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Minimum salary required in London: £500k?

firevlondon.com

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Re: Minimum salary required in London: £500k?

#31

Post by keithpeter »

jdimov9 wrote: post #13

So, everyone here is bothered that people like to eat well and take family vacations (is this really your definition of "luxury" lifestyle? You guys sound like coal mine workers.) But you're all perfectly fine with the government taking close to half of that income in taxes. Were you all raised in a communist regime?

"Were you all raised in a communist regime?"

No, just in an ordinary family at around median income for the UK. We ate well. We had holidays (not so many foreign ones during the days of exchange controls).

I resisted the temptation to reply in a humourous way to the parent post out of respect for HN norms. I could have mentioned those Three Yorkshiremen and The North.

Re: Minimum salary required in London: £500k?

#32

Post by prawn »

richmarr wrote: post #26

The degree of entitlement evidenced by this article is seriously distasteful. If private school from age 3 is part of a "minimum" lifestyle, exactly how does the author describe the lifestyle of all the kids who go to state schools? Zone 1 indeed.

The author is describing their friends, not themselves. It doesn't sound entitled to me to describe what they're witnessing and wonder about the figures. The discrepancy comes from that being described as a "minimum" (and thus linkbait headline) when really it should be qualified at all levels as minimum for that lifestyle.

Re: Minimum salary required in London: £500k?

#34

Post by dazc »

irremediable wrote: post #9
JohnyLy wrote: post #7

I would say 50K is required to live well in London and 20K as a minimum salary. 500K as a minimum is ridiculous.

£20k is a much better estimate. A twentysomething without children can live comfortably on that -- with plenty of money for drinks, gadgets and eating out.

http://www.entitledto.co.uk/

On a salary of £20,000 a single person living in SE1 would be entitled to £58 a week housing benefit.

Re: Minimum salary required in London: £500k?

#35

Post by majc2 »

pjc50 wrote: post #24
cmdkeen wrote: post #21

The article is also making an assumption that people on £500k a year are using the NHS. Unless you're Mrs Miliband private health insurance is almost certainly going to be part of your employment package, because if you're earning that much then the productivity hit of waiting for NHS treatment is likely to be more than the cost of private health coverage. This is another reason why I love living in Edinburgh, the sa…

Upvoted for Edinburgh. It's lovely here, affordable by comparison with the south-east, and has a reasonable tech centre. Still trying to find the startup clique, though; is there an "HN Edinburgh"?

Checkout techmeetup.co.uk

Re: Minimum salary required in London: £500k?

#36

Post by pjc50 »

SeanDav wrote: post #33

For comparison purposes, if one wants a benchmark for a top notch salary, then it is common practice to use the salary of the Prime Minister, who earns £142k.

Weirdly, that's not even the highest salary in the public sector. And you occasionally get MPs complaining that it's "not enough to live on" (which in comparison to the £500k couples it isn't). Malcolm Rifkind got himself in the news lately for hiring himself out and saying "I'm not paid a salary", while earning £67k for being an MP and ~£110k for being a nonexecutive director of Unilever a few days a week.

At least the job of PM comes with the use of two houses and a car.

Re: Minimum salary required in London: £500k?

#37

Post by devloper »

jacalata wrote: post #6

Tldr: no, but if we redefine "live in London" as "live in Zone 1, take family of four skiing in France four times a year, send kids to private school from age 3, always eat at Michelin starred restaurants, own multiples of everything Apple ever releases, any other stupid consumerism you can think of" then yes.

Minimum salary required to be a part of Boris's and David's circles.

Re: Minimum salary required in London: £500k?

#38

Post by hugofirth »

keithpeter wrote: post #25
hugofirth wrote: post #20

I should also chime in and say that even for people living in London and sending their children to private schools these estimates are very high. I was luck enough to go to Eton and honestly, for most parents it was a question of affording the fees by: a) not spending that kind of money on other activities; b) lifelong saving; c) selling substantial assets (like second houses etc...); and d) inherited wealth and/or g…

Scholarships still in evidence at all?

Absolutely! For a start 17 students each year are fully funded. Then there are 25 additional fully funded scholariship students are taken on at the beginning of the penultimate year (called 6th form year in the UK).

Added to these are are lots of partial scholarships available, though the ways in which these are funded and obtained are a little more roundabout. The Music department in particular often gave prospective students scholarships of up to 90% of fee totals.

Re: Minimum salary required in London: £500k?

#39

Post by lmm »

For any given number I'm sure you can come up with a lifestyle that costs that much. Costs expand to consume the money available. So I don't think anyone will ever reach financial independence "without changing your lifestyle."

There are always things you would have spent the money on. The trick is deciding which you care about, and whether you value them more than independence.

Re: Minimum salary required in London: £500k?

#40

Post by kspaans »

I would asssume that the £30k without paying income tax

  Very comfortable life: £30k per year.  Which still corresponds to £40k gross salary (roughly 1.5x statistical median wage), but with tax-efficient asset allocation you can relatively easily achieve £30k per year without paying any income taxes
comes from drawing down savings rather than earning income? At £40k annual income, your effective tax rate is 14.7%[0], so without complicated self-employed tax reporting (deducting most of your expenses), I don't see how you can reduce taxes on earned income. Sure, the ISAs (read: tax-free savings accounts) give you tax-free earnings, but they haven't been around long enough for you to make all of your income from them[1].

0 - https://www.gov.uk/income-tax-rates/current-rates-and-allowa...

1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Individual_Savings_Account#Ori...

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