Livre d'Or

I think I met more people from different backgrounds at university than you did because I socialized much more in goyische circles. At J-soc, I pretty much met middle-class north Londoners whose parents were doctors and lawyers. But I also did political societies and cultural societies and theatre societies and LGBT stuff and to a small extent socialized in college, and my subject was 100 people in the year so I met most of them. A friend of mine briefly dated someone who was, I forget, but less than 20th in line to the UK throne. One of my regular lab partners had been homeless before university, I think mostly squatting and sofa-surfing rather than literally rough-sleeping but I wouldn't swear to it.

I think you can't be far off the top decile even with mortgage debt. In the absence of being able to find lavendersparkle's calculator, you can look at ptc24's link to Wikipedia and get a rough idea. The little bit I started out with (seriously, it was less than £20K, it's been very fortunate timing and circumstances that has allowed me to turn that into owning my own home now) can't possibly be the whole difference between wealth and poverty. I don't remember ever disagreeing with you that I was better off as PhD student than you had been!

I don't on the whole believe in insurance. The part of my family that had money passed on to me the belief that you should only insure against utter catastrophes on the level of your house burning to the ground. Anything less than that, it's better to self-insure by putting aside savings, rather than putting yourself in the hands of companies who will try to find a reason to deny your claim. And for all kinds of reasons I would rather have a functional social safety net than the option to buy private insurance.