Is it difficult to earn more than £40k?

[Lowwages]

I’m currently on benefits due to a long period of sickness and I’ve been trying to prepare for work for whenever I get better. I’ve been running the numbers though and the benefits I receive for being sick with 2 young children is equivalent to a £40k salary. I’m quite shocked but now also worried that life will always be a struggle as a single parent unless I can exceed that £40k salary.

I’m currently 32 and looking at getting qualified in finance or going to med school but the average salaries on glass door and payscale seem really low considering that these are supposed to be some of the best paying jobs in the UK.

Just how difficult would it be for somebody newly qualified at 35+ to surpass £40k? I’m aware that I could never recover or that I could meet a partner to share finances with but I think that it’s better to prepare.

The OP might have nefarious intentions, but it is a pertinent issue. I'm a long term benefits user due to ds being severely disabled and ds2 also having a chronic health issue. I have a LLM, but haven't worked in over a decade. I'm completely out of touch of the workplace. If ds died tomorrow there is no way I could walk into a job that would give me the same income as my benefits, and that utterly terrifies me. Including our housing benefit (and I'm not in London) I suspect my 'income' would be considerably higher than a £40k salary. I feel literally trapped in this cycle. It is NOTHING to be jealous of.

Depends what industry. My son's friend is about to graduate and has been offered a job- 45K in the banking sector, he's in tech. So actually going into Tech might better for you. Barclays, LLoyds etc all offer over £40k in salary for fresh graduates.

So, 28,000 isn’t a decent graduate salary?

Yup, it’s damn annoying. I’ve worked for a few firms that have closed, and I’ve had to start again, a few times, and I’ve never yet got £40k, and I’m a graduate, hardworking if not high achieving.

I hope the OP fabricated her story

OP, you should be ashamed of yourself. This thread is a load of nonsense with more holes than Swiss cheese, and solely designed to rile up anger towards people on benefits.

No one is bringing home 40k on benefits to spend on what they please. Most benefits are ring fenced for specific costs and are paid directly to housing providers/landlords, councils and so on. No one is sitting at home getting £2.5k a month dropped into their bank account by the government to splash on fancy holidays and designer clothes, ffs.

Let's remember that a society is measured by how it treats its weakest. Frothing at the mouth about people receiving benefits feeds into the Daily Mail narrative that everyone on benefits are scroungers. The vast majority of people on benefits are actually working. And the fact that they need benefits is certainly not their fault, but the government's, as if they mandated a living wage that was actually a living wage, and brought in regulations around the enormous and totally unregulated cost of rent in this country, then we wouldn't need to be topping up people's incomes in the first place.

If I were you I'd go for finance over medicine; far less stress to contend with and reasonably consistent hours.

I've just employed a number of unqualified accountants for between £30-70k. They do have good solid experience, however it can be done.

I find it ridiculous that people are getting ‘riled up’ about the amount of benefits a genuinely disabled person receives. Do people honestly wish that they or their children were in such ill health that they qualified for PIP? I doubt it. It isn’t fun and it certainly isn’t a choice.

You say it’s not my fault that I need benefits but then if I mention said benefits I should be ashamed of myself, despite the entire point of the thread being that I want to get back into work.

Thank you so much to all the posters who have given helpful and detailed advice. There’s very mixed opinions about university, but accounting qualifications are something that I can do from home in the meantime. I think that a lot of it comes down to lost confidence and not knowing how to get my foot back in the door after so long so it’s encouraging to hear about all the different routes available for those in my position such as apprenticeships.

Have you considered software engineering? There are lots of companies that will train you in the job and there’s a huge skills shortage. Absolutely no need to go back to uni.

Have a look online for free coding schools/courses and have a go.

Not for a single parent with 2 kids and rent to pay. Fine for a 21 year old living at home or in a house share with no dependants.

There are degrees in Accountancy and Finance which will give you exemptions through early stages of professional accounting qualifications.

Something like this would give you the chance to look at the different branches of finance and see which interests you. At the end if you decided Accountancy wasn't for you you would still have the degree.

I earn over 40 thousand but I've been working my way up for 20 years. I started on 18 thousand. Unless you can do something like law or finance, you're not going to start on 40 thousand.

What an awful comment. OP is on benefits due to ill health and has two children to support. She is hoping to get into a good career, and one of the options she's considering is actually medicine!

Public sector salaries are definitely too low, but complaining about it to someone who is on benefits and trying to get out of that situation is just awful. It's not OP's fault that nurses aren't paid enough.

