As I often say, the average income for a houshold in England is £26k. Therefore you should not have any problem. Especially as you are talking about Sussex and not London.

 

It's interesting article. It is related to the debate about cutting child benefits for what the Tories call "top-earners" (without thinking that they wouldn't cut for a household earning 2x£44k but will cut if they earn 1x£45! ) and taking example of friends of them making £150k/year (they obviously live on another planet).
The author makes a very good summary of the issue here:

However you will notice that the article concentrates on London, which is not Sussex. Moreover it says:

That is a shame that they did not provide the median as you would have seen immediately that it is much lower (a teacher earns £25k, a lot of wages such as Tesco etc make £15k), despite what the journalist says.

PS: I had a look at the 2009 Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings as pointed out in the article. Indeed the median (not average as I wrote above) is £25,800 in 2009 (with the crisis, things have not changed much). You also see that the median for London is £627x52=£32624 (nearly half the average of £60,959 quoted in the article ! )
In Sussex - South East, the median (and close to the average as all the high salaries are located in London due to the banker bonuses) is £26707.