There are still 20 years to go for me to reach the retirement age. I am still full of energy and am still ambitious. My wife and I both have very good retirement plans with our amployers. In addition to our professional retirement plans, we also get state pension due to our social security contributions, we will have a good retrement life 20 years later.
I started from pennyless in my pocket when I first arrived in England. Now, not many people at my age can enjoy our life style. In the whole of UK, only 17% of kids go to private secondary schools. We have just paid for 7 years of private secondary education for our 1st child who is going to a very good law school in September this year. We will do the same to our 2nd child. We already have saved 1/2 of the money. Our house in western London suburb is worth USD900,000 for which our mortgage balance is only USD380,000.
Hope you do better than us and I will be really happy for you. Do not feel that your ego got hurt if you have not yet done as well. I never feel bad to see others doing better than me. Instead, I feel happy for them.
Hey, why are you so frustrated about what I have written here ? Did you feel deeply hurt by this article? You do not have any manners and you behave very badly. Your behaviour shows that you are still in the lower class, because people in the upper and the middle classes do not behave like you.
There is no need to be unhappy here. This is my true story and I am only in the middle class. If you have done better than our family, I am happy for you. If you have not yet achieved what I have got, you could soon catch up if you work hard.
How many (%) Chinese couples in the US have a joint annual income of USD200k ? If you have, share your story with us. I believe only a small minority of couples from mainland China get that kind of income.If they work in the academia, both need to be full professors.
stupid! $200,000 USD annual income for a typical middle class chinese family in US is quite normal. You are still "身无分文" now, dude. Can you retire at this point? Stupid, period.
I understand what you are saying now. I would say that your intension is to have a go to insult. But I forgive you. Maybe you are deeply unhappy about what I have written here. But unlike you, I did not set out to insult or hurt anyone. I just wrote my true story here to share with people and to encourage people that it is not difficult to achieve what I have achieved.
You do not win friends by behaving like that. If you do not like what I have written here, you are more than welcome to go away.
Allow me to clarify a couple of things. I didn't say anythig about your house insurance, I meant HEALTH insurance. Shrink refers to a clinical psychiatrist or psychologist in the State, what do you call that in the UK?
Don't get angry or excited ! This is a place to get relaxed and friendly.
In the UK, insurance companies do not insure the value of houses. They insure me for repairing and re-building my house if anything happens. My house insurance bill is actually quite reasonable at about 35 pounds per month. That covers unlimited cost for reparing or re-building my house.
Most of the value of a house is with the location of the piece of land on which the house was built. If anything happens to my house, for instance, floods or fire and my house disappears, the piece of land is still there. The insurance company only needs to cover the costs for re-building the same house and the cost of that is much lower than the value of the house.
Therefore, I do not need to insure my house at its market value. And I do not need a good insurance agent to find a good insurance policy.
Hope you are happy now. Be a happy man ! That is the advise I would give you.
You live in the US in which except New York, L. A., San Francisco, Boston and Seattle, house prices are relatively low and stable. The house price inflation I have seen in UK in general and in western London suburbs in particular in the last 10 years is not going to happen in many cities in the US. That is why the value of your house seems more affordable and does not increase much over the years.
The high value of my house at approx. 900,000 USD is the result of the housing market growth that only happens in London and New York not even in Paris.
I am not showing off here. As I responded to the previous comment, I am just sharing with friends here my own experience starting from pennyness in my pocket for the purpose of encouraging everyone that you can climb up the social ladder to the upper-middle class if you work hard for it.
Your comments on the multiples of a couple's joint income is correct when you start borrowing money from banks which use a multiple of 3-4 times your joint income to decide the amount of money they will lend you. However, in my case, the current value of my house at 450,000 pounds is the result of a phenomenal growth in house prices in the UK in general and in western London suburb in particular. We bought our house in 2001 at a price of 320,000 pounds. After 5 and 1/2 years, the value has grown by more than 1/3. This is still a slow growth by the UK standards in the last 10 years. We bought our 1st house at the rock bottom price in the mid 1990s at 75,000 when the housing market was doing very badly. In 2001, we sold it for 155,000 pounds. The house price more than doubled in 7 years in western London suburb area. We used that money as the 1st down payment for our current house. As such, the size of our mortgage is not large. Currently it is less than around 190,000 pounds, less than 3 times our joint annual income.
Paying off the mortgage is not a big deal for us. Raising the cash to pay for the private high school education of our kids is more challenging, after paying taxes, mortgages and maintaining the cars etc.
I just don't know how you can pay off ur morgage with you 75 grant. Normally your hourse should not exceed 3.5-4 time of your annual income. And this is only you and your wife. Nothing worth to show off.
