For my husband to earn £65,000 per annum and we still can't afford to live in this bloody country!!

[winegoddess]

Mortgage has gone up, electric has gone up, 5 mouths to feed, 3 children to clothe etc etc and month after month is a bloody struggle. Am fed up with straping money together when my husband earns a good wage and we should be able to get by! I now need to search for a way of 'me' bringing in some money but with a young baby at home and 2 others at school i am at a loss as to how! Please give me some job ideas or ways to make money!!

Orm, I am in Surrey, and I would consider it a very good salary

YANBU unreasonable to moan about it tbh but I dont imagine you are sitting on the floor with no heat looking at soggy crackers and furry cheese for tea

Not joking. We both do salary sacrifice of £243 a month (saves us £80 tax) and the bill on a monthly basis is around an average of £800. (They take off the 5 x 2.5 hours for a 3+ year old during term time). Jusst done rough sums and it equals £17,000+

It is a great nursery, but not the most expensive in the area. One reason we chose it is it is on military base where DH works - in Middlesex.

I'min the North and it wouldn't pay my mortgage. But that's the point. We almost all live to the edge of our means.

It is a good income for any part of the country. I grew up in an expensive herts town and we had less than half than that and I had a happy and comfortable enough lifestyle.

But not if she has a very expensive mortgage. It's all about disposible income. Lots of people have big mortgages and now is not a good time to try to downsize.

obviously people see the figure and reflect on their own experience

i would be so incredibly delighted if i could earn over 20k that 65k seems like an incredible amount to me at the moment

i would be delighted if i could earn 15k

i can imagine thinking h (not that i have an h lol) earns 65k and we still don't seem to have enough like the op thinks

but actually writing her op i am surprised that she wouldn't have realised that her position was atypical given the national average income

I can believe the childcare figures. I am paying £300 for my DD to go to nursery 3 afternoons a week this month.

"Being unable to maintain a lifestyle you are accustomed to / have bought into in this country is NOT the same as 'being unable to afford to live in this country'."

Not easy to get out of it sometimes - yes they could (try to) sell their house. If rental prices are anything like round here the rental they could get on their house will probably be much less than the mortgage - so renting it out and them renting somewhere smaller and cheaper probably isn't an option either.

I am going to start a different thread Mumoverseas re NHS and schools

If you stick to the OP, she is not being unreasonable. With that sort of income they should be able to afford a nice lifestyle, they shouldn't be struggling to get by.
I think Salleroo had a very comprehensive list for making savings.

good idea stillenduringsurrey. FYI, I started one in education a few days ago asking for recommendations and got some helpful info from scaryteacher which I'm still researching. It may help you.

I agree with puddingeater - I said a similar thing further up thread. You get taxed far more for £65,000 as one salary than if you have combined income of £65,000.

badly worded OP. Course poeple can live on 65K. 90% of poeple manage on a lot less than that. But what rich poeple see as necesities, most poeple see as luxuries.
Holidays, cars, meals out are all luxuries. Kids 'classes' - luxury.
If DH earned 65K I'd be laughing. We'd be able to turn the heating on for starters.

And I said that you also save several ££K in childcare which is paid out of net income, but the childcare provider is then taxed on.

NMC - car isn't always a "luxury" - when we were in dire financial straits 3yrs ago had exH not had a car he wouldn't have got his job (and he applied for anything and everything at that time - 2 interviews, both for jobs that needed cars - visiting 50-60 different addresses a day on bike/foot/public tranposrt just isn't possible). Also people with disabilites, or who have children with disabilities need cars, not to mention those that live in rural areas with no/crap public transport.

FAQ do you know who you are talking to? nmc knows more than most about disabilities.

Ok, here goes.
dh earns around £20k, I earn around £6k. We pay £600pm for our rented house, not including council tax which is a further £133pm.

We're lucky that we have a wood burning stove thingy in the front room that is very economical so instead of putting the heating on, we chuck a log on that.

We get the kids school shoes from ebay. Similarly with clothes.

