A survival guide for the ‘squeezed upper’ classes: do you own an Apple Watch and earn six figures, but worry about making ends meet?

They own Georgian townhouses, wear Apple Watches and earn six-figure salaries, but they’re still worried about making ends meet (heart bleeding yet?). Nick Curtis offers a survival guide for the ‘squeezed upper’ classes
Feeling the pinch? Here's a survival guide for the ‘squeezed upper’ classes (Illustration by Stephen Collins)
Illustration by Stephen Collins

You would, to paraphrase Oscar Wilde, need a heart of stone to read of the problems of London’s ‘squeezed upper’ classes without laughing. These are the people who — tee-hee — find they can’t live in the city on a household income of £100,000 to £370,000 a year.

They are in the top one per cent of earners, but moan — ho-ho — about school fees and massive mortgages. And the squeezed upper middle — oh, my sides — are doing even worse. The number of middle-class people contacting Citizens Advice about debt may have dropped by 12 per cent in the past four years, according to the organisation’s latest survey, but fears about living costs are up by eight per cent, and a massive 48 per cent of households earning over £70,000 worry that they don’t have enough to cover education, savings, retirement or even food bills. Snort, titter, chortle…

My mirth at these losers has a slightly hollow ring. Because I’m one of them. Together, my wife and I pull in six figures a year (just). We live in a four-bedroom house one Tube stop outside Zone 1 in increasingly fashionable South London. We still own the flat my wife lived in before we met, which returns a good market rent. After a financial scare ten years ago, we paid off as many debts as possible. We don’t have children, those continuous drains on the family purse. I should be sleeping the sleep of the untroubled. Yet I wake most nights, face twisted into a silent rictus of terror, afraid that I don’t have enough money.

Why? Partly it’s insecurity: I’m self-employed, of an age where I can see physical incapacity on the distant horizon. Partly it’s London’s fault. The capital’s hectic economy and helter-skelter house prices make even the super-rich feel penurious. But mostly, I think, we of the squeezed upper have unrealistic expectations of how to live. We expect to have all the accoutrements that our parents had: a modest house, a car, a pension, decent healthcare. But we also expect to have things they never dreamed of, but which our culture of acquisition and aspiration conditions us to crave: weekend jaunts to Soho House Istanbul, an Apple Watch, a wardrobe update at Selfridges once a season... It’s not sustainable. We have to unsqueeze.

‘But I’m a serious foodie…’

It turns out that buying wine in Lidl is not enough. It took me and the missus, ponces that we are, years to prise ourselves away from our local foodie cornucopias of Borough and Oval farmers’ markets and familiarise ourselves with the cut-price delights of East Street and Brixton (those bits of the latter that actually sell fruit, veg and fish, rather than artisan burritos). Friends of mine formed a group to buy fruit and veg in bulk from New Covent Garden Market: of course, this means an early start and the risk of a surfeit of B-list vegetables. But if life gives you parsnips... look up a Jack Monroe recipe.

Latest London food trends

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Stop buying over-the-counter coffee and prepare it at home. And if you’re conjuring up visions of a Nespresso with milk frother (£139.99) and a Quooker tap (£634), think again. A Bialetti Moka stovetop espresso maker (£17.99) and a twin pack of Lavazza (£5.70) will take care of your caffeine needs for a month. Buy spirits in larger bottles as they are incrementally cheaper (Tesco’s 1.5 litre Special Reserve blended Scotch is a particular bargain at £25). Befriend useful people: my father-in-law knows a buyer at M&S who gets him a staff discount on top of special offers, so he pays less than half price for his champagne. He’s not just any friend, see...

‘How else can I get those crates of wine home?’

Driving a car in London becomes a black hole of cash. I belong to Zipcar, a car club that charges from £6 an hour to hire a BMW and has cars all over London. The only disadvantage is that cars have to be returned to the exact same location you pick them up at. With DriveNow you can leave cars anywhere, while easyCar lets you rent private vehicles on the Airbnb model. Or you could always get the Tube — cheaper than a cab, and the driver doesn’t care who you voted for.

‘Seriously, I haven’t had a holiday since Méribel in March!’

Use Airbnb, One Fine Stay and HomeAway to find accommodation, and Trip4Real (which uses locals rather than expensive guides) for city tours. The US website cheapair.com recommends buying international flights as early as possible: a BA return to Sydney in July costs £1,193; in November, it’s £890. Pick places courting the luxury travel crowd rather than already pandering to it: Burma instead of Bali, Cape Verde instead of Cape Town, Wales instead of Suffolk (an inflatable beach dinghy in Aldeburgh costs four times as much as the same model in Tenby, which is the price you pay for the chance to bump into Richard Curtis). On the other hand, a budget flight to Rome can work out dearer once there than a well-chosen long-haul flight somewhere dirt cheap. War zones and unstable countries offer possibilities. Try the ‘-stans’ — I hear Kyrgyzstan is lovely at this time of year.

‘But where will I sleep when we’re arguing?’

The squeezed upper wilfully impose a debt burden on themselves by living in houses that are larger and more expensive than they can afford. When was the last time someone stayed in your spare room? Couldn’t you move to somewhere 25 per cent smaller and stump up for a nearby Airbnb on those rare visits?

‘I need something to talk about at book club!’

Don’t let your cultural life suffer: go to pay-what-you-can nights on Tuesdays at the Arcola theatre in Dalston, free open-air tea dances in Spitalfields on Wednesday lunchtimes. It costs £2 to swim at Hampstead bathing ponds, £4 an hour to hire a tennis court at Brockwell Park. And what about learning a skill that could provide a second income stream? In Lambeth there are free or cheap evening classes in painting, sewing, IT, cake-making and crafts.

Your hobby could turn into an enterprise like Southbank Mosaics, where designs sell for thousands of pounds, or Bespoke Barware, founded by photographer Anjy Cameron and product designer Jamie Wilson, which creates cocktail vessels (such as the tiki cups at Mahiki) to adorn the capital’s hippest clubs, from Bodo’s Schloss to Tonteria. Oh, and do take that digital photography course. Instagram isn’t just a gallery where you show off your life, it’s a marketing portal where you sell it.

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