BBC are saying you need a joint salary of 70,000 to avoid poverty

[bridgetjonesmassivepants]

I find this such a high sum. How are most families meant to reach this figure? It doesn't include pension contributions so you would probably need 80,000 by their reckoning.
They are saying that you are in poverty if you can't manage a UK holiday every year and 70 a month on cultural experiences.

We are around about £55k at the moment joint income as I only work part-time for the time being, but I'm guessing it's housing and childcare costs that are pushing things up as neither of those are massive for us. Our mortgage is only £650 a month and childcare with two in nursery, one three days and one two days, will still only be £400 a month when DC2 is born and starts going, which leaves us plenty for everything else. We also have no commuting costs.

But statistically even those people will be in the minority - a family with two children means oldest child is 18. Teenagers (counted as children) is only age 11-18.....so yes they do exist but statistically unlikely to be in the majority esp. when you include the SE England in the report. So obviously lots of people do have lower outgoings. However, families with two kids are more likely to have higher mortgages/childcare costs than others.

@FourTeaFallOut I am in London, surrounded by people who had deposits gifted to them by their parents and hence have a tiny mortgage or no mortgage. I know a guy on 35k living in a £550k 2 bed house, mortgage free at 32 as his parents bought him the house. He has no car too so actually would survive quite well on less than £35k. I am the only one of my peers I know who didn't get gifted money by parents, though I did get free rent for 3 years.

Many people in London don't pay a fortune to live in London, they live in London because they can afford to. It's the other way around.

@FourTeaFallOut but we can't use people with rich parents as a statistical guide though they are quite common. Even Kirsty Allsop had help and that was donkey years ago when most people didn't have help

It totally depends which part of the country you are in. We earn just shy of this in the NW and honestly I feel like we live like kings. I would get laughed out the room if I tried telling people we are on the poverty line. Buying at the right time helped massively so mortgage is not high (£400)

Well, okay then. I'm not sure that people paying rent in London would appreciate me not acknowledging the gulf in housing costs when I declared that £70k could be heaps - under circumstances when overheads are low. But yeah, throw another caveat in there for good measure.

Is money the new AIBU today?

Whose rich parents? I have one dead one and one poor one, neither are paying out.

That's odd.
We (38 and 40) earn approx £80k, but only NEED to earn £18k to pay our essentials bills, mortgage and food shopping. I did a granular analysis of our finances as I was thinking of retraining.
Crucially, we've kept our mortgage small. We also don't have kids.

Its not buying at the right time - it was being born at the right time. For those parents in their late 20s/30s - they bought at the 'usual' time - it just happened that house prices had rocketed. Not sure we can all expect them to have bought in circa 2002 - seeing as many would only have been 14 at the time. Sadly, these parents might very well see their mortgage of 1,500 sky rocket to 2k, 2.5k with a rise in interest rates. So they will be doubly squeezed - high debt/high rates

@FourTeaFallOut my MIL who has never earned more than £17k in her life would be a millionaire soon enough given her house is already worth £750k..many terraced houses in London are worth £1 million. If they downsize well before retirement, they have money to give to their children..
My MIL has a friend who sold her house for £1 million, bought a 500k flat and both her children got nice deposits. Her son in particular was a self employed gardener so would not have gotten a big enough mortgage even in the North West but managed to buy a run down 1 bed terrace in a dodgy part of London. This is very common. And these are not rich people. They are people who have done well out of the London property boom and who are helping their offspring.

Even for me, we managed to live rent free for 3 years while working in the city and we got a deposit of £70k that way..imagine for the people with London parents and who also gave them deposits.

I’m not implying I’ve done anything clever by buying at the right time. I guess that’s what I meant - we’ve been lucky. We were buying right after the 2008 crash when prices came down a bit. It just happened to have been a good time to buy, in hindsight.

I’d be filthy rich on that amount!

We're a family of 4 and live on just over £1000 a month. But no mortgage as it’s paid off.

This headline figure is not useful. A more helpful approach is maybe to say that after paying for their basics e.g. mortgage/council tax/childcare/travel to work. - if a family of 4 have 1k left that's doable but not much; 2k is fine; 3k is loads; over 3k and you're well off

That way people stop jumping at 70k shouting it's loads while suggesting they have no mortgage/childcare/travel costs while others say 90k is tight if they only have 1k left after those basics.

I also think that if we start asking where people live - then we might find that in practice people outside South East/London have a lot more disposable income and wealth despite 'only' having a family income of 35k or 50k

I bought in 2003 and have three, my first child in 2007 and last in 2014. For people like me, and I'm not unique, £70k is more than comfortable.

This headline figure is not useful

Yes. This was my first and only point, not quite sure how it pissed so many people off.

Because lots of people jumped on it saying 70k is loads and loads, then others defended it saying in London 70k (if you have nursery fees and only bought last year) - you might very well only have 500 quid at the end of the month after covering your basics while not even including food.

@ThatsRoughBuddy my hubby and I live on £75k. We have £3300 to live off after mortgage of £1k and also no car and no kids. We still shop at Aldi/Lidl lol. If you met me, you wouldn't think I am filthy rich. Far from it! All my dresses are bought in sales or charity shops.. we do eat out regularly and go on long haul flights and I buy expensive makeup and my DH has lots of coffees from Caffe Nero but we definitely have to be careful (but not tracking our budget in an Excel chart careful).

Which is why I quite specifically said it could be heaps for some people but it wouldn't be for others, depending entirely on people's overheads. That and stating that the average mortgage is just over £700, nationwide figure, so by that measure £1300 seems a lot.

I didn’t mean others were filthy rich on that amount! Just I would be as it’s so much more than what we have now. I’d feel like the queen. Same as you'd feel rich if you were suddenly earning tens of thousand more.

@FourTeaFallOut if I had bought in 2003, I could have bought my flat for £200k. Perhaps I may be mortgage free now. Sadly in 2003 I was 11 years old and far too young for a mortgage. So I had to buy it for £392k in 2019. Now worth around £450k in 2022. It shocks me how much prices can increase over even 10 years so people who are from the same generation can have such different costs. It would be quite common in a year group for people's mums to have an age difference of 10-15 years and thus to have such different housing costs despite living in the same area and perhaps being from same background.

and let's not forgot wages have barely moved in a decade.

Same pretty much. I draw £1000 from the business per month and we live on that plus other perks and a little bit of share dividends, house was upgraded and paid off long ago. The house makes all the difference to monthly finances.

Are you labouring under the impression I said that people who couldn't get by for £70k have mismanaged their budgets, or something like that?

I just can't get a guage on why you seem intent on telling me why £70k isn't a salary that provides you, specifically, with heaps when I was very clear to say it wouldn't be enough for others to get by on.

If you really want to get into that chip on your shoulder I secured a mortgage at 23 yo with a £6k deposit.