To think that a comfortable middle class existence is basically unattainable for the vast majority of people.

[joelm1776]

I was thinking today about how much someone would actually need to earn per year in order to have a traditionally financially comfortable middle class existence. This, to me, means having a family one parent being able to look after the kids, being financially secure and having some pleasures in one's life on a regular basis but not necessarily any extravagant pleasures ie. not having multiple holidays a year, or luxury items or fine dining meals out. I know these things are fairly subjective, but I would like to think that my judgements here are quite middle of the road. I'll show you my working:

2 parents and 2 child household

1. £17,000 per year in mortgage payments for a 3 bedroom house (average price of a 3 bedroom house in the UK is about £275,0000)
2. £8,300 per year in supermarket shopping
3. £5,500 rough estimate for running 2 cars per year (one for commuting one for short journeys) including fuel, tax, MOT, insurance and maintenance.
4. £5,000 utilities, internet and council tax for 3 bedroom house
5. £1,000 per year on clothing (£20 per person per month)
6. £2,500 repairs and long term replacement fund for house.
7. £2,000 student debt
8. £6,000 one family meal out at a mid-range restaurant per week
9. £1400 2 night out for drinks with friends per month for each parent.
10. £3,000 one week family holiday to mainland European destination per year.
11. £1,500 pocket money for kids
12. £1,200 sports clubs and gyms memberships
13. £1,500 general household items excluding clothing and food
14. £2250 large purchase fund (e.g two cars lasting 15 years each, 4 smartphones lasting 5 years each etc)
15. £2,000 saved for other contingencies

Total = £60150 net + 7.5% saved as a pension = aprox £64650
Total gross = £94000

so basically you need to earn £100K even if you don't live in London, and only the top 5% of uk earners earn around this amount and most of those people probably work in London.

I know the the mortgage figure ignores the fact that people often have equity from other properties, but that makes the calculation a bit too complex

Phew I thought I wouldn’t be able to go camping in France again 😉

have friends around instead of going out

That’s a big difference I’ve noticed, my parents & friends had dinner parties & lots of gatherings/parties at home with us dc congregating in another part of the house or garden.

My friends and I don’t do this as we don’t have the space!

And as for parking for all the cars, impossible now without a big drive as everything is permitted etc.

To set this in context I was head of science in a large comprehensive school in 2003 on 46k. That's top of the non London teaching scale (UPS3), 5 management points (now called TLR) plus one R and R point. (Recruitment and retention). Index linked to today's money that is 94k!! Exactly the figure you quoted. (Although I don't agree about 1k for clothing - too low) 6k and 1400 for meals out and drinks seems generous, but still your general point is valid.

Teachers who are currently head of science get NOWHERE NEAR that much. So this illustrates your point perfectly. We are not getting anything like what our work used to be worth. So the lifestyle is out of reach for the current generation.

At that time I was divorced with 2 kids, single income, (bugger all maintenance) childcare tax credits towards nursery fees, could take the kids away for the weekend, pay my 4 bed detached house's mortgage, have a UK holiday, legoland season tickets, children's shows at the theatre, go on nights out with colleagues etc. Alongside working my arse off in a very demanding but well-paid job.

I don't particularly like Blair and Brown but the UK standard of living was a lot better than it is now.

I agree life should progress. But pointing out that people didn't use to have those luxuries is relevant if the original premise of the thread is things are worse than before because we can "no longer afford" things that were once commonplace.

I can remember when I was young the narrative was young people wasting money on avocado toast. That was annoying because all the avocad toast you could eat wouldn't make much dent in a house deposit. And besides, avocado toast is more available than before because of global changes in farming/transportation. It doesn't make millennials better of than boomers. But if I was saying luxury foods like avocado used to be affordable but now aren't that would be incorrect

@Persephonia1966yes people spend more now on eating out etc but housing was cheaper & people often had more dc so I think whilst exact comparisons are impossible overall you can compare lifestyles.

My parents bought their large family home in their early 30s (their 2nd property) largely because they took an interest only mortgage (& luckily it all worked out) they also benefited from MIRAs & family allowance/child benefit as it wasn’t means tested. I also had some friends at school who got FSM whereas the criteria now means they wouldn’t get it.

Many things have changed

Teaching is a service industry job that hasn't seen the same increase in productivity that other sectors have. They are about as productive for every hour worked as teachers 30,50,100 years ago. This isn't because teachers are lazy/unproductive. Its because if you have a factory from 100 years ago making things, changes in technology and increased automation mean that suddenly workers are 10 times more productive then 100 times then 200. So each factory worker is "adding" more to the economy for every hour worked than before. We have had some changes in teaching methods and tech like whiteboards. But even the best teacher alive today can't effectively teach 3000 pupils in the same time it took a teacher in 1926 to teach 30 pupils.

