Meet the Henry- High Earner not rich yet

We don’t know what their pension arrangements are, or what their adjusted net income is.

If their adjusted net income is £103k, they aren’t eligible.

And anyway, even if they are currently slightly under inc pension contributions… what if Henry has the opportunity to be promoted and earn £125k? If he had a baby 100% of that extra £25k over £100k would just pay for the childcare help he’s lost (~£10k - £15k is lost in tax and NI).

It doesn’t make sense that promotions, changing jobs and earning prospects should be influenced by keeping your salary low enough to claim for childcare.

This group pay 50% of all tax receipts - we should be encouraging them to earn as much as possible.

Cba to read the article, but is that the fictional flat of the fictional man in the background? Looks lush. I once lived in a houseshare where our resident sex worker, used to wash the knickers of her workwear in the communal kitchen sink, and we realised we had rats, when one climbed up on the counter one night and ate a birthday cake which had been left out, with icing drying on it. It also smelt like farts and stale cigarette smoke. Everything's relative, I suppose.

They disclaim the image is AI. I don’t think ‘Henry’ actually exists, it’s meant to be representative.

But that's the problem. Even at those wages, people don't have access to those things.

With housing costs, there is a shortage of a sense of security. And access to car - free outdoor space is increasingly scarce.

There’s a psychological tag on ‘100’ that needs to be removed, I agree.

Henry will still be eligible for free hours and tax free childcare on a gross income of £103k. The article is wrong there.

I was thinking that the image from the thumbnail is AI

I agree with others. The point of the article is very much that 100k today is not 100k as in years gone by.
If one makes 100k they should reasonably expect a great lifestyle. But they don't have it anymore in London. It's also not the same like 2 people making 100k between themselves (these are actually much better off).

Lots on MN still think of 100k wage like it's still 2010...

I disagree high earners resent the tax burden. They resent housing, childcare, travel and fuel costs.

I think this is a bad article to represent the ‘Henry’, as the example is a single adult living in a one bedroom flat… on which £100k is still a pretty healthy salary. No you wont be feeling loaded in London, but you will be fine.

There is a Reddit forum for ‘Henry’s’ and it’s interesting reading. The complaints are all the same (and quite London / South East-centric):

• £100k after tax is £5700 or £5000 if you have a student loan.
• £100k wouldn’t get you a mortgage on an average house in the South East, so you still need a dual income household to afford something ordinary.
• Even with two £100k earners… you aren’t getting much house in London / South East. The mortgage might then be £3-4k a month for a terrace / semi in the outer zones.
• The high cost of stamp duty means moving to a nicer house might cost six figures… in tax
• The loss of childcare help. This is the number one issue raised. At £100k you lose free hours and tax free childcare. With the new scheme in September this can be worth £10k per child.

I will have two in nursery next year, and the loss of free hours gives me a 100% tax rate on income between about £100-140k.

It’s a massive disincentive to work and earn more. Most parents I know are working part time or putting up to £60k a year into pensions to keep under the threshold.

It’s completely radicalised a whole group of parents IMO - paying very high tax rates and excluded from the social benefits they pay for, for the other 97%. And it’s not like we are living in mansions and driving porches!

I think £100k has been the benchmark for ‘high income’ for about 30 years.

Wish I was on 100k a year. Never going to happen though!

It is insane but yes, I can absolutely see that £100k doesn't go far in London. So when you consider how much less than that most people are on, even in London where the average is higher (a quick Google suggests it's around £47k although it's not immediately clear if that's the mean or the median) then you wonder how people manage to live at all.

This is crazy.

I think this is a badly written article- the issue is less about whether or not 100k is a great salary and more about a downgrade in lifestyle and expectations which applies at almost all levels of society except the genuinely rich.

If I consider my personal circumstances they are this:

• both my partner and I are from ‘middle class’ professional families.
• he’s one of 3, I’m one of 4
• our parents were able to buy large homes, support our uni educations, could take us on regular holidays, my sisters and mum had horses
• both sets of parents were able to afford additional rental properties/holiday homes
• our parents are comfortably retired and have enough for travel and small luxuries

My partner and I:

• also middle class professionals, like our parents, him just under 100k, me 55k.
• live in the SE, commutable to London
• have one child and won’t have more
• live in a pretty modest Victorian semi, albeit an expensive area which we won’t pay off until our 50s.

We have a nice life but the fact remains we don’t have anywhere near the financial security or lifestyle our parents did.

There is a massive cultural psychological shift that needs to happen in order to match our (society’s) living expectations with income expectations. Our living expectations are stuck in the past and the economy has changed so so rapidly.

When I moved to London 20 years ago I earned £18k. I could afford a decent house share and holidays. Even 7 years ago when I moved out of London my room in Balham was £800 p/month- I’ve looked recently out of curiosity and a similar room/house would be £1300 at least.

