How much do you earn??

[Limpetsmum]

I know this sounds very rude but I just dont get how people afford private education.
My husband and I have good jobs and probably earn a take home wage of £6000/month between us ie after tax, student loans, pension etc. And that's with doing extra Hours to top up income. We both work full time and are exhausted!
Childcare comes to £2000/month. Mortgage current £1000 (but likly to go up when we move soon). Bills guessing around £600. We have no savings but have investments in property.
I would love to privately educate our kids and our combined wage will probably go up by about £1000/month in a years time - but I struggle to see how we would afford private education. I don't think we can for 3 kids.
But having said that, on paper we earn good money and I just don't get how others afford private education.
Those who privately educate - do you earn a lot more than us - or have you come into money/inheritance to fund education?
Sorry to sound so rude by asking the question but I presume as it's anonymous I might get some replies! Maybe we're just really bad at managing finances....

Take: I'm genuinely curious ( looking for tips), after school fees and mortgage, you would be left with £1k month for council tax, household bills, food, car maintenance and car tax, clothes, plus holidays - how do you do this and where how much do you spend on holidays once or twice a year for four of you?

No choice is simple. Nobody has a crystal ball. Leaving yourselves without any pension or savings, though, is a colossal gamble to take with your children's future happiness - that's a huge bill they might have to pick up for you in the future to ensure you are cared for; or a colossal burden of guilt if they don't care for you... You would have to be extremely confident your children wouldn't have been happy and getting a good education elsewhere for far less cost.

It also depends on careers. I had my first children in my 20s and I had a huge lot of confidence that my pay would go up and up and up and indeed even now I expect the years from 50 - 60 and possibly older to be the stellar earning years. So sinking money into children's education rather than pension was fine for me. Also if your children earn £100k as at least one of mine is doing is in a sense an investment in that I am sure one of the 5 would keep me in old age if that were necessary. However plenty of women earn £100k and go to state schools so might have been just the same had I not paid. I have always paid school fees as much for all kinds of ephemeral reasons as exam results and earning capacity however.

I just think the original poster is not that sold on private education and wants to spend her money on something else which is fair enough. We all make choices every day about how we spend our money.

I don't see how you can't.

Given that we are able to pay for nursery for two kids off a combined salary of £24k.

On another point however, I went to private school. As did my siblings. I wouldn't say my parents wasted their money, but let's just say. You don't avoid your children hanging out with children you rather they didn't. You just buy a better class of bully/drug taker/sexual active 14 yr olds etc etc.

Was my education better? Hmm. Honestly, I went to a state 6th form, and I'm pretty sure I would have done well anywhere. I wanted to learn. My parents instilled the value of education in me.

Save your money. Spend some time with your kids instead would be my advice. My mother was pretty horrified when, as an adult,I told her all the goings on at our lovely private school. She honestly thought that going private would mean I wouldn't go to the local 'comp' and have to deal with such things.

Look closely at the school stats in the Dept of Ed Performance Tables.

Of course there is a difference between the results of your highly selective grammar and a comprehensive - it reflects the intake. The Schools tables show you how many of the 'high achievers' in a comp get top results / achieve their potential. In a good comp the top sets are the grammar sets and their results reflect that.

You don't even know what academic ability your DC will be yet!

Save money to give you the widest range of choices when the time comes, whether this be a 'rainy day' fund against redundancy etc, a house upgrade or education.

Without seeing the whole spreadsheet of your income and outgoings, no-one else can tell you what you can afford.

Self employed here so tricky to say exactly what we earn but luckily our ( excellent) local private school is only £10k per year. Also it has no 6th form so due to age gap we will only hve to pay one set of fees at a time. I have 4 years worth of fees put aside in shares as well so should be ok. We also might get 25% bursary if DD does well enough in the entrance exam which will be nice.
We are keen for both DC to go private if possible but not if it negatively impacts the rest of the family, so if we could only afford DD fees if her younger brother gave up a hobby or we couldn't go on holiday we wouldn't do it. We are in The North and anyone on about £80k without a huge mortgage should be able to afford fees here.

DH and I gross £155k. We currently have three children in independent school - two in secondary, one in primary.

