Pupillage and Earnings

[Answered]

This is something that the clerks/Chambers admin should be well-placed to discuss. I don't think there would be any harm in asking.

Ask him to ask his clerks - they should (at the sort of set you've described) be able to give him a rough ballpark of what the last few new tenants have earned. The trouble with anyone else giving you an idea is that you really won't know how well it translates to his circumstances in particular - especially things like how his Chambers handles expenses, which can vary a lot from set to set.

I agree with what has already been said. I can give a broad idea, but that really won't be helpful simply because as educated as my guess would be, I would be guessing. Clerks are well used to fielding questions about earnings for things like mortgages, so they would be the ones to approach. As much as it is daunting to ask that sort of question early on, it is the sort of thing that the clerks would be best placed to answer. However, one massive caveat to this is that as much as the clerks within the set would be best placed to give a rough figure, even that could be out quite significantly. Your fiancé will be self employed, and the actual amount of income he receives year on year, and the extent to which that increases in the first few year, can vary significantly. As a general rule it'll be two or three years post pupillage before you have a rough idea where his earnings might fall year on year, and given that he's self employed it may also take that long before a bank is comfortable approving him for a mortgage. So my advice would be not to make a firm plan. See how much you can save in the first two to three years, but at that point you'll be able to assess how much longer it might take you to get things together to be in a position to get on the property ladder. Unless you have savings and/or sources of other financial support already, you'll be very unlikely to be able to do anything meaningful before that due to his self employed status more than anything else. I'd plan to just see where you are at that point.

On a side note, I'm pretty confident that I know where your fiancé has pupillage from the information you've given in your post, which means I'm fairly confident I'd be able to identify him once the set publicises the identities of its new pupils. If he values his anonymity, and assuming you've got the information you need from these first few posts, I would edit your post and remove the detail.

Thank you very much everyone !!

This is really helpful, and I've also taken up the advice to better maintain anonymity! Thank you again for taking the time to explain these things to me !

You might want to ask Veni Vidi Fugi to edit his/her response which includes your original post and the details best kept private. Like Crazy Jamie, I am pretty certain that I know the Chambers in question.

Done!