This means you either get the Baumol effecthttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol_effect where services that rely on teachers and similar work become more expensive over time relative to other goods/services as increased productivity in other areas drives inflation. Or, you see the wages of teachers relative to inflation fall. Or, as is happening, a combination of the two effects. Education costs the government more but teachers wages haven't kept up with inflation. That's not a problem across all industries but maybe it impacts middle class women in particular since they are more likely to be in those jobs. (The wrong reaction would be to consider those jobs as less valuable because they pay less or add less value to the overall economy or are less productive. They are still very important and long term it's a problem if wages are decreasing)

My parents were solidly middle class.

Both went to university. Both travelled before I was born, living abroad for a bit.

Growing up we lived in a good area. My Dad had a senior management job at his company and was on a relatively good wage. My mum worked part time from when I was about 10. We didn't go on a foreign holiday until I was 11 and that was to visit my grandparents abroad so no accommodation to pay. We rarely got a takeaway never mind ate out - there wasn't many places to eat out locally. We had a spectrum when that came out. We had our first family computer in the early nineties and had broadband earlier than most. We had two second hand middle of the row family cars without fancy badges. They got screwed by Black Friday and Endowment mortgages so ended up working until retirement age but are now reasonably well off. And we were not badly off all things considered.

Compare that with expectations now of what middle class looks like.

Houses in the same area are astronomical. There are many more places to eat out - the shops that closed were the video store, the local hardware store, the greengrocers, the off licence, the sweetshop and several other product stores which now are covered by Amazon and the major supermarkets. A number of the pubs have gone under.

Now the idea of middle class is you go abroad several times a year, you eat out or get a takeaway regularly. You buy way more clothes (clothes are much cheaper now but this is made up for in the volume we buy). And it's way more brand intensive than even we were young. Your kids do way more clubs and they have childcare which wasn't available when I was growing up. You all have expensive devices - a laptop each and a TV in every room is standard. Never mind the subscription channels which we never had. Lots of the kids round here are tutored for various reasons (some for grammar entry, some for SATS, some to catch up, some for GCSEs). That was never a thing previously.

The expectation of what middle class is, is much much higher having peaked about 15 years ago and we are still trying to aspire to that lifestyle.

But the house prices continued to grow and the ability to maintain the lifestyle and the house has shrunk.

I don't think 'being middle class' has changed as such.

I do think there was an affluence bubble that ran out.

Lots of studies have shown this divide sits between age 44 and 48 (DH and I are on both ends of this). His school peers are all much worse off than my school peers. He's younger. If you are older than 48 you are on the right side of this. If you are younger than 44 you are on the wrong side of this. What's this about.

Well it's simple. The defining feature is whether you had purchased a property before 2008 or after. It's ALL about that economic crash. That's it. That's the only real common factor. That's why if you were working class but had a house before 2008 you could well be doing better economically than someone middle class who is younger.

But I don't think this means you have dropped class. I think it highlights what happened in the 2000s and early 2010s - there was a generation really living beyond it's means and not paying enough in infrastructure investment and we are paying the price for this. This was the era of PFI and kicking the can down the road and paying astronomical prices for the privilege of doing this. This was the era of low house building by the state. And then we wonder why the fuck we are in this mess now.

It's not rocket science. We have a census every ten years to monitor demographics and to plan from - we ignored these issues. We've barely had a large infrastructure investment in the last 25 years.

Agree with this! When I was growing up up in the 80s very few people I knew went abroad on holiday or ran two cars. Consumer goods were relatively more expensive too. Eating out in restaurants was less common, as was takeaway food.
Imo most of these things became more common in the 90s, lots of chain restaurants popping up, cheaper electronics & clothing. Easyjet & Ryanair offering cheap flights. It was the late 90s when house prices began to rise significantly too.

Class and income are different things

Today I think they are linked.

We almost live the stereotypical middle class lifestyle but can’t quite afford the holidays (2 weeks in a naice villa with a pool in the Mediterranean or Cornwall, a ski trip at feb half term, Easter at centre parcs in the uk). We don’t live in London and we do earn in the top 10% each. Absolutely couldn’t afford for one of us to sah but as the dc are at school it would be a complete waste of someone’s time. The people I know living the middle class life you see in books, tv, films etc are millionaires

We were in top 5% of household incomes but house prices were obviously much cheaper when we bought in 1999 so it was very attainable then. We also lived in a very cheap part of the country so even back then our house was half the price of where I grew up on the South coast. We couldn’t have had that lifestyle where we both grew up and knew it even back then.

