£370k - is this figure just the stuff of pipe dreams?A new study, by salary benchmarking site Emolument, has discovered from its research that British workers now only feel well-off if earning £370,000 a year. UK professionals were found to be up there with their US counterparts, who also said they weren’t wealthy until they made £370,000.
This was closely followed by the French, who didn’t feel well off until they earned £310,000 a year, while Swiss workers said the figure was closer to £208,000. At the bottom end of the table was India, where locals felt well-off with a salary of £25,000.
Not surprisingly, the less experience people had, the less they needed to feel wealthy: those with less than five years’ experience needed just £93,000 p.a, compared to professionals with 15 years’ experience or more, who needed £435,000 to feel well off.
However, even the majority of those working in well-paid sectors said they still didn’t feel wealthy. Only a quarter of those working in financial services and a third of those working in insurance said they felt rich. Workers in the tech sector seemed particularly hard done-by, with just 15 per cent saying they felt wealthy, compared with 16 per cent of those working in the public sector.
Alice Leguay, Emolument’s co-founder, said, “Considering current levels of frustration with their jobs and the industry as a whole, it is not surprising that only a small proportion of bankers feel wealthy,”
Many workers entered the sector with hopes of huge bonuses, working in a glamorous and aspirational job and now find themselves in one of the most regulated industries with ever-shrinking payouts and poor social perception of their choice of career, as well as huge standard of living costs which many struggle to maintain.
“This discrepancy leads many searching for an exit towards less regulated and more exciting opportunities in the venture capital, private equity and hedge fund space, where bankers now perceive opportunities for wealth to be within reach.”
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