How are you affording it - private school.

[DonkeyKon]

Fee paying (but relatively cheap) london prep school and then step up to Latymer Upper for one an (we hope) second child in the future.

we have a good income between the two of us but by god the fees are eye watering.

outside of those in banking / faang, how do you go about affording 2 x £35K/year post tax?

After putting three kids through private school from the start, we’ve witnessed a massive shift in the parent demographic. While the education has been top-tier, the cost has forced us to aggressively increase our earnings—I launched a business just to keep up, and we now earn £250k–£400k annually. Despite that, the 'entry bar' has risen so high that the community feels much more exclusive than when we started, and we definitely feel like we’re at the bottom of the school’s current wealth bracket!

We worked hard and earned it.
Because our no1 priority is education.
Not results / doesn’t matter what grades they actually get, but - to be able to actually learn.

1 DC, state primary (mostly), 2/3rd fees from salary, 1/3 GP contribution, not in London. No longer have a cleaner, have reduced holiday budgets and have no debt other than mortgage - have prioritised stupidly expensive hobby/sport over spending on other things.
Moved for final year of primary as then guaranteed entry to seniors (also bullying issues not being dealt with by primary) Secondary state options are dreadful within a reasonable commute, grammars all over an hour away in a car, more like 90 mins on school transport and we wanted DC to be able to continue the stupidly expensive hobby because they love it.

No mortgage, sensible spending, state primary and we started saving into a unit trust for secondary fees quite early on so that’s starting to pay the fees now.

We didn’t have family money, and chose to live in an area where we could pay the mortgage off. I’d love to live in SW London but we prioritised education over those property prices.

I agree with the previous poster that said a lot of high earners are high spenders - we are high earners (not uber high) and don’t work in FAANG or FS but live below our means. That’s the only way we can do it.

We do it through two high incomes. A lot of people I know from the schools we use have family help though. I do mean a lot, a very high proportion.
I met someone I hadn't seen for ages a few weeks ago. Their family help had stopped. They will be taking out loans to fund the three years they have both dc in private secondary school.
VAT really raised the bar.

About to start two sets of fees in September, we are planning to save 1-2 terms fees in advance as a buffer and take out 40k in equity (we have a high amount of equity and mortgage is low for London currently). Following that we will pay a third from savings and rest from income for the next three years, until DD finishes Y11. At that point will consider state sixth form if needed so we can drop down to one set of fees. Income between us is 200k so it will still be very tight so home improvement plans and holidays will be on hold for a few years.