Apparently we need a household income of 'at least' £45K a year....

[notyummy]

David Kuo, of investment advice website Motley Fool:

'The average person in the UK spends around £32,000 a year. This is made up of £25,000 on basic expenses (transport, food, clothing etc) and £7,000 on mortgage repayments.

The upshot is that the average household needs a gross salary of about £45,000 just to break even.

That is why, I reckon that the average person won't be happy unless they earn around £50,000 a year. However, it is may still be a hand-to-mouth existence.

A salary of £100,000 a year can make a huge difference. After tax, this works out at £65,310. And after average expenses, there should be around £33,310 a year left over.

Someone earning a salary of this size could retire in reasonable comfort provided they invest their disposable income carefully. They could amass a pension pot of around £550,000 after 10 years and almost £1.8m after 20 years.

Of course, this assumes that a person on £100,000 is prepared to live modestly, spend carefully and save diligently.'

Thoughts ladies??

There's even a calculator if you want here

it says the minimum for a 2+2 family is 29,200

Wow! Amazing the huge variation there is.

I used that calculator, and when I adjusted it for our actual mortgage and council tax, it suggested that we have 8.11 left over every week.

There were no columns for pensions or savings, but we are allowed a hundred quid a week for food and the same for entertainment!!! They have got to be kidding! Just as well I am cheap frugal, I suppose.

So they say that for 2 adults and 2 kids, we need 29k:

they say we should spend :

Food
107.13
Alcohol
6.49
Clothing
29.58
Water rates
5.70
Council Tax
21.66
Household Insurances
2.37
Gas, electricity, etc
20.09
Other housing costs
7.73
Household goods
18.96
Household services
9.81
Childcare
0.00
Personal goods and services
29.19
Travel costs and motoring
39.37
Social and cultural activites
104.73
Rent
71.18
Mortgage
0.0

couple of things i object to :

1. our mort, or rent, at ik is 250 per week. they only allow 71.18 2)no childcare

and for all those saying you should be saving or paying into pensions. 'we have to. we should. we have aduty to, so as not to be so selfish to expect for the state to provide for us later', where is thta provision, then ?

but its not all bad.
you get to spend £6 on a bottle of wine. weekly !!

We are about £200 a week short which explains a lot, we don't have the wine though so I'm sure it all balances out in the end

DH and I between us earn more than £45K a year (though not much more) and consider ourselves well-off, hardly scraping a living. We realise that we are very lucky to both have jobs that provide a decent income. I pay for the running costs of the house - this means EVERYTHING - and DH pays our (interest only) mortgage and saves up enough to put a big lump sum on every eyar so that we'll be paying off early. OK, we don't have doreign holidays, our one car is nearly 10 years old, I haven't bought a single item of new clothing for myself in about a year, but on the other hand we do save - and who cares about being fashionable anyway? What matters is that other than the mortgage we owe nothing on any credit cards, loans, store cards etc. - so if the washing machine dies we can replace it. We are both very well aware that we could survive on less, and we admire people who do.
£150/week on 'social activities? Pleeeeease!

Wow, they allowed us £71 per week for rent - ours is £250 and that's modest for the area we live in.

What they calculated we needed to live on is actually what my dh earns BUT after we have put in our actual spend there is a shortfall of £250 each month.

They only allowed us £71 per week in rent - ours is actually £250 and thats modest for where we live so not sure where they have got their figures from.

Oops should have previewed first!