The upper-middle class poverty line

[denny]

http://women.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/women/the_way_we_live/article1719509.ece

The author borders on insufferably self-involved, but the core point is worth discussing... I know plenty of fairly 'well paid' professionals, mostly geeks, who are living in grotty shared housing and/or still sliding into debt. Why? Because housing is so stupidly expensive that just 'well paid' isn't enough any more... if you want to live 'comfortably' in London, you either have to be paid in the sort of brackets the financial sector waves around, or you simply don't make the grade.

I'm bemused by the article's conclusion that this is all due to 'globalisation'. I'd have pinned the blame squarely on a combination of city bonuses driving the housing prices in London up at a stupid rate, and buy-to-fucking-rent doing the same thing across the whole country (albeit somewhat more slowly).

If you can't afford to rent or buy somewhere halfway nice to live, everything else you can do about your quality of life is pretty much window-dressing.

Discuss?

Comments

[kotenok.livejournal.com]

And all this becomes even more magnified when you lack the skills or qualifications to even come *close* to the 'professional' status. There is always going to be a limit to how good a salary one can expect to acheive when working as an administrator. Rather depressing, really!

[dennyd.livejournal.com]

No offense, but this isn't about you. This is about people who are fully-qualified and experienced professionals, who you'd expect to be doing very nicely thank you, who are in fact almost as fucked as everyone else. That's kind of the point the article is making - there's an increasing amount of financial difficulty in the places you wouldn't expect to see it, as well as in the places where it's perhaps less surprising.

Not that experienced office workers should be paid below the break-even point either, but that's not the subject under discussion here.

[kotenok.livejournal.com]

No, I realise that. I was just throwing in my two pen'orth..

;)