income and wealth on this one: @Libellousness had mentioned that she knows people who clear £300k a year net; that is referring to income rather than wealth

Earning £300,000 is income.

Your original post said wealth.

The “earning £300k after tax” is a response to Libellious mentioning that she knows people who earn £300k after tax: she was referring to income and that’s what I was replying to.

Yes, the original post is referring to £300k wealth which is completely different to £300k income. I’ve not confused the two at all.