But comparably looking at your figures for stuff like eating out. If it’s a decent lunch then my local carvery is £12 per head. I know where MIL lives in Surrey it’s £21 per head. I can go to my local Chinese cafe and have a really good fresh cooked lunch for £14 per head.

Never was a SAHP, DH family had his Mother at home and were an upper middle class family wit( everything on your list plus going overseas was very unusual back then plus private schooling and a housekeeper.

Yes class and income are not the same thing - but forty years ago classic middle class jobs were much higher up the ear ones scale than they are now.

Same here. I knew we are wealthy on paper but we don't live extravagantly by any means. The same goes for almost all our friends in a similar income bracket. Nobody is flying private jets, doing shopping sprees in designer stores, eating at Michelin restaurants. The "luxury" is that we don't have to budget or sacrifice one thing in order to afford another. We can buy new things and don't have to use Vinted, get second hand cars, have a side hustle etc. Private school is also fine and we book activities based on interest, not how much they cost.

I would say this is typical of upper middle class families. They're just "living life" and not splurging out for mansions, staff, nannies, clothes, gadgets etc. I feel the image of how wealthy people live is actually a social media cosplay of what lower income people think the appropriate lifestyle for 100K, 200K, 300K should be.

We bought our nice, but not exceptional, house in 1997 for £130k. By 2023's price peak/bubble, it was "worth" about £800k, and now it's dropped again, by about £150k because almost no families have the earnings locally to pay so much, unless relocating from London or affluent commuter suburbs with a ton of equity.

The 2008 price crash, followed by years of rock-bottom interest rates and quantitative easing, plus PFI and the other factors listed out by @RedToothBrush add up to the parlous state of family finances now.

We're older, but with a mid-20s DC, so we see both sides of the picture.

No they aren’t . And never have been.
You get working class people who are very rich. But not in a million years are they middle class. And many would not want to be either.
And you get many middle class people who are not well off really. But not in a million years would you call them working class.

Disagree. Of course they’re linked. There is not a perfect overlap between class and income/wealth in the UK (there is in other places) but there’s massive overlap. By in large middle class people will have more money than working class people.

@Monty36I disagree the traditional markers of middle class eg higher education, home ownership, professional job are linked to money.

Yes, a working class person can be a millionaire but their dc are often middle class.

@PancakeCloudexactly

I guess we are getting into the realms of what makes someone middle class ?
As the saying goes if a duchess marries a dustman what class is she ?

Education, not so much these days. Public school is indicative of upper middle class.
Home ownership, not so much these days. Many people own a home or are buying one.
Professional job. Depends what you mean. Barrister, consultant. Yes they earn.
But not all professional jobs do pay well. And it depends what you mean as professional.

Then there are softer things that define class. But are not dependant on any of the above.

Social mobility if it is desired I think usually takes two generations. If you are lucky. It is a difficult thing to do.

But we all have different views on these things.

It's a thread on what is considered a nice middle class life. Not on the minimum a person can get by on.

I’d consider myself comfortable middle class and spend way WAY less than have estimated !

whilst DD left home now so some things are clearly different - we never ran 2 cars , house was the odd tin of paint apart from one year when we got windows replaced , and I fell of my seat at how much in meals and drinks out ! Think you have some extra 000 s in there , your utilities etc is quite high

holidays - abroad was a rarity

you mortgage costs seem high - we had a deposit when we bought which saves a lot but even at full value you have an extra 2k over MSE calculation

See to me i think about nurses.

Some people think nurses are working class. And a single parent nurse with childcare would probably struggle tbf.

But 2 nurses in a cheaper area of the country could easily have all of this list. Especially if senior nurses. So are nurses middle class? Can they change class by divorce if they split up and became single parents?

What about generation? My older relative is a nurse on a single income but owns a 4 bed detached outright. Is she more middle class than a doctor today buying a 3 bed semi?

Middle / working class are meaningless definitions currently as noone agrees on what they mean.

@Monty36 as I said I think it’s linked to education, jobs and home ownership. When I said education I didn’t mean private, a degree is required for many professions today and uni is expensive. And the excellent state schools tend to be in areas with expensive house prices, it’s all intertwined imo.