What’s the best EU country for people earning more than £120,000? How can you get tax-free childcare despite being a high-flying lawyer? Should you buy a “doer-upper” home in the London suburbs for £1.5m or a modest semi-detached for just shy of a mil?
For most of Brits, these questions might as well be asking how soon they can board a SpaceX flight to the moon. But for Henrys (high earners, not rich yet), these are the kind of questions that keep them up at night.
Henrys are finally having their time in the sun. These big earners have been the subject of ragebait broadsheet tell-alls (sample headline: “We’re Henrys but we’re not saying hooray”) and explainers in financial publications like Fortune and The Economist.
There are dedicated social media forums for anxious Henrys asking whether a Universal theme park queue jump is good value for a kids’ holiday (conclusion: stupidly expensive, but worth it) or whether they should move from banking to consulting (the consensus: don’t make the jump if you like spending any time with your family).
For a comparatively low-earning rubbernecker like myself, reading about Henrys is a little like your aunt boasting about how her oncologist son just treated her to a weekend in Lake Como: jealousy-inducing, difficult to relate to, strangely compelling.
You see, this is precisely the problem: Henrys are, by their nature, deeply hateable. Everything about them conjures up an image of the kind of flicky-haired, jumped-up blonde posho you might have seen braying on the high street of a provincial university town. And yet they point to a deeper problem in society.
Something has gone very wrong when even the textbook rich – which tends to refer to those on salaries of £100,000 and above in the UK – don’t feel like they have much cash in their pockets. Scrape off the privileged surface foam of the typical Henry moan and you’ll find stories of those who are dipping into savings to cover the cost of childcare or scraping the bottom of their bank accounts to cover their mortgage repayments. They may be doctors, lawyers, bankers and tech consultants, but they’re still coming up empty at the end of the month.
The problem is, it all comes down to tax. According to calculations by The Economist, a Henry on £100,000 can face up to a 71 per cent tax rate once you factor student loan repayments and National Insurance into the higher tax rate. That essentially means they take home 29p on every pound they earn – earning a single pound over that magic number of a hundred grand means that you could be taxed thousands more.
Those with children also lose out on cheaper childcare in a country that already charges among the highest rates in the world. In inner London, it now costs £218 a week to put a child into nursery part-time. If you’re a single parent Henry, things can be just as bad – after all, you don’t have a partner to split the bills or pick up the childcare slack. “I know that will sound ridiculous to some people,” one singleton Henry told The Times. “It is not enough for me to pay for my house and life, and I don’t have an extravagant lifestyle – I tow a caravan and that is how me and the dogs go on holiday.”
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If you’re still feeling unsympathetic, I don’t blame you. After all, Britain has a peculiar relationship with wealth – we aspire towards it and yet we loathe it. The French guillotined their rich; we merely seethe in silence and send passive aggressive texts when our friends upgrade to Premium Economy on a group holiday and leave the rest of us in cattle class.
Of course, it is absolutely right that those who make more should be taxed appropriately –although that basic principle should apply just as much to the flexibly-domiciled millionaire and billion-pound corporations who have the means to employ an army of tax-dodger advisors as it does to the average NHS consultant.
Henrys may have it bad, but so do the rest of us – according to a survey by online banking service Marcus by Goldman Sachs, 43 per cent of Brits say that they worry about money a lot. Over a third of people feel that they are financially worse off than they were at the same time last year.
At least Henrys can choose to fall back on deferring their bonuses, working shorter hours, or increasing their pension contributions. Hating them is easy work – but the real question to answer is why even a high-earning person in Britain feels so much worse off.
Zing Tsjeng is a journalist, non-fiction author, and podcaster
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