We have mortgage of £1,200pcm and car payments of £300pcm and other normal bills.

We managed a £15k holiday to Florida last summer and also I contributed £40k to my money purchase pension in 2014/15. Eldest DD took school trip to New York last January (£1.5k) and also skiing in April this year (£1.2k).

It is possible. Its down to negotiating sibling discounts, staying out of debt, carefully planning money, not being irresponsible with cash and appreciating every day the fantastic things we have. Seeing the sheer pleasure on the face of my dyslexic 11 year old when they come out of school (after years in a state primary where he was "brushed under the rug") makes it all worthwhile. Also, in two years my eldest will attend an excellent state-6th form college. In four years my middle child will do the same. So the school costs will slowly come down.

For University? Go to the Netherlands! ;-)

We are planning to start off DS at an independent school for complex reasons. We have DS2 on the way.
Our household income is about £70,000 gross annually. We have £1000 mortgage monthly. Initially it will be about £20000 annually for school + nursery + afterschool care, going up to about £25000 when both children are prep level.
We reckon we can just do it, but with a few tight years at the beginning until DH is a bit more senior and earns a bit more.
I am utterly baffled about how anyone on a lesser income could manage it. If we end up moving for work reasons and the state schools are better, we would seriously consider changing.
Scholarships round here seem to be only for secondary level and are pretty minimal, about 5-10% of fees.

You can probably do it, just need to plan and prioritise!

Just a fairness point diet, why will it be your husband who gets a bit more senior and earns a bit more. Huge numbers of women are on the same trajectory - my daughters and I as lawyers. Surely women also might earn a bit more and get more senior these days and pay school fees!

I'm name changing today and so don't mind giving figures.

Our joint income is circa £330k (gross). DH earns £105k. That basically pays the mortgage each month of £3800. My income of about £225k then covers everything else which includes two lots of prep school fees at £12k each plus extras (comes to about £2500 a month).

However up until 2 years ago our joint income was £180k. DH earning £100k and me earning £80k. The school fees were the same (although do keep in mind that most schools increase the fees every year). The mortgage was still £3800 (although we have an interest only mortgage and overpay and so we have a lot of flexibility there if we need it to take it down to £500 a month) and so things were fairly tight each month on that.

I think you can afford threes sets of fees but it will affect your lifestyle.

Jilly the reality is in most cases it will still be the husband who gets more senior and earns a bit more. You and your daughters are unusual. I have a lot of high achieving female friends and its still the case for most that their husbands earn more.

I don't know what our household income is these days but when I left work 6 years ago, our intention was to switch to private schools for high school. At that time we had a gross household income of around £100k pa and we had savings earmarked for private school of £100k. We both worked for a company with a generous bonus scheme and had saved our bonuses for a number of years to accumulate an education fund. The day schools here are just over £10k pa plus extras- we pay around £12k in total for DS. We would have used our savings plus ongoing income to fund private education (2 children).

How can anyone not know their household income? I can understand people wanting to keep it confidential but not to know it sounds a bit dangerous. We read every day on mumsnet about men leaving women for a yougner woman and the wife having no idea what the husband earns, his pensions, his assets, never seen his P60s etc. How can that be?

JillyR2015:
Well, DH and i are on the same nhs pay hierarchy but he is working full time and me part time so he makes progress up it more quickly! Hopefully i will make it eventually. Plus his job attracts more antisocial hours pay than mine; that's just our differing interest areas.

Jilly It's not dangerous in the slightest. I used to be an American citizen and after my mother died I was a beneficiary of a very large and complicated estate. For US tax reporting purposes it made more sense to completely separate DH's finances from mine. If anything, it's more dangerous for DH to not be paying attention to my finances.

I could ask DH for his salary details and I'm sure he would tell me given that we used to have joint finances, but it hasn't come up for years

Wow, this thread is an eye opener for me. I had no idea the average private school family had such a high income! I've been thinking that £120-150k would easily pay for 3 kids at even a top senior boarding school (3 x £30000 fees still leaving well above the average annual salary for the rest of life.) Should be easy surely?

I have 2 in private prep and one in attached private day nursery on take home pay of 2k a month as a single mum. But that's because I'm a teacher at the school so get 85% off fees!