In 2001 when my parents sold our family home (a rural property they had built on a 6 acre section of land) it sold for 350k - it was sold again 6 years ago for 1.6m, that’s insane. The lifestyle I had growing up as the child of a small town GP and part time nurse is now only affordable for millionaires. I would love to give my son the childhood I had, but that’s never going to happen. It’s not poor me, there’s no violins here, I know I am lucky, but it is a mental and emotional adjustment I’ve had to make.

I don’t think it’s surprising people are struggling with this economical change. Our economy is screwed and it doesn’t support people and families progressing and being better off than the next generation - which until recently was a reasonable expectation regardless of whether you were a teacher or a GP.

I know there will be people on here who can say they’ve managed this and that’s great - but you’ve achieved that against the odds in the context of an economy that’s stacked to make that achievement more difficult and less likely.

No, I wouldn’t call it living comfortably in the context of that salary. The context matters.

@Caligirl80 I lived in shared housing till I was close to 30, everyone did. DH and I still shared with 2 others when first dating.

Being on £100k and feeling it's a struggle becomes a problem for society because they quickly resent their taxes being paid out in the form of benefits - younger people (Henrys) are generally big hearted to begin with, appreciating that there are many worse off in society. If they can't earn their way to (what they perceive as) a decent lifestyle, they won't particularly want to be giving others one for free either.
This is why "cry me a river, Henry" etc is spectacularly missing the point.

Indeed. I moved out of London but remained working there as my job doesn’t exist elsewhere (to a large extent). My travel costs are £5500 a year – so that sucks up all of Henry’s ‘extra’, so even if he saves elsewhere (housing really is the only real saving), he’ll still be back to square one.

Yes, the backlash of probably a few who benefit from the tax he pays. It is clear that people in this country need to be incentivised to work and create wealth. It is the opposite.

We lived in London on a joint salary of about £170k. We lived in a house share (together in our room) until we had our first DC where upon we got a one bed flat for a year before we left London 10 years ago. Even then we compromised and our DC didn't have it's own nursery but was in with us.

We both worked in law / city.

I agree that young professionals now feel like they "deserve" their own flats and have an insane entitlement.

Living in a house share meant we saved an absolute fortune (even with ridiculous city gym membership and a decent work hard play hard lifestyle) and moved out of London with 40% house deposit to leafy Cheshire. Had we moved elsewhere in the country we could have been mortgage free.

The difference in cost for us was £600 for a shared room (it was 10 years ago) as against £2000 for a flat.

I don't think £100k is a lot in London but Dude needs to live in a Zone 3 houseshare---- for a bit.

I agree on ‘expensive discretionary stuff’ but bills for a flat in London will absolutely cost you that much. My bills in 2015 in my (tiny 400sq ft) London flat were £550. Dread to think how much they’ve gone up now.

I think a lot of people here are missing the point – irrespective of whether someone is moaning or not, the point is what that salary SHOULD afford, and how drastically its worth has been slashed due to the economic challenges. It has more clout to demonstrate it at this salary because a) it’s not news to anyone that it’s a struggle to live on minimum wage and b) the higher you go the more disproportionately affected you become.

This is the concerning part of the article and why it's a problem

"According to The Economist, they account for five per cent of taxpayers but nearly half of all income tax receipts. And they represent a conversation we don’t want to have in Britain and which our politics (understandably) isn’t geared towards. After all, plenty of people are worse off than Henry".

Taxes for essential public services are being increasingly focused on a small group within the population. We can look at the article and make judgments on Henry but they are holding up a significant amount of the tax take; and are unlikely to feel that they get good value from public sevices. They are probably in high levels of debt from university; and AI may be coming for their jobs in the next 5-10 years. The Jon market is tricky at the moment so it may feel too risky to move out of London and seek work elsewhere. If you buy outside of London and commute in part of the week the costs are high.

This group may end up struggling to feel stable enough in thier lives (mortgage; savings etc) to be able to have children (if they choose to)

It's a big; growing problem

Top up benefits?

He's obviously not poor but it's about expectations and whether his expectations can be better met elsewhere or if not now, when? He's a single man doing okay for himself and living an expensive life. I have earned double his salary for about three decades now and I am fairly well off now but for a very long time I did not live as expensively as he does, I lived very carefully indeed, no drinking. no going out, and didn't expect any different so didn't feel poor. He feels poor and that's the weird thing.

Well he IS living comfortably on that salary...he's not borrowing money to pay the gas bill is he...?

The other question is 'are people really arguing against progressive taxation' ie take away money from people who can't even put food on the table and give it to high earners so they can feel sufficiently rich?