comfortable salary

vincent1989 said:
almost everyone in the UK lives comfortably and the vast majority of those people are on or barely above minimum wage.

comfortable does not mean running a sports car, owning a £300k house or having a £5k+ holiday every year, comfortable is having enough food to eat and water to drink, enough money to cover the necessary bills, a home to live in and a relatively stable income of one form or another, everything else is a luxury.

there are billions of people across the planet that would kill for the kind of comfort some people in this thread are describing as poverty!
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I whole heartedly agree - There is no such thing as poverty in the UK.
Everyone has access to education, health cover, legal cover etc just like everyone else. Aside from the odd junkie, everyone has a roof over their heads too.

Comfortable salary? I would say £25,000 in the midlands if living alone with a mortgage on a £120,000 house. That gives you enough to cover your monthly outgoings with a bit left for social occasions and PC parts :).
 
Jono8 said:
The people who are saying they would need £150k and that it's all down to your own personal idea of what is comfortable have misunderstood the thread i think. But then, each to their own.
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Surely that is the point, each of us have a different idea of what "comfort" is?

The people who say 150k (or even 60k like me) can perfectly well survive on 35k I bet you, however they would not be able to afford things that they want ... meaning that while they will live adequately, it will not be in full comfort.
 
rypt said:
Surely that is the point, each of us have a different idea of what "comfort" is?

The people who say 150k (or even 60k like me) can perfectly well survive on 35k I bet you, however they would not be able to afford things that they want ... meaning that while they will live adequately, it will not be in full comfort.
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Comfort isn't having everything you want, it is having everything you need.
 
Which is why defined comfortable, well off, and rich a few pages back.

If having everything you need is the baseline to work from, and having everything you want is luxury, then being comfortable is somewhere in the middle, or being able to do and have many of the things you want, but by means of a bit of forethought and planning.
 
carvegio said:
I see this reason from people often as to why they don't want high paying jobs. But it sounds more like a cop out.
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Or maybe they put more value on the life part of work-life balance?

If you have a job that you enjoy, pays enough for you to live comfortably(by your own definition) and gives you plenty of free time why would you want to work longer hours for just more money*?

Being "comfortable" should include work-life balance in the equation.




* Yes career advancement would be an option but we are just talking money in this thread.
 
vincent1989 said:
comfortable does not mean running a sports car, owning a £300k house or having a £5k+ holiday every year, comfortable is having enough food to eat and water to drink, enough money to cover the necessary bills, a home to live in and a relatively stable income of one form or another, everything else is a luxury.
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No, that's just living to work. It's all subjective but I would define 'comfortable' as a lifestyle that I wouldn't mind changing and sticking with, for the rest of my life. Obviously that would exclude renting a flat, driving an old car, running a crappy pc (as I am now) or going for holidays once every blue moon. Yes, I could, would (and am) live like that if I had too but I would be doing everything I can to change, to improve. I wouldn't put my feet up and say, ohhh that's comfy now stay right here and tread along until I die like that. It's only when I would reach a point and say that I don't need to bother to get anything more from a material perspective that I would say it's comfortable for me. Having more than what I consider 'enough' (and that's where the subjectivity creeps in) is where luxury starts.

there are billions of people across the planet that would kill for the kind of comfort some people in this thread are describing as poverty!
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What you seem to forget is that those people usually have no options, their quality of life is crap and the opportunities to better it are minimal. I live in London where the opportunity to improve the quality of my life is pretty much sky-high and I'd consider myself a quiter if I didn't at least try to get the most out of it. It would be the same as sitting at a buffet and say "Oh, I'll only have one small bite because the world is starving and therefore I don't need any more". Well, yeah I could live on that 'small bite' but I want more.

UK is a place full of opportunities and one who doesn't bust their gut to make the most out of them is wasting time IMO. Since I know that there is money to be made out there and I am confident I can have a shot at it I'm not going to sit on my back thinking "oh I'm good enough" and let sleeping dogs lie.

I got one life and I want to make it big - actually scrap that - I will make it big. Why? Because I can! Because there is a world of opportunity out there.

P.S. There were a few digs taken at what I said yesterday and someone even went to the length of going through my previous posts to find some kind of evidence about my financial situation (?!). I liked it how they made assumptions based on a post I made without knowing anything about me!
 
daz said:
There is a small band between 100k and 110k where this is the case, IIRC.
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Nah, even then you are still better off the more you earn. All that happens in that band is that your personal allowance is curtailed in some way (I forget the exact details - I don't do personal tax these days) so you are effectively taxed at a marginal rate of 55% or something on the income in that band. Once you get above that band your marginal rate is the 40% or 50% or whatever it is at that level.

There was a time, I think it was back in the 80s, where if a particular set of circumstances occurred and you had specific sets of income and when the planets were aligned and you were being paid on a Tuesday when there was a total eclipse of the sun, then you could be taxed at an effective rate of something like 102% of your income. In that case you would be worse off the more you earnt, but for all other cases you are always better off earning more money.

Summary - unless your marginal tax rate is below 100%, you are always better off for earning more money. It just may not be very worthwhile if 99% of each pound goes on tax...
 
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kgi said:
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You are money-driven, good for you, but the desire to earn as much money as possible puts your views on what is 'comfortable' so far in an extreme that it should be excluded from getting a general idea on what comfortable is.

My gf's sister is very work-driven, earns huge amount for a 31 year old, but works 12+ hours days, sometimes 7 days a week. She loves it though, she lives to work.

Me, I value my personal time more than any monetary earning I could ever aspire to, I do plenty of balancing between work effort required, work time required, and earnings.
 
In the area i live in i would suspect that earning 25k a year would give someone a very comfortable lifestyle.

Bledd hit the nail on the head for me, £700+ left per month after essential bills are paid and thats being comfortable.
 
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