If you care, use your vote at the next election.

How is it right that you get £40k for doing nothing when some of us are working second jobs to make ends meet and still getting nowhere near that figure.

I'm so done with this system. ☹️

OP I'd say retrain or something but it could take years to get £40k if you went into nursing, teaching, social work etc.

It's worth remembering that lots of people (and children) have health conditions that "don't quite meet the threshold" for benefits. And so struggle every day but have to work

It isn't a binary between gloriously healthy and in work Vs unwell and on benefits.

This is very true, but also worth remembering that if a teacher/police officer was a single parent to 2 children in rented accommodation, they likely would be eligible for a top up from UC. Along with many other workers! It's not right but that's the cost of living for renters these days.

UK Infrastructure Bank is also in Leeds - working there doesn't make you a CS as its a private company but 100% owned by the Government, full of ex-CS and has a lot of the CS culture etc. Would be a good mix of finance and CS.

OP you still haven't clarified your A-levels. You say you have 2 a-levels and a level 3 in business studies. You say you have an A* in further maths and an A in biology. You can't take further maths without also taking maths. It's very unusual to take further maths (and the required maths which you didn't take) but then take a vocational level 3 alongside. Your posts read like a teenager who thinks 'they'd love to be a doctor' but with some deluded idea that you'd swan into medical school without chemistry A-level and a suspicious further maths without maths A-level. Can you see why people suspect you are a troll?

But you’re on not on benefits, are you? You’re not a single parent with two kids and a long term illness. Nothing on this thread adds up. You’re just trying to rile up ire towards people on benefits by making up a scenario people can get angry about.

You’ve made up your qualifications (Further Maths A Level can’t be taken without also taking Maths, so you tripped up there), you’re 32 with a supposed good education and highly intelligent and yet you refer loosely to wanting to go into ‘finance’ or ‘med school’ with seemingly no awareness of what these involve, rather like a teenager would. No 32 year old is as clueless about working life or routes into work as you show yourself to be.

It’s no coincidence that half term started yesterday, people! Don’t feed the troll!

Its really easy to progress in finance very quickly if you're good at what you do.
A lot of places will pay for your qualifications and give you study days. I'd go that route.

Apart from the A levels issue, I don't know why people are saying this couldn't true? I just looked up £40k take home, which is £527 per week. If you are in receipt of disability benefits for either yourself or a dc it's very possible to get that amount. People are also saying OP is getting this for "doing nothing". Disability can come with huge extra costs. Should we just send disabled people into a workhouse instead?

I’m sure it was further maths that I took, but I definitely only have two A-levels as they told me that my level 3 already counted as one🤔 I’ll have to dig them out of the attic at some point and double check.

I have already agreed that I’m very behind and clueless with careers and the working world due to poor circumstances. Things happen and life doesn’t always go to plan, your confidence gets knocked and you end up out of touch with the working world. I assume this is exactly the reason that many people stay trapped in minimum wage jobs, they just don’t know how to get started after so long. Thankfully the vast majority of posters do seem to understand this and encourage those who want to break the cycle.

In Yorkshire it is difficult to get 40k - but it's doable.

But I'd say it's even more difficult to get a mortgage for a large house & large garden as a single person on a single salary without a huge deposit. You might need to lower your expectations. Youd also have to factor in childcare if you were working full time.

It really is a sad state of affairs when single women are better off on benefits than trying to have a career. It's depressing.

Jesus, it really is a bucket of crabs mentality in this country.

It's disgusting that people have to work multiple jobs and work more than full time hours just to be able to scrape by. It should not be like that. But people with disabilities who have children to support should also not be left to rot.
Believe it or not, lowering benefits for disabled people with children will not automatically make your life more comfortable or give you a pay rise. The system needs a complete overhaul I agree but we should be looking towards the government and the tax evading corporations and the 1% rather than hating on each other.

It’s not the amount of benefits that’s the giveaway.

It’s the immaturity. The generic choice of either ‘finance’ or ‘med school’, which sounds like a teenager’s career options - the assumption that both careers can be wandered into with a couple of A Levels - the total lack of any awareness of the working world.

A 32 year old who has been out of the job market for a few years is still a 32 year old, with life experience that gives them awareness of how the world works even when they may not have experienced things directly themselves. The OP sounds like a teenager. This thread is entirely made up and just wanting to wind people up about workshy benefit scroungers, which it already has, so the OP has achieved their goal. Predictably.

As I said it’s no coincidence that it’s half term. Sounds like someone is bored on study leave.