is this a reasonable amount to live on?

[ilovehens]

Or would it be classed as a small amount?

£20,280 (net) for a family of four - 2 adults and 2 children under 12.

This is after small housing costs.

Just want opinions really.

katy I just want to say how much I can identify with the feeling of being conned. I did the same - did everything "right" and yet I'm suffering because of it. I honestly think I'd be happier if I had no career - less financial stress, less career pressure, and I could focus on being a mum which is what's most important to me now.

Tbh I need to stop being a crabby cow and focus on what I do have rather than what I don't. And perhaps look at solutions rather than problems. I have totally hijacked this thread with my whinging.

Poor kc but who picks teaching for the pay etc> Why didn't you become a banker or a lawyer or an equity partner in Enst & Young? I remebmer aged 14 being in the luibrary borrowing a book called "what people earn". nothing stopped any other mumsnetter doing that if they were that way inclined. So why did I and others didn 't? It's fine if people want a low income but they do need to realise being a teacher has always been a low paid vocation for people not into money.

Also being home with children under 5 if you have 3+ is very very hard work and not much fun and I think most adults, male and female who work would not be happier at home covered in sick etc with no job or income prospects. They may think they would be but they wouldn't be and their depression levels would be even higher.

Sick pay... I get zero from the second I fall sick. Private sector people who aren't self employed as I am and aer not feather bedded pubilc sector workers get no pay at all for the first 3 days off sick.... wow - I wonder how the public sector would feel if they had to learn how the other half lives.. and then SSP after day 3 and SSP is much lower than many wages. Thsi is the sort of thing we need to reintroduec into public sector workers' packages and then they will skive off sick a lot less. It will make huge savings.

Most people aern't clever enough to get the A levels a doctor needs etc so they have end up as nurses or road sweepers etc and plenty have no interest in money and are happy on low incomes - this thread shows some who are and some who aren't. My point is if you're happy poor as loads of people are then that's absolutely fine. If you're unhappy then why pick low paid jobs in the first place?

It's an important issue for our children too. I am delighted with the differences between all my childern and genuinely would be happy if one were a contemplative hermit and another ran BP or whatever but what I do hope I can show teenagers is that one choice leads to XYZ consequences. It's ensuring they aren't blinkered - that they don't think XYZ is a good job because you get a company car or free clothes which I've heard said by they or their friends before now when free cltohes because you work on a fashion magazine on £14k a year might not actually be quite so good a perk as if you owned the magazine and earned £20m a year - no free clothes then but perhaps you could then afford to buy your own etc etc

Targetting low paid public sector workers really gets me angry, and references to them being sick as skiving is just so offensive. Most are monitored so strictly and on disciplinary procedures if they are sick twice in a fiscal year. I know of one who was sacked for poor attendance due to being ill, and turned out he had cancer. The employer should have sent him for medical assessment, but even though they know they got it wrong, he won't get his job back. He doesn't want a payout. He wants his job that he happened to be good at. And fortunately he is responding to chemotherapy...

Anyway, the blame the low paid worker is just the most ridiculous argument. So predictable.

I think you're slightly delusional about poor and choice Xenia.

Where I grew up a nurse is pretty well off: minimum wage is a norm. So getting to that level is imo different in terms of how uch aspiration is required than if you are born to two professionals and decide to go for a lower salary.

Financial aspirations I mean: I know a Dr who retrained as a nurse as he hated the medical 'dismissive' culture (his words not mine- obv. he is far from the norm.

And choice- I got 100% in my A-level equivs in half the ti e of usual: firstto ever manage that. My choice was Bristol with unaffordable housing and poor schools, or elsewhere with lesser Universitit status and decent housing / schools. I still desperately wish I accepted Bristo's offer to apply for their Social Policy degree (on recommensation from a turot) but know it was right.

Ah feck off Xenia. Most of the teachers I know (and I was one for a long time) got fantastic A levels. I could have easily become a doctor or a lawyer on my grades, but chose instead to become a teacher.

On the other hand, I was still teaching when the first wave of newly redundant bankers came through their PGCEs. Not one of them had the wit or intelligence to cope with a teaching career. None of them lasted beyond the first three months. Yet they all came in with the assumption that you don't have to be too bright to teach.

DH, who works in a career aligned to medicine, considers most medics to be quite unintelligent really. His comment (borne out by a friend of our who is a GP) is that a medical degree and training is a bit like having to sit 50 GCSEs.

PAH!!!

Katycarr and others, I feel the same way as you sometimes, but if conditions get really tough, those that are already used to providing for themselves rather than relying on the state will be less vulnerable.

So vegasm because he took those earlier decisions to earn a lot there is no mortgage and now he benefits from that.

Yes, in many parts of society the teacher is a very clever miss who earns a fortune. I accept taht but it's all relative. To get to a teacher from some environments and indeed a nurse is a huge achievement but I just want people to know that there are some jobs where you earn X and some Y and decisions taken by their children in their teens will determine whether or not when their chidlren are 30 they are struggline to pay for childcare or not able to give up work without a mortgage and write music or whatever simply because they chose teaching over business or nursing over being one of our leading surgeons or whatever it is.

I do know a lot of rich scientists but they went into business. I work with scientists quite a lot. They are very clever. They get things right away and plenty aren't into mnoey. This is my point. If you aren't bothered about what you have then there's no issue at all. Happiness does not correlate to whether you have much money although my Dickens' quote above I'm sure still stands over 100 years later. But if you are or will be... and the will be is the thing - young people dont' always think ahead and we all change as our lives develop , then people might regret some choices made.

