£150k debate - the sequel

[Twinklemegan]

Here you go.

Ah now I will confess that I would really love a sportscar. We have 2 very ordinary low-end of the market cars - dh's is the smallest. Dh had the choice of a much nicer company car or a travel allowance and he took the money. I suppose that was very sensible of him but....

We have no savings but I won't have creadit cards or credit agreements apart from the mortguage and cars. My parents died in a lot of debt and I have a horror of credit. Owing money makes me feel ill.

DH earns a big salary now and he always buys really expensive luxurious things for himself and for us. He wants to very best of everything. I've come to realise this is because despite coming from what I'd deem a pretty wealthy family, he had bugger all as a kid.

His Xmas presents were socks and pants (and still are, I kid you not). He had to save his pocket money to pay for a pair of glasses. It wasn't that his parents were trying to teach him to respect money it was because they were tight fisted and mean. So now I am sure he does this to fulfil some need from childhood. (Still it's very nice for me to get posh pressies).

Funny how growing up poor affects people differently. Dh grew up very poor and now has a good salary. He STILL has a very frugal nature though and tends to go for the cheapest option with me trying to persuade him to factor in the quality-for-money angle. He's not mean - just frugal and always out for a bargain.

Dh the opposite. His parents, like pickupthismess's pils, are the meanest people alive. Dh had nowt. Mil is draped in the finest clothes, jewellery, etc etc.

Dh is the biggest spender of ALL TIME. If he earns a pound, he'll spend a pound and a penny. I have to come up with all sorts of schemes for hiding money because if he senses there's even £50 spare, it'll be burning a hole in his pocket.

It's had the effect of making me into a miser because I'm always afraid that dh'll land us in the poor house.

I think it is as much a nature thing as a nurture one - in my family, my Dad is careful, my mum as profligate. I am careful, my sister is profligate (on less money!) and my bro is tight. .
We didn't have much spare money growing up but we never really went without - I still managed to go horseriding fortnightly, even if I only had 2 pairs of jodhs and 3 pairs of boots (size 1,5 and 8!) between ages 7 and 15!

pagwatch...I'm the same with a crappy old car.
It does, but my brother goes on and on on how I should buy a nice new one.
Why?
I only use it once a week, the rest of the time it's a drive ornament.
I'll buy a new one when it cronks, but yes, in our social circle there are people who would buy a new car, even if they went into masses of debt so that they could say "I've got a blah blah car".

I am frugal, my brother is not.
He earns 4 times what I do and has 4 times the debts...

Perhaps the reasons for growing up poor are also important. Dh's parents were/are not at all mean - they were just genuinely very poor with 9 kids (bit more comfortable now).

I think it's also his nature though.

As a point of information: I saw an audit of various professions once that showed that the level of intelligence, education and training needed to become a nurse in todays high-skill medical arena is at the sam level as an accountant.

And having spent the morning watching our highly skilled and experienced professional nurse negotiate the protocols and politics to steer the house doctor into doing what needed to be done, (including pharmaceuticals, complicated teatment etc) I am in awe of specialist nursing staff. There is NOTHING of the hattie jaques with a bed pan about it. It is a highly demanding an skilled profession.

(DS is in the middle of a complex orthopaedic procedure and has broken his ankle as a suplementary complication)

Funny that. My ex-nurse turned successful entrepreneur friend is married to an accountant.

(Hope things work out ok for your DS Blu.)

Thankyou Blu!
(see my earlier post!)

I entirely agree with Suey2's post - suey said:

"I have always thought that success (in these terms) depends on 4 variables.

1. Talent, whether intelligence or an aptitude for sport
2. Drive
3. Health
4. Luck: whether being spotted in the street (eg Kate moss) or having supportive parents and a good education.

Without the drive you would not be able to make use of the other 3 variables. However, imvho, drive is apoisoned chalice. People without it find happiness easier to attain"

So very true! I've met very talented people without drive. The people with drive were often the ones with less talent (I have more drive than talent btw). And yes luck and health/stamina all play a part.

It's slippery to equate success with high earnings, once again, however. By default, you might (unwittingly?) be assuming that those who don't earn highly are not successful.

Suey was careful to define her terms.

Just to pick up on the barriers to entry and skill things leading to higher pay...

I agree with you insofar as there is a wide variation in solicitors' pay. Anything between around £25k and £2.m. I imagine the same is true of medicine. Like you, I don't believe the spread is likely to be as wide in nursing and I also think that the average salary is likely to be much lower in nursing than it is in medicine or law.

Where we seem to differ is the cause of this difference. I ascribe it to barriers to entry and length of training. You ascribe it to "professional responsibility and liability". I think we are talking about the same thing actually. Professions are all about barriers to entry and length of training. To take professional responsibility (and ultimately liability) one has to overcome the barriers to entry.

You missed me out!

OK, I am not for a minute positioning myself as a low earner... Academics did very well (IMHO) out of our last pay round (the VCs pegged the final part of the settlement to the September 08 RPI or 2.5%, whichever was the greater. Oh how they laughed when it turned out to be 5%...) I feel rich on my salary, despite the fact that on a month to month basis cash flow is tight, we pay 2 lots of nursery fees, rarely go on holiday. But I do have lots and lots of luxuries in my life, pay higher rate tax and compared to millions of people who scrape by each week, we do very well.

But my point was - despite the virtually identical barriers to entry, training, professional criteria etc. - the average salary of an academic is between half to a quarter to a tiny, tiny fraction that of the average salaries of most medics and lawyers.

