Money money money

[almostwitty]

lust money

Originally uploaded by catsfather

The ongoing saga of MP expenses has opened up a veritable kettle of worms in terms of what people earn, what they expect to earn - and crucially, how that compares to the rest of the population.

Thanks to actionreplay, I spotted a link to the Institute of Fiscal Studies has a handy calculator that compares your income against the British national average (£390 for a two-adult household, after taxes and benefits).

My details against the IFS calculator show that I have a higher income than around 85% of the population. Then again, I’m in a single household with no dependents.

I’m reasonably happy with my salary - I don’t feel rich, but I don’t feel poor either. I’m not buying Tesco Value baked beans, but neither am I buying organically grown gourmet beans flown in from Fiji. But then once I discovered that some people earned far more than I did, I was slightly peeved for a while - for no good reason. My income hadn’t changed at all, but the knowledge that other people were doing far better than I did suddenly started to rankle slightly. For no good reason.

There’s a fascinating - if somewhat biased article - in The Guardian about the *emotional* gap between those working in the City and their reality. How everyone in the City assumes they’re working for a slave’s wage, yet can’t grasp the reality that they are far better off than most people. Because, alas, most people aren’t around them - they only see their peers.

Which is probably why MPs had no clue that the rest of the country would see what they were doing as thieving.

I’m fairly sure most of my friends would consider themselves to be average wage-earners, not earning that much more or less. But then the reality is, in fact, that they’re probably all earning far more than say 75% of the population.

Originally published at almost witty. You can comment here or there.

Comments

[radiantsoul.livejournal.com]

you have a higher income than around 97% of the population - equivalent to about 58.1 million individuals.

And I don't consider my income to be all that high.

[almostwitty]

Did you put your post-tax salary in? That's the mistake I made, initially.

But either way, your income *is* high. That's the scary bit.

[radiantsoul.livejournal.com]

Yeah it is post tax.

I don't have much wealth though.

[almostwitty]

Stop spending so much of it then ;)

[far-gone.livejournal.com]

Thanks for posting this, I'm printing up the article. The thing is that there's a big chunk of people who either don't work at all, or work for very little. I think they should have looked at the MPs in the context of, for example, their education. I don't think their base salary is over-high. Not that that's a justification for just pocketing whatever you can on the side.

The research has always shown that the feeling of "poverty" is very relative. People in NYC on medium wages feel poor bc they are surrounded by ostentatious wealth. Same in London I suppose. I often feel hard-done-by at the moment, but I keep reminding myself that outside the City my comp would be generous. Now that the City isn't going to pay that well, I wonder if a lot of people will opt for other professions.

[almostwitty]

Alas, I don't actually know anyone who works in the City, but I'm kinda assuming most people do it for the dosh. Teenagers don't necessarily wake up and say "I want to work in derivative finances!" - it's not an emotionally satisfying place to work, as far as I know.

So those people will migrate to wherever the money is. The Internet dotcom industries had a bunch of them in the late 90s when it looked like the Internet industries were going to make more than the City. They all strangely drifted away after the dotcom crash.

IMHO.