It is though much easier to qualify as a teacher than some professions. Teachers always have this over inflated view of their own importance which is ridiculous looking outside in on them. I think it's because they reign supreme over their own little world/class room and think they're the bee's knees but of course as in our culture your pay values you we know housewives are worth nothing and teachers very little. Your worth in a sense is determined by your pay.

Anyway I must go, earn some filthy lucre.

I agree with nyou there on most things (although a good teacher is important!. The poor teachers who directly ahrmed my chances as a child (eg by deciding girls from the estates could only fo typing and lesser mscience rather than the 3 straight sciences I wasnted and my gardes deserved) were compensated forr in great measure by the great ones- wg the 'lesser' human bio science teacher who relaised what ahd happened and let me elad classes at 14. The English lit teacher who pro,moted the itnerests of the mediocre student with large breasts and a c average was firmly beaten in my eyes by the one who let me study orwell over banal set texts a few years later.

Having SN kids emans you get to learn whcih teahcers are great and which not- not so much by their outcomes so much as their willingness to work with a child as an individual- ds3 was written off at 4 but is now reading (betterthan his 9 year old sibling) and starting to write at 6.5. A good teacher inspires children to meet their own ability levels: a poor one deals only with the middle level.

The same could be said about lawyers Xenia. The problem with teaching is everyone has spent some time in a classroom. To the untrained eye it looks easy. The tendency is to think "I could do that". The reality is, in fact, very far from that.

The attitude that what you are paid defines what you are worth is a curious one. I used to get it from students all the time. They couldn't understand why anyone with a first class degree would bother in a poorly paid profession like teaching. They were the Thatcher generation though. None of them could quite get to grips with the concept of working in a job you enjoy rather than in one that pays a lot.

In my experience its the lawyers and bankers (and to a lesser extent doctors) who live in a strange little bubble. They have this self fulfilling prophesy that what they do is important, which is why they get paid so much, and since they get paid so much they must, by implication, be impoortant. But, come the revolution, and the lawyers and bankers are the first up against the wall, would anyone actually notice when they are all gone?

DH is a scientist. Gets paid diddly squat. When the team he is working with develop the gene therapy for cyctic fybrosis, will he be lauded and well paid? Probably not. Will he be considered as being "worth" something to society? Probably more than the lawyers who spend their time advising their companies how to aviod tax.

I am managing with a large house, no housing costs but all bills, food etc for myself 2 adult aged dependent children and a teenager,a dog and a cat on far less. I would feel rich with an income like yours.

Slug, at risk of stating the obvious, it's market forces.

Clients are willing to pay a lot for lawyers and bankers' services. So lawyers and bankers can earn a lot.

Teachers are (mostly) paid by the state. The state can't pay lots to teachers as it's spending taxpayers' money which is limited (especially at the moment).

Nobody, I'm sure, thinks lawyers are "worth more" than teachers. It's just that their employers can afford to pay them more.

Those who choose to go into teaching (or any other less well paid job) make that choice knowing they will earn less. Some people would love to be teachers, but choose to be lawyers so that they earn more.

Ah, here's sort of teacher to respond! DH teaches and I did. Managing as SAHM, bread on table and clothes, mostly for children, a few treats and a British holiday. I however refuse point blank to accept that teaching is low paid. Sorry. I wouldn't say no to more but I'm not campaigning either. And the problem with Xenia's argumant is that as an impressionable teenager who hung on the words of the careers teacher I would have definitely gone for money had I been told to. God knows where I'd be then. But not in my current life and I would be unsuited to being in a business environment. I resolutely refuse to define anyone by their pay. I put it to a well paid (and proud of it) friend that we're bioth good at our jobs just one gets more financially rewarded. But yes I am envious sometimes of slightly larger disposable incomes, but I also am wary of what else might come with it - certainly not the amount of holiday (yes dh works some of it but still).

It's interesting though. Why are we prepared to pay more for lawyers than the education of our children? Is it because we are conditioned to believe that "anyone can teach"?

Just something I'm pondering at the moment (no longer teach) as I watch the university I work in pay a hundred grand for the licence to use an IT system while simultaneously fail to find the money to pay the people to run it.

Should add, of course I recognise that there are many who don't have the choice at all and are only able to get a lower paid job.

i think that is an ok amount but i can see it would eb a struggle. we seem to expand to fit our earnings - we used to have very little and have worked our way up in our jobs etc. when first had kids we lived on one salary of £22k per year. Now earn around £100k per year but still look forward to pay day! Have bought a house though in the interim so have an enormous outlay each month with the mortgage, but yes, it is all relative and we have voted for the government we have got, they were quite clear on cutting tax credits etc and lots of people still voted for them so I suppose that is the downside of democracy - Sometimes my team loses!

i think that is an ok amount but i can see it would eb a struggle. we seem to expand to fit our earnings - we used to have very little and have worked our way up in our jobs etc. when first had kids we lived on one salary of £22k per year. Now earn around £100k per year but still look forward to pay day! Have bought a house though in the interim so have an enormous outlay each month with the mortgage, but yes, it is all relative and we have voted for the government we have got, they were quite clear on cutting tax credits etc and lots of people still voted for them so I suppose that is the downside of democracy - Sometimes my team loses!