And you know what - I don't care! - if my tax over the 40% threshold was put up 5% too, I wouldn't complain. I am not pretending we wouldn't have to adjust, but I would neither feel the sense of injustice or waste that the wealthy people on this thread seem to feel. I do not mistrust the government nor do I object to the principle. The one bit of tax I have objected to paying is that funding an immoral war.

And perhaps it is the fact that you don't care that means that you are in the job that you are Wilf.

People go into jobs for all manner of reasons. Some because they want the money and some in spite of the money.

To reduce all this to simple or bete et mechant economics as they say in French is to show a lack of imagination.

Salary is not the only criteria for choosing a career path. Hence this idea that lower earners are only in the jobs they are in because they don't have the skills, drive, intelligence or whatever to do anything else is massively flawed.

I don't disagree that success cannot solely be judged on job salary or status. As qc said, my 'recipe for success' was based on the topic of this thread, not what I believe to be true success.
I believe that my brother is more successful than I am. Why? He earns about 1/6 of my dh's salary, but he is very happy, has a wonderful family and is content. We earn so much more, but because of the drive we are always striving for more and are less content.
It may be difficult for many people to understand, those whose main source of stress in life is money in particular.

I was thinking about this last night too, and I realised that, in general, pay in the private sector depends on your capacity to make money. Conversely, pay in the public sector depends on your capacity to lose money, through dodgy budgeting, litigation, whatever. If your job doesn't involve money at all at any level, well then you're stuffed basically.

For me salary just wasn't a factor in choosing a career. In hindsight it perhaps should have been, but at the time of making those choices I was pretty burned out from the whole education treadmill. After a false start at music college (which is the route I had always been "encouraged" to go) I ended up opting for a degree that would interest me, with unfortunately little consideration of what I would do after that. I actually took the postgraduate diploma in law a few years back with the intention of retraining. I was in the top 10% of the year, but I didn't end up pursuing it because the branch of law I was interested in (legal aid and community type work) just didn't pay enough to justify the massive cost of training. And there's no way we could afford to live on the £12k training salary that was on offer. So that was that.

Anyhow, so here I am. I am one of very few people who are lucky enough to have achieved a career in my degree field. I have got to exactly where I wanted to be in my career, and have taken a lot of risks to get here. Unfortunately my job does not exist in the private sector for anybody with any scruples, so here I am working for local government. The public sector views my job as I kind of amusing annoyance in terms of the budget, although it is highly valued by many members of the community.

The point of that ramble is really to say that, all in all, I have made my choices. I would say that financial circumstances prevented me from pursuing a law career, and I am convinced that many people run into the same problem. I think it is very poor that, as with everything, the pay for legal professionals who are working for the public good is much lower than the rest of the profession. But I am very happy in my job. I have great job satisfaction. But oh, with a degree and 10 years experience in the field, I do wish I earned more than an admin assistant.

OK so that post was a product of me trying to work out where I'd gone wrong. I guess I knew it was a bit self-indulgent. Please don't end the thread on account of it - I'm sure there's more stimulating discussion to be had.

Come on - I haven't killed a thread for ages!

ha ha twinklemegan: I think people left just as it was getting reallyinteresting. Let me killit instead

sorry space bar White on iPhone

It's the weekend, people are busy.

This thread has stuck in my mind and I was thinking this morning about something.

There has been lots on here about skills, motivation , etc and a bit about opportunity and so on.

I was thinking about the factors which play a role in how we turn out and came up with another one which seemed obvious once I had thought of it. Expectation. I think the expectation that we will do or not do certain things plays a major role in our lives.

This made me think of a mate of mine who comes from a very under privileged estate in London where there is a lot of unemployment, poverty, drug use, domestic abuse and other social problems.

As far as her family were concerned she is doing well because she is not a drug addict, a prostitute, in prison, an alcoholic or so on. She has bucked a trend as it were, but she is the exception rather than the rule.

Just made me think that discussions like this piss me off because most of us ignore, forget or play down the huge ramifications of social circumstance and other luck factors.

Of course there are exceptions to the rule, but let's face it, the family and area you were born into is probably, for most people, the main factor in how we end up doing the jobs we do.

For all we talk about luck ,opportunity, motivation, drive, skills, hard work, etc the fact is that luck of the draw is possibly the most influential of all.

But I'm not just talking about poverty.

I'm talking about the social ramifications of poverty and the family climate they can lead to and the hopes and expectations for our kids that can be a consequence of living in shitty circumstances.

Yes indeed, Charlie Bucket had it easy compared...
And I became a lawyer and am now an author.
But I will never stand up as the poster boy for sink estate kid makes good because I had things going for me despite my circumstances
-I was clever
-I had a great, probably pushy, Mum
-I was born a grafter
-i was pretty
Not everyone gets that.
In fact most of my contemporaries are still on the estate or worse.

I get what you are saying Beachcomber but it STILL isn't that simple - as Litchick says, there are other factors that still matter, sometimes more.

I was expected to go to Uni - I had the brains, I had the schooling and I had the opportunity. So I went, got my BSc and then a job which led to a professional qualification.
My bro could have gone to Uni but chose not to take A levels as the only thing in life that interested him was his computer and you had to do OND/HND quals in computing back in the dim'n'distant..
My sis had zero interest in further ed, let alone higher ed - she wanted to work in a shop and she still works in a shop, 20 years later.

My dad, bless him, had hoped that he would get 3 professionals out of us: a lawyer, a doctor and an accountant. Didn't manage any of them (although I am in a sort of paramedical profession).