Meet the HENRYS: The Six-Figure Earners Who Don’t Feel Rich

Fifteen years ago if you’d told April Little that she’d make $300,000 a year, she would have pictured a life free of financial stress.

“The white picket fence—I have the whole visual in my head,” says Little, 38 years old, a human-resources executive turned career coach in Rochester, N.Y. “I don’t want to sound ungrateful, but when I got to that proverbial mountaintop I realised there’s a lot of expenses. And I still don’t own a home.”

So go the plush-but-not-too-plush lives of the Americans who qualify as HENRY—high earner, not rich yet.

Little makes multiple six figures running her own business but carries $90,000 of college and grad-school debt. Child care and education for her three children would be so costly that she and her husband decided the better option was for him to leave his radio job to parent and home-school full time.

New census data show 14.4% of U.S. households bring in $200,000 or more a year, a near record. Yet the money doesn’t have the buying power those earners wish it did, partly due to the rising prices hammering us all and partly due to the supercharged costs of things like houses and cars. HENRYs describe feeling stuck on a hamster wheel—a nice one that other hamsters envy—but running in place nonetheless.

Oh come on, you’re thinking . You’re asking me to feel sympathy for Audi-driving, Chase Sapphire-loving, Whole Foods-shopping consultant types with kids in private school?

Well…not exactly. But what they’re feeling is a version of what a lot of Americans at every income level face—making more money but not feeling like there’s a surplus. The essence of being a HENRY is feeling a gap between what you have and what you think you need to be comfortable.

What these high earners consider essentials might be termed luxuries (or nonsense) by the rest of us, but it’s also true that it takes more money to feel rich these days. And their great fear is becoming a HENRE: high earner, not rich ever .

Short of expectations

Attorney Joshua Siegel doesn’t expect sympathy as he motors around Los Angeles in his Lexus SUV. He just figured at age 40, having risen to partner and chair of the transactional tax group at Albrecht Law, that he might be driving from a house he owns to a country club where he’s a member.

Instead, his occasional golf outings take him from his rental home to a public course. Raising three kids in one of the country’s most expensive cities has been a reality check, he says. He’s also realised that a lot of people with jobs like his come from wealthy families where trust funds and down-payment assistance give them financial head starts.

The son of an electrician and a dental assistant, Siegel is making his own way in the white-collar world.

“It really just feels like treading water,” he says.

Monique So, a 40-year-old financial consultant, says she and her husband, a software engineer, have a net worth in the mid-seven figures. But she likely won’t breathe easy until, or if, they accumulate an eight-figure net worth. Daycare for their 2-year-old takes a $30,000 bite out of their family budget.

“I have this scarcity mindset that is very common,” she says.

What it takes to feel rich

Caitlin Frederick, director of financial planning at Ullmann Wealth Partners in Jacksonville Beach, Fla., says many of her mid career clients are less affluent than their salaries suggest. She advises a lot of prototypical millennials who racked up student loans in hopes of vaulting into high-paying jobs. They delayed buying houses and starting families while climbing professional ladders.

The first part of their plans worked, she says. The degrees led to hefty incomes. Now that they’re having kids, shopping for real estate and wishing to upgrade their Camrys, they’re discovering that many of life’s major expenses shot up faster than the overall rate of inflation.

Lifestyle creep is a factor too, she says, noting clients who overspend on trips and restaurants.

“It is easy for people to just continue to increase their lifestyle every time they get a promotion,” Frederick says.

Then again, they watched their slightly older co-workers spend freely, and buy lake houses, too. The good life requires more money than it used to, she adds.

In 2009, the median home price was $220,900, according to the Federal Reserve, and a new car cost an average of $23,276, according to the Energy Department. Had prices increased at the rate of the consumer-price index, the average house would cost $322,000 today and a car would cost $34,000. Instead, the Fed reports an average house goes for $412,000 today, and a typical new car is $48,000, according to Kelley Blue Book.

The national going rate for a babysitter 15 years ago was $10.50 an hour, according to Care.com. Now it’s $18.38, 20% more than if the cost had tracked the consumer-price index.

Budget-conscious HENRYs tell me it’s often hard to find mid tier options in, well, anything, as companies push luxury versions of everything from high-end water bottles to $1,000-a-night hotel rooms .

Another big-ticket item

Another financial curveball comes up frequently in my conversations with high earners: school costs.

Nearly half of American private schools increased enrolment in the last academic year, according to the Cato Institute. Parents who originally planned to send their children to public school tell me they’ve gone private for reasons that include pandemic learning disruptions, public schools’ difficulty retaining good teachers and budget problems . Some say they’re convinced private schools are the only places their kids will thrive, though more than 80% of American kids attend public school.

Brad Gyger and his wife shuttle their three children around in a 2014 GMC Yukon with 130,000 miles—not exactly the late-model, luxury ride he expected to own as a three-time chief revenue officer in the tech sector. Then again, he didn’t anticipate annual private-school tuition payments roughly equivalent to the price of a new, fully loaded Cadillac Escalade.

Gyger, now an independent sales consultant in California, says he didn’t consider private education until a few years ago, when he and his wife concluded their oldest child would thrive in a more academically challenging environment. The school could also accommodate their second child’s learning needs. And how could they leave out the youngest?

Gyger, 46, says his family is fortunate to even have education options. The trade-off is living more modestly than his résumé might suggest.

He gave up gym and tennis-club memberships, opting to stay fit on the cheap by cycling and lifting dumbbells in his garage. And forget about upgrading from the home the couple bought in 2015.

“We’re probably never moving,” says Gyger. He hopes they’ll remodel the kitchen. Someday.