Yeah no ~$66k/yr is just taking-advantage money, your "quiet when being paid enough" beeper should be going off so loudly right now the people in the buildings next door are wondering if there's a fire drill or not lol.
That being said, if you want to retain the stability of your current environment, one way to mitigate the precedent/reputation hit of going "hi, pay me more plz" might be to shift the responsibility of the suggestion to a skills guidance counselor, life coach, therapist or similar position (I'm sure I've heard of more technically-oriented roles supporting this sort of thing, I just can't remember them right now).
If *that* person were to hear out your situation, go back and forth on various sundry details and then happen to hear about the pay bracket bit and flat-out tell you you weren't being paid nearly enough... well, you were just going to see them because you were a bit depressed (the circumstances you describe line up perfectly for mild depression), and oh no, this happened. Woops.
They are not paid $66k. They are paid £60k which depending where they live in the UK is an average software engineer salary. It’s low for finance in London but unsurprising for an industrial company in the north. You can’t extrapolate the US market to the rest of the world.
It still seems low for that amount of experience. In a non-finance company in London, someone good with 15 years experience should be on >= 100k. I know people with less experience working at such a company making 140k; my impression is that this is on the high side for that context, but it definitely exists.
Maybe it's less outside the south-east. But OP works remote, so why not work remotely for a company that pays decent money? I know a guy who lives in some godforsaken fishing village in Scotland and has a remote London job.
That being said, if you want to retain the stability of your current environment, one way to mitigate the precedent/reputation hit of going "hi, pay me more plz" might be to shift the responsibility of the suggestion to a skills guidance counselor, life coach, therapist or similar position (I'm sure I've heard of more technically-oriented roles supporting this sort of thing, I just can't remember them right now).
If *that* person were to hear out your situation, go back and forth on various sundry details and then happen to hear about the pay bracket bit and flat-out tell you you weren't being paid nearly enough... well, you were just going to see them because you were a bit depressed (the circumstances you describe line up perfectly for mild depression), and oh no, this happened. Woops.
For your consideration:
https://www.levels.fyi/
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29336234 - hiring a good EA/PA; a guidance counselor needs to be similarly supportive so maybe is relevant