In November 2019, in the middle of a general election campaign, a man in a Question Time audience became briefly and permanently famous.
The subject was a proposal to raise income tax on the top 5% of earners, meaning those on more than £80,000. The man was cross about it, and said so. He was going to be taxed more, he told the room, and he was nowhere near the top 5%. He wasn’t even, he added, in the top 50%.
Fiona Bruce, to her credit, asked the obvious follow-up. So you earn over £80,000?
He confirmed that he did.
You can more or less hear the room turn.
The numbers weren’t close. At the time, around £75,000 to £81,000 was the entry point to the top 5% of income taxpayers, so he was in it, and by some counts nearer the top 4%. As for not being in the top half: about £25,000 would have done that. He was out by roughly £55,000 and an entire hemisphere of the income distribution.
Here’s the part that I think is worth more than the ridicule he got.
He almost certainly wasn’t lying, and he wasn’t stupid. He was describing, accurately, how his life felt.
Because he wasn’t comparing himself to the country. He was comparing himself to the people he actually saw: neighbours, friends, the people he worked with. And if everyone in that circle earns what he earns or more, then the arithmetic of his own experience says he’s ordinary. Slightly behind, even. The national figures might as well have been about a different country, because in a sense they were.
This is the trap, and it doesn’t only catch people on national television.
Social media gets the blame for it, and fairly. A feed is a curated highlights reel of manufactured moments, and measuring your ordinary Tuesday against it is a reliable way to feel worse. But the deeper problem isn’t the phone. It’s that all of us are running a comparison of some sort, all the time, and almost none of us have consciously chosen who’s in it.
The reference group picks itself, out of proximity and habit. And then it quietly sets the target.
Comparing yourself against something closer to the average is, psychologically, a much healthier habit than comparing yourself against a feed. It’s also a better guide to reality. But averages are slippery things, and the national one is often too blunt to be much use. A household income that feels comfortable in one part of the country will not stretch nearly as far in another, and telling someone in the South East that they’re well above the UK median is true, unhelpful, and slightly beside the point.
Local averages tend to be far more informative. Earnings and house prices in your own region, what a comparable household actually spends, what people in similar circumstances have realistically put aside. That’s a benchmark with some meaning in it, rather than a number that either flatters you or depresses you depending on which way you hold it.
None of which stops the feeling. You can know the figures perfectly well and still feel like the man on Question Time, because feelings aren’t calculated from HMRC percentile tables. They’re calculated from the last dinner party you went to.
But knowing where you actually stand does one useful thing. It separates two questions that get tangled together constantly: am I doing well, and am I doing well compared to these particular people.
The first one you can plan around. The second one is mostly just weather.
We help people in Hook and across Hampshire, Surrey, Berkshire, Sussex and Kent get a clear-eyed view of where they really are, which is often further along than it feels. It tends to be the reassurance nobody asked for and everybody wanted.
Altor Wealth Management LLP is authorised and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA number 769033). Registered office: Landmark House, Station Road, Hook, Hampshire RG27 9HA. This article is general information, not personal advice. Tax treatment depends on your own circumstances and is based on current legislation, which can change.