Who we are
Hello and welcome to The Clueless Couple blog. We’re a married couple in our early thirties who live and work in London and have a one-year-old baby. We’ll try and provide as much financial detail as possible with you, sharing our conversations and disputes, while also trying to preserve some level of anonymity.
Our purpose
We aim to create a safe space/resource for people with relatively privileged financial positions to learn from other like-minded people. This is for people who know they’re earning a good wage in the UK context, but for which tailored and personal financial advice is out of the question.
Speaking about money with friends and family can be a surprisingly tough thing to do. It can also be difficult to find people to talk to that actually understand your full situation. There is so much advice and research available on the internet that it can become overwhelming and actually result in no proactive decisions being taken, or bad decisions being made.
What we earn
In terms of household income, we’re doing okay! With both of us earning above the UK median wage, it is safe to say we’re quite privileged.
To be specific, our earnings:
- Her: around £50k a year
- Him: around £110k a year
We’re incredibly fortunate. That said, with one half of us having spent some time on maternity leave in the past year, and obviously managing the extra spend on our little one, finances have started to take a hit… and it is not cheap living in London, or anywhere in the UK for that matter
What we have
Current earnings are only one part of the equation. Given we have different family backgrounds, we have different amounts and types of savings/other investments/assets. We’ll share this and the impact of this at various stages. We’re also lucky to have one half of our family nearby, which helps with childcare.
What we’re trying to achieve through this blog
As mentioned above, despite being relatively high earners, we are acutely aware we’re not making the best choices.
The goals of this blog are namely to help bring focus and clarity to our own decision making around our household finances, which will include:
- Defining what we’re trying to achieve – as specifically as possible e.g. move home within [X] years, pay off mortgage within [X] years, retire at age [X] with [£Y] in the pension
- Showing, practically, how we are making decisions using all of the information we have available e.g. how to decide how much to contribute to pensions to deliver the best household impact (across different time frames i.e. now and in the future), or how do we think about savings for the baby and the associated challenges with that (when do we want them to receive it, what should they be able to do with it etc.)
- Finding ways to make sensible but easy changes to everyday life in order to increase our chances of achieving our household financial objectives
And hopefully it might provoke some thought for you too.