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!!

and if you are a sahm or a worker who can use public transport and doesn't need a car for their job, then a car is a luxury too.

Ah custy, are you also slightly agreeing with me that £65k isn't fuck off rich? eg you don't have loads left over every month on that? Or have I misread you?

Computer + broadband is a necessity in order to fully participate in the information society. Governments in developing countries put access to the internet for all right up on their agendas, along with basic education.

I think it's the mortgage that skews everything. I can't beleive the sums that people on this thread are paying! Truly shocking! We simply couldn't pay anything like that much. What confuses me is that no-one I know (here on in London or in any part of the UK) has the sort of mortgate that you lot are talking about. I suppose that's because we all bought years ago and haven't constantly upgraded.

We live in a small house, needs lots of work done on it.... and it's in Somerset (ooh ahh..chews straw and tightens twine belt whilst goggling at incomers ).

And it's more or less fine. A new house is something that we'd buy when we inherit (if) or win the lottery. I prefer to have more disposable income and security TBH.

I live in the south east - does that make me posh then

am totally about a 4K a month mortgage, even if i could afford that much the stress would put me in an early grave...shit does happen, people are made redundant, i honestly think that would fry my head. I guess i am pretty niave, but when i look at the really lovely houses that clearly cost 750K or more, i pretty much assume that the people who live there have either

• played the property lottery and won
• inherited it
• have what i call "old" money
• are dodgy car/drug/antique dealers (joke)

I never really think, "fuck me" imagine what their mortgage is - We have a £110 mortgage and we barely manage that, but that is our own personal problems really, but 4K?? I wouldnt be able to sleep at night, i don't care how lovely a place is. Our mortgage is about £800 a month, our house is low end of market material so i do appreciate that there will be higher mortgages, but 4k???? 4K????

Bloody Nora , this is not a judgemental post, just a bloody shocked one

Orm, the "Years ago" bit is the relevant bit!

Years ago I bought in London (1997) and EASILY bought a 2 bed flat on my income alone at far less than 3 x salary. Impossible now, pretty much.

House price inflation has skewed everything, I agree.

MadCreamLady, to add to your list, had heady bonuses. People who buy £700K homes at current market prices could be in the bracket that earn nice bonuses in the good times which takes big chunks off their mortgage each year, if they were wise enough to use them to pay down the mortgage. Likely to be a thing of the past though.

I'm sorry but yes the idiots that took out 5 x their salary mortgages or remortgaged do need to burn with the banks otherwise nothing will be learnt. Is it ok for those people to be saved but those who were prudent to loose their savings in inflation, for the 20 year olds to have to sell their souls to the devil to afford a shoe box along with their £30k of student debt ?
It's a case of a small amount of pain now for the long term good, we need house prices to fall back to three times your salary.

WM - lovely welcome back and you are editor of this thread now I remember why i stopped posting just lurk - MNetters like you deter posters

Do you look at what you spend & know how much things cost? Mean this reasonably as once you start looking at prices on everyday things it is easy to reduce your spend.

i dont understand baubleblueeyes post

Yes re three times rule and i was always taught to nver commit more than two thirds of your salary in total outgoings and you ideally you supposed to save three to six months salary in case of emergency

Ah, i can see this has moved on to necessity v luxury. That is really interesting.

Anna has said about computors and internet not being a luxury and actually, i tend to agree - we use ours for our business, such as it is, but we still need it. Then of course there is mumsnet , an evil necessity.

Car? I guess it depends where you live, if you can get to work on public transport, but yes, in some circs a luxury.

Dishwasher?? Are you MAD? absolute essential.

Sky or broadband? For me, a total luxury, ive never had either, dont want either really so my attitude towards that comes out of my not really wanting it. Some might, but i still think its a luxury.

Washing machine - nuff said

Tumble dryer - luxury, ours broke, we manage, although DP is nagging that we need one, im determined not to cave in. They are cheap enough to buy but too dear to run.

Central heating/adequate heating - essential

decent shoes for the children - essential, i only buy startrite/clarks or equivalent, even though sometimes i have to borrow to do so.

New clothing - luxury, i buy from charity shops and quite enjoy the challenge (its like my little hobby).