I'd never really thought about private education (below average comprehensive education for me) but when I got pregnant at 19 with no father on the scene I realised I was going to need to work full time and have free child care. To train as a teacher and work in the private sector was the only possible life path I could see as being open to me.

I love, love, love the school but I wouldn't put myself in financial straits to pay for it. The education is good but we have good state schools round here too. It's all the added extras that make it worth the money imo. And that's not worth sacrificing quality of family life for.

here's an warning for you. Don't bother - didn't you read the head of Dulwich College in the Sunday Times recently?
I have now survived 6 years of private education youngest is 13 & only option is a 36k boarding school - the prep schools target place of best fit. Husband has lost his job. My advice is STAY AWAY if you can. Half the class are oligarchs/tax exiles. Still nice as kids but it has been a weird lifestyle with some of them even going to their second homes overseas for the WEEKEND. My oldest was a genius and needed stretching so we got in the system this way but he now has a scholarship for half the fees and will likely be funded fully if our finances truly go belly up. However, the youngest is just above average and it hasn't worked for him. He's not rich and not excessively clever. That's the only folks to whom it's suited. As you can tell I am ANGRY because guess what, husband has just lost his high paying job. School fees meant we didn't pay down the mortgage. I took a low paid local authority 'mum' job and now we are truly stuck with husband wanting to sell the home and rent while paying for the 36k boarding school. It is MAD. 13 year old unwilling to change his lifestyle and go to a local school as the private world is all he knows plus for boys the year of entry to senior school is of course 2 years later. Poor love and poor me and I let it continue for the sake of the kids' welfare. What kind of a muggins am I!!!

Me and DH have 4 degrees, a masters and a phd between us . We'd both went to state comprehensives.

Private education is not the be all and end all. Especially if it means huge sacrifices in other areas of your life.

manic you're not allowing for tax. A salary of £120-150k will be taxed at the higher rate, so when you subtract £90k (3 x £30k) you'll be left with much less than someone who started with a lower salary.

Eg someone earning £30k will have a personal allowance of £10 and pay tax at 20% on the remainder, leaving £26k. Someone earning £120k will have a personal allowance of zero and pay tax at 20% on the first £31.85k and 40% tax on the remainder, leaving approx. £78k. Even someone earning £150k will be left with £96k.

So you can see how subtracting £90k from the post tax figures does not leave you with "well above the annual average salary".

That's a simple example, not allowing for NI, pension contributions etc, but you get the picture.

Step, but surely your warning ought to be never rely on a husband's income as he might lose his job - women work fulltime and out earn men then you can fund 5 sets of school fees as I have done? Never put all your eggs in one basket and in fact educating girls well can mean they don't fall into dire straits or live on male earnings later in life.

Manic there is no way you would pay three lots of £30k school fees with an income of £120k, it just isn't possible unless you don't pay tax.

However not all good schools cost £30k. My DSs school was the Sunday Times independent prep school of the year a short while ago and its around £12k a year. Fees increase for the senior school but not to anything like £30k.

Women can loose their jobs too. Relying on earned income for school fees is a very precarious situation.

Jilly as you and I both know though you don't have to go to private school to be a well educated woman (although I'm sure the state schools are very different places than the school I attended many years ago).

And much as I generally agree with the things you post, there are not many women in this country who could afford to fund five sets of private school fees. Your situation is admirable but very far from typical and in fact very far from achievable for most women (and men!).

Gently most people rely on earned income for school fees though. If they didn't we'd only have about 20 private schools in the country!

Yeah most pay from earned income, same as all other outgoings.

Some have safety net of savings, investments, property or whatever. Bit not all.

Ohhhhh, yeah. Forgot about tax!

Think we must have a wide range of financial situations at our school (I don't know the ins and outs of parents' finances of course!).

We have an annual Grandparents Day where Grandparents are invited in and special events put on (cream tea, concert etc) and I think this is because so many grandparents pay or contribute to the fees so need to feel included in what is going on at the school.

But we also have many who go the Bahamas for half term and stay at the Ritz after watching a show in London even though we're only half an hour away on the train.