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!!

oooh those squirrels
many a happy hour spent there

yes you are in the right area

I have gone brunette for that reason amongst many can drive my Audi without feeling like i'm letting the side down.

and yes when I worked in the 'next village', at school pickup time the road was blocked by 4x4s!

To be honest I think the OP is being ridiculous and unreasonable.

The thing that is ridiculously aggravating is the sense of entitlement that the OP seems to have - an entitlement not to work when in fact work is the normal lot for people. You have no entitlement not to work simply because your DH earns an above average salary.

You seem to feel somehow diminished by needing to "search for a way of 'me' bringing in some money". Why on earth shouldn't you work? Either work or scrimp. Those are the logical alternatives.

But what if her work means that the childcare for her 3 dc is more than her income?

Then that would be ridiculous.

We pop over just for a nose sometimes. When we were house hunting we sometimes put it into righmove with a minimum price of 500k and there would be about 15pages above that! Some beautiful houses, though many are ugly new builds with gates. No need to guess who they're built for!

I'd feel so poor if we lived there.

Quattro - The OP has three children. Perhaps they are very young. And also you don't know whether her husband has to do out of hours work, on call work etc.

i dont get a lot of mumsnetters attitude towards people who earn a decent wage

if the ops dh worked his bollocks off since the age of 14 whilst most of his mates were out partying and so on and so on until the age of 23 when he eventually starts earning - then does he not deserve a good wage

unpopular opinion i am sure...

Quattro - she is asking what sort of work can she do. You are being horribly unsympathetic - unlike you.

You get state benefits with an income of £60,000 so it can't be that luxurious, can it?

Winegoddess, I feel for you. You came on with a valid question which you should have been allowed to ask without getting flamed. I don't earn as much as you but I dont earn as little as some other posters. I can't decide whether to cringe or be green with envy when I read threads on nanny/au pair problems, private schooling etc. so I choose not to. I think MN is great in that it seems to encompass many diverse groups of people. You should not be made to fell you are too rich to have a worry. Birth announcements sit cheek by jowl with miscarriage stories. People worry about accidentally falling pregnant under the same heading as people who have been trying to conceive for years. We cannot always be sensitive to what everyone else thinks. We do that in real life and that is why we have screen names here. You came on looking for similar people to yourself to answer an honest question and I am sorry that is not what you got. Please don't go. Namechange and we'll see you again.

I agree with WWW, except she has forgotten champagne and pomerol as basic human rights.

WWW - where does one buy proper Harissa in t'cuntry? And I mean stuff from North Africa, not some crap from Schwartz or Bart Spices, which is a bit red. Am finding it a drag trolling up to Fortnums for mine, but have at last found a shop that sells Merguez, so am no longer smuggling kilos of the things back from Brux on Eurostar!

I acknowledge that many women cannot earn enough to fund childcare - although the OP has claimed that "we study hard at school, college and university to get a good job. we then work hard to progress our careers to provide a better quality of living for our families and children".

Either the OP is well educated and has saleable skills, in which case she can work and pay for a bit of childcare. Or she isn't in which case she has two options - the first is working around the children and the second is to downsize and manage on the household income she has.

I simply don't understand whingeing about money in this situation,

Quattro - and what do you think the realistic chances of being able to downsize in this current climate?

They would have to be able to sell their current home before doing that..........

I do agree Swedes that £65k isn't a king's ransom and that in London or the South East you'd have to do a bit of scrimping to buy your own house. Sorry to sound unsympathetic but there are lots of women who simply can't work and don't have a reasonable salary to provide the basics.

Quattro - We all know there are others who are worse off. I think Mumsnet is for allcomers.

wtf is harissa paste???

my first flaming on mn was for a similar point wg. Quattro I disagree. If you need full time childcare, I have worked out that I would need to earn 70k to break even.
I think it is a fair question: why , if I have worked hard at school, university and beyond , 'done everything right' you expect at least by your mid 30s to reap the rewards and feel comfortable. I found the most recent posts by wg a little right wing and frankly daft, but I don't think the original question was unreasonable. She openly acknowledged that 65k is a large salary.

Ladies, you can make your own harissa paste: there is a good recipe in tamasin day lewis.

LOL at ronaldinho the acronym queen. I have just made a nice cup of coffee - you fancy one?

I'd try Waitrose for Harrissa paste, they even have it in the Cornish branches. failing that Mrs S, they have it in GB in Tervuren and at Stonemanor.

I love the way that people who the OP's husband is subsidising via tax credits and benefits are being really vile to her.

Some of us aspire to more than living in a caravan and foraging for blackberries....

Good harissa paste is hard to find. Homemade is generally better unless you have a specialist shop nearby.

Blackberries make excellent jam, but to be honest I can never be faffed with getting a thermometer to do the temperature check, so I tend to just buy mine.

What was this thread about again?

'£65k is fk all if you live in London, frankly. '

This is what I don't get. There are millions of poeple living on London on 24K or below. The guy selling newspapers, nursery workers, the list goes on and on. Course you can live in Lodnon on less but you might have to forget the holidays and nannies.
Basics don't cost more do they? Like food and electrcity? TRanposrt is cheap compared to most cities - kids are free on buses, bus fares are stupidly cheap when compared to other cities. And its warmer so less heating required.

Millions of people living on 24k or below will be paying less tax and will probably be eligible for tax credits etc..

When you are being stung for huge amounts of tax every month, have to pay the full whack for school meals, dental bills, prescriptions, are paying back student loans that you took out in order to finance the higher education that you did in order to get a 'good' job, have to pay subscriptions to a professional body just so that you can do your job then it can be a struggle.

We don't earn 65K - we earn 45K and for the past 6 months we have been living hand to mouth. All our clothes are second hand, we have the heating on evenings only, we run a 15 year old car, don't go out, haven't had a holiday for ages... If we were working on the till in tesco I could accept having to live like a pauper - but my DH is a highly skilled professional who works damned hard, and TBH it's pretty fucking galling.

yes, but the money they have 'left' is way less than someone on 65K has left, even with tax credits.
We are on just over 15K and don't get free school meals (we are 50 quid over what is required) so every morning I have to cook soup for dd as I can't afford school dinners.
Don't pay back the student loan cos don't earn enough.
And my DH is a scientist with a PhD - he just can't work more than an hour a week (to keep his job open) but when he was on 35K a few years back I felt rich. We had a car. Could put some heating on and even went camping.
Save on dental bills by never going and the doc gives me prescriptions but I just bin them.

So 65K is a great deal of money and more than 95% of the population earns.
Course, if you think you should have foriegn holidays and new cars and new clothes then you should change your thinking.

And when you are already living as lowenergylightbub described and you find your mortgage is about to come to the end of its discount period leaving you £100s of pounds out of pocket then you have EVERY right to complain about it.