They eat packed lunches every day as the weekly bill for dd and ds for school dinners was £19pw.

We don't go out much. We cook nice meals at home instead and at the weekends we watch a DVD when the kids are in bed, that's our weekend entertainment.

I shop at Aldi for everything bar meat. I don't buy free range chickens anymore, sorry but they're too expensive.
We eat fish twice a week now and I try to make casseroles using cheap cuts or sausages.

We switched supplier to an online one as it was the cheapest around then. I keep my eye on that one to make sure it's still the best deal.

I enter competitions. Recently got £25worth of Amazon vouchers for taking part in a discussion on digital televisions, that will pay for ds's Christmas present.

We only buy for immediate family at Christmas and if we can handmake it (i.e the children drawing pictures and putting them all together in a scrapbook with photos for grandma) then all the better.

That's how we get by. And we can actually afford a cheap holiday once a year on that if we're careful. So it can be done, it just means rearranging your priorities and working out what is necessary and what is a luxury.

FAQ - I am disabled and dd is severely disabled. We have had to live without a car as the motability one is too expensive. So we don't go anywhere. When I want to go to Morrisons I go in my wheelchair, dh pushes dd and we hang shopping on her handbars and I have bags on my lap.
Car is a luxury to us, one we cannot afford.

Morrisons is 2 miles away btw. I'd love a car.

NMC, everyone is assuming they could live easily on it by basing it on their current outgoings. If you had a 4k mortgage,there wouldn't be much left.

mumoverseas this www.mumsnet.com/Talk/_chat/642499-Mum-Overseas-your-info-much-appreciated-re-being-abroad-for is the thread

Agree with needmorecoffee - meals out, holidays etc, they are luxuries. You don't need them. As kids we only got a holiday once a year and that was in Wales, now people feel hard done by if they don't have at least 3!
Restaurants used to be for the rich only, now people expect to be able to eat out nearly every weekend! And clothes were handed down or passed on by a neighbour, but now everything is new.

The only good thing about this credit crunch is that people have started to rethink their luxuries and spending habits. Things are no longer being thrown away but reused or passed on, that has to be a good thing.

What I'mtrying to say (badly) is that people live up to their means usually. So if you are used to a salary of 65k then you likely have a big mortgage and other hefty outgoings. The mortgage at least isn't easy to just ditch,especially in this market.

The OP has been viciously flamed here, but you know what? She has a point. I've name changed, partly because I'm chicken but partly because some people in RL know I post on here.

That's not a huge amount different from what I earn, and I end up paying nearly a third of it in tax. In order to earn that wage I have to live within commuting distance of London. DW is a SAHM.

4 years ago we bought a wrecked 2-up 2-down cottage in a decent area but around the corner from an estate. It cost 225k on a 90% repayment mortgage. We are not near to any decent schools, and we've spent 4 years COMPLETELY redoing the house ourselves - no workmen bar plumbers and hard stuff. We pay £1,400 p/m on the mortgage, which is nearly half of my take-home pay.

We don't have cable TV, we run an old car (bought from Ebay for very little money), we don't have holidays to speak of, we have no debt that we have to pay back. No big telly, gadgets, city-breaks, nada. I keep a motorbike for commuting because it's cheaper than the £200 p/m I'd have to pay on the train.

We do okay - have a bit of savings, etc., but only by virtue of having to live very carefully and not make any discretionary expenditure that we haven't budgeted for. We have to think twice before going to a film, dinners out are a long distant memory and we're going to run out of space in this little house in the next year or so when child #2 arrives.

It annoys the hell out of me - I'm lucky enough to be pretty good at something quite lucrative, I do long hours and I see very little of my wife and child. I KNOW that's a good wage for almost anywhere in the UK (bar Chelsea, I suppose ) - but I'm still living in a tiny cottage in a poo location. I don't understand how people do it - HOW can every house in London cost > 350,000!? How do people afford them!?

And people ask the OP "do you have a 5 bedroom house and a 4x4?" Hah!!! Pish. Pffff.