The moaning millennial on £70k a year!
Manager, 29, cancels her £1,800 gym membership in ‘struggle’ to buy flat
A MILLENNIAL with a £70,000 job has been mocked for listing the ‘ radical changes’ she is making to save for a home – such as cancelling her £150-a-month gym membership.
Other sacrifices made by Kate Donovan, 29, include making fewer trips in taxis and cutting out pub lunches.
Her comments, in a newspaper interview, led to derision from some readers, who told her she needed to ‘get real’.
Miss Donovan, a project manager for property firm Lendlease, is from Australia but now lives in London and earns double the capital’s average salary.
She told the Our Money series in the i newspaper that of her monthly income of £4,003 she is able to save £1,500 after bills and food – with £523 left to spend on herself and £375 set aside exclusively for holidays.
She calculated she would need a deposit of at least £60,000 in order to buy a property worth about £320,000.
In the piece headlined ‘How I live on a £69,500 salary while saving to buy a two-bedroom flat’, Miss Donovan explains how she could save £1,800 a year by cancelling her gym membership and running instead.
She added: ‘Recently I was going to buy a red jacket, but then I thought “I don’t need a red jacket, I’ve got a navy one and it’s fine”. So I’ve changed my train of thought about what I really need to spend money on.’
Some readers were quick to mock Miss Donovan, who studied engineering at the University of Queensland. Blogger Lisa Valentine wrote on Twitter: ‘Surviving on a £69,500 salary and has to cancel the £150 gym membership to save for a house deposit. My heart bleeds.’
And David Walters said: ‘Kate Donovan get real, 70k lady you’re having a laugh. You should say thank God for your blessing instead of moaning. I see homeless people sleeping rough [and] you moan about gym membership. Some people don’t know where the next meal [is] coming from.’
But not everyone attacked the high- earning millennial for sharing her money-saving tips.
Jess Sikand said: ‘ Jealous, ignorant people on Twitter are trolling Kate Donovan for being fiscally responsible. She clearly states her goal of buying a property therefore is cutting back on certain “comforts”. London is one of the most expensive cities in the world.’
And the reporter who researched the piece, Rebecca Jones, has responded to the barrage of tweets with a message of her own. On Tuesday she wrote: ‘It seems my latest instalment of “How I Live On” is causing a storm as the subject earns £69k. To clarify, in this series we speak to people on a range of incomes, including single income families and pensioners. Kate is on a higher than average salary.’
She added: ‘We launched the How I Live On series to build a snapshot of people’s finances across the UK. As part of the series we have interviewed a pensioner living on less than £9,000 that can’t afford to turn the heating on as well as a family of four using an overdraft to survive on one salary.
‘We feel it is important to understand how people on different salaries – high and low – are managing their money.
‘This case study comes from the former bracket.
‘Her earnings are indeed well above average, however the reality of the housing market in London means that she needs to save around £60,000 for a deposit on a one or two-bedroom flat (as she has been told that she can borrow £320,000) and she is choosing to do so by cutting back her spending as much as she can.’
‘Being fiscally responsible’