Guardian - UK middle classes ‘struggling despite incomes of up to £60,000 a year’

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2024/feb/20/uk-middle-classes-jobs-housing-costs-abrdn-financial-fairness-trust

Food for thought. There's a lot of posters on here who have very entrenched views about income/poverty. Things are almost always more nuanced than we perceive. It's easiest to judge other people's actions/lives in context of our own but much harder to understand what they are going through because we aren't living their lives.

It’s a good article btw, childcare, work contracts are owning vs. renting are big factors as to how ‘secure’ you might feel regardless of whether your headline salary looks decent.

60k is a lot. Depends where you live

It’s a good article btw, childcare, work contracts are owning vs. renting are big factors as to how ‘secure’ you might feel regardless of whether your headline salary looks decent.

$60k (pardon the dollar sign) is **** all in this day and age. For a student or otherwise unattached person it might, prima facie, seem a lot but to anyone else its woeful.
Take this as an example, 60k equals about 44k a year post tax (ignoring student loans and pension contributions etc) nw, 44k per month is 3666.
Prima facie, not a bad amount. Not take away the 1500 (roughly) mortgage youve got 2166. Take away insurance and youve got probably 1900. Petrol, food, power etc. wipe out the rest fairly well. When you factor in child care, otherloans, savings and general out goings it really doesn't leave much for the average 3 person household.

Of course, you also have to factor in the immutable law that expenses increase with wages. Someone on 60k is almost universally going to spend more than someone on 30k in terms of lifestyle, its just a fact of life.

Life is expensive, especially these days. The only people ive ever heard call this amount 'a lot' tend to be those who are very new to the corporate ladder and dont have many expenses/commitments.

Napp, you're mad.

My mortgage is £2,100/month.
Insurance if we got round to it would be circa £100/month
Council tax £250
'leccy/gas is £170/month
Petrol is zero for most months of the year

Call that £2,750
So £900 a month disposable income when living in a five bed detached house in a city.

So then we've established that 60k is working class. I don't disagree with that. As Napp says expenses increases with income. You earn 100k and you buy a bigger house and a bigger car that likely sucks up the same fraction of income that someone on 60k spends on house and car.

At what point then do posters here think income has to reach before you don't have to worry about counting the pennies 😀? 150k? 200k?

$60k (pardon the dollar sign) is **** all in this day and age. For a student or otherwise unattached person it might, prima facie, seem a lot but to anyone else its woeful.
Take this as an example, 60k equals about 44k a year post tax (ignoring student loans and pension contributions etc) nw, 44k per month is 3666.
Prima facie, not a bad amount. Not take away the 1500 (roughly) mortgage youve got 2166. Take away insurance and youve got probably 1900. Petrol, food, power etc. wipe out the rest fairly well. When you factor in child care, otherloans, savings and general out goings it really doesn't leave much for the average 3 person household.

Of course, you also have to factor in the immutable law that expenses increase with wages. Someone on 60k is almost universally going to spend more than someone on 30k in terms of lifestyle, its just a fact of life.

Life is expensive, especially these days. The only people ive ever heard call this amount 'a lot' tend to be those who are very new to the corporate ladder and dont have many expenses/commitments.

I think what you mean is that your own household would struggle to maintain its current lifestyle on that income.

Looking at the wider picture in the UK, It's a reasonably high household income that puts that household roughly in the top 20% of the earning distribution. The average UK household earns around £38K per year and whilst I'm sure that isn't "comfortable", I think it's a little unrealistic to suggest that a typical household needs to increase its earnings by over 5x (and be in the top 1% of the population) just to be "comfortable".

£60k will be never be middle class. You'd have to be an absolute ******** to think that

But what is the point of working harder and earning more if not to have a better lifestyle? I remember 20 years ago earning 40k a year and having a rather frank discussion with one of my bosses who was on a 120k a year. I drove a Honda CRV (Boss had Porsche Cayenne and his missus a top of the range Golf GTI), lived in a two bedroom flat (admittedly in the West End of Edinburgh which was very nice - Boss had a 5 bedroom detached house in the West End on a much better street). I had two holidays a year. But there wasn't very much left over for the rainy day if things went tits up. In our discussion, my boss stated if he wanted to be truly comfortable he'd have to be on more than 150k/year. I didn't quite understand what he meant - to me it looked like he was living the life.

Fast forward 20 years and I am earning a fair bit more but my car and house now cost me a lot more and holidays are much more exotic - still only 2 a year though. Now you can argue buy a smaller car/house/holiday cheaper but why work harder then? Might as well just work less hard. You will struggle to find someone who earns 60k a year but lives a 30k/year lifestyle.

I appreciate what Napp is saying. Let's assume 2 child family and you want to be at the point where you can afford a few decent things

2 private school fees - 35k/year
2 holidays - 15k/year
2 cars on finance - 12-15k/year
4-5 bed detached house - 50k/year
Groceries/Petrol/Day Living Costs - 3-4k depending on how much crap you buy

Assuming you want to pay the tax man fairly (who does that when you're earning that much 😀?) 200k looks to be low to me because there's still no savings.

The point remains - you spend in proportion to what you earn. You can get by on less but it's only beyond a point most people in life never get to that life is truly comfortable - that point where money becomes a secondary consideration. The families on 60k or 100k a year are still having to juggle finances and I guess that's what the article is pointing out. Yes it's a nice place to be earning more and life is more enjoyable which is the whole point of working hard but most middle class families will find a precipitous drop in lifestyle/security if they lose two paychecks.

Well it's all a choice - if you want to own and fund expensive goods and services then the price for that is that you need to earn lots more money to sustain that and will need a very high level of income to be "comfortable" - but that's because you've chosen to sacrifice the comfort of savings & pension contributions by buying lots of high end discretionary goods and services (ie: expensive luxury cars that despite track day-esq levels of performance will mostly be used to carry groceries and visit the mother in law). Is a better lifestyle measured in the owning of luxury goods, or the contentment from having the comfort and security of savings (opportunity for early retirement, less need to chase promotions and stress to keep up with the Jones's etc...) decisions decisions...

The things you've listed are a little more than merely "decent" - private schooling, expensive holidays, two financed cars, large house - these are multiple expensive high end purchases. It's absolutely someone's choice if they want to prioritize these things, others choose to avoid lifestyle creep and use their income for comfort and security. In your example the £200k (over 5x times more than the median UK household!) only doesn't include room for savings or the ability to get by on a much lower income because the family have chosen to spend all of their money on lots of other expensive things.

Definitions of comfort are a little irrelevant if we define comfort assuming you spend all/most of your income on luxury stuff (and the reminder of celebrities and sportsmen earning many millions a year going bankrupt shows us that if you take that approach, nothing will ever be enough)

Quady, you're financially illiterate. Or just generally illiterate if you think your personal experience is at all relevant to the population writ large.
i.e. $0 on petrol paha ridiculous.
Not to mention you seem to have missed out a truck load of expenses.. unless you neither eat, nor have any debt?