Holidays, hmmmm, now this is one i hesitate on - i was going to say luxury, but im not so sure actually. We have had our problems, finances nearly caused us both to break down - we did a SUN holiday (thankyou again chippy) and i try believe it saved our relationship, things have been so much better between us since then - so, no, not a luxury actually - it of course depends on the holiday.

Activities for the children - somewhere in between luxury and essential i think. My DD does ballet and adores it, i was really loathe to start it but she enjoys it so much - I don't think i would do anything else though.

Computor games - luxury (or are they?)

TV?? Id rather do without this than my computor, but Silent Witness is finished and i feel bereft, i got two doses of eye candy for the price of one there. Fecking crap story lines though

Meals out - luxury (we do this too much)

Take away - luxury, although they are never really that nice so its weird referring to them as a luxury

Nice bubble bath - essential for my sanity

hair cuts - luxury

oh and the list goes on and on....

Katie, i agree with you but i don't think it is going to happen, the problem if they go back that far is there is going to be a plague of negative equity - i am glad im not gordon brown

If Northen Rock had gone to the wall so would have HBOS which includes egg, intelligent finance,halifax.
As it was 3 weeks ago people were withdrawing money like crazy from these banks.

As blu has said it would not have just taught the imprudent a lesson. It would mean thousands of people losing their live savings. I don't think that is acceptable to teach someone a lesson.

But we are missing the bigger point. If there is a run on the banks the whole system collapses, governments just can't let it happen. There is no liquidity and no business, the country would go into freefall.

winegoddess,your dh should come over to Repubic of IRELAND doctors here get paid loads more than 65000 a year

Around 8 years ago, my dh got somthing like £65k redundancy. Sadly after tax we had around 48k. Because of a major family trauma, we both decided to take some time out of work and we used the money to enable me to stay at home for 5 years and dh took 8 months off. It was a great thing which I don't regret in terms of , my children needed me t be at home with them...
But we have been playing catch up ever since financially. gosh, when I think how that much money would transformour lives now...just to have that for one year.
I am deeply envious - but doesn't mean I want to slam the OP.
OP, I hope you stick around and I hope you find a way to bring in some money too. There is nothing worse than feeling like something is out of your control...ditch the holiday, go find a job, and that will take away some of your anxiety.

filthy, that is a great post i kind of hope the OP sticks around too.

Isn't it in freefall anyway if business' are running on debt ?

no www. you have misread me! its fuck off rich!

People's saving are frankly useless anyway, look at Germany in the 30's people were using currency as toilet paper because inflation was so high.
God forbid it gets that bad but the bubble will burst, it should have happened in 2005, interest rates were cut, sigh of relief alround. However all it did was inflate the bubble further and i'm sorry but when it goes, it's going to be nasty.

Katiedd, debt in certain forms is healthy and necessary. Like overdrafts to tide over peaks and troughs in cash flow. Mortgages and loans to acquire property and other assets (but not at silly income multiples that are ultimately not repayable). It is called leveraging, which has a risk attached to it, but used wisely is a sensible way to invest and increase your assets for future generations.

i think it has already busrt don't you?

agree, we are already on the down side of the cycle. But we are not in freefall (last I checked).

The average person in the street has no idea about healthy rise and leveraging, that's best left to those who do understand what they are gambling with not JOE BLOGGS who wants a roof over his families head (or hers).
If you ask most people would they gamble with their family home the answer would be no and yet anybody who bought in the last 5 years has done just that.
As for overdrafts etc, no they are a bad idea too.
A rainy day pot to cover the cars MOT used to be the norm, now people HAVE to put it on their credit cards, so they are slaves. Next time you go to Tesco's just look around at how people are paying for their food shopping, I was floored at the number of credit cards coming out of wallets. We maybe the internet literate looking at MSE for the best deals and shopping around, clearing the debts every month but at the CAB you cannot get an evening appointment for 9 weeks in an affluent area and it's all debt management cases.
The point is that we now have a bought electorate who will do as they are told because they cannot live without their tax credits, we have debt slaves who will work until they drop because they can't save for pensions and will never clear their mortgages, the next generation have £30k of student debt before they even start out in life.
The worlds gone mad, mad I tell you