Be a thrillionaire
Why you now need £3 million to feel rich
If I had been told when I was a little girl that I would grow up to be a millionaire, I would have assumed I was destined for a life of luxury. That, in the words of the Frank Sinatra classic, I would be wallowing in champagne, tiring of caviar and sailing on my private yacht.
Fast forward 35 years, and judging by property values on my suburban street, lo and behold: I am.
My ordinary-looking terraced house in north London has gone up by £400,000 in eight years, making it now worth just over a million pounds.
But pop that cork back in the Moët and cancel the order for the Aston Martin. Because, for a multitude of reasons, being a member of this once-exclusive club in this day and age hardly makes me feel rich.
Although ‘‘millionaire’’ was once the magical word that implied you had won life’s lottery, these days the term has very much lost its sparkle.
For one thing, it seems there’s a lot of us about. Twenty-five years ago, there were just 31,000 millionaires in the UK. Now according to new figures from Barclays, there are no fewer than 715,000 – that’s one in 65 of us.
Like many of the middle classes who find themselves property-rich but cashpoor, if I tried to take you on a Hello- style tour of my house, you would not find too many gold taps.
All this lovely money is purely on paper. My husband, two children and I have to live somewhere.
My house is only worth £1 million when someone pays me £1 million. Move to the country, I hear you say. But being a writer and journalist means I need to stay where I am.
Nor does it seem that the champagne lifestyle will be arriving any time soon. The only way my husband Anthony and I are likely to be able to fund our retirement is with this house – so, in the meantime, I devote my life to scrimping and saving.
I date this back to my Andrex moment about nine years ago – so-called because it was then that I realised it would be supermarket own-brand loo roll from now on if we were going to be able to keep paying the mortgage along with the school fees.
Yesterday was typical of my not-so-glamorous millionaire’s lifestyle.
First thing, I checked my bank balance and gulped in horror at the bite taken out by our weekend food shop (an 11pm Tesco’s delivery so the neighbours don’t know I’ve given up Ocado).
All day I went round the house, turning off lights with gusto, thrilled at trimming another 0.005p off our skyhigh electricity bills. Dinner time with my husband was less “how was your day?” and more “how much have you spent?” This all took place in our kitchen, of course.
Date nights are out now the babysitters, who rake in a tenner an hour sitting on my sofa, earn more than I do, pro rata, writing a book.
And however impressive a £1 million property sounds, it looks pretty meagre besides those of the billionaire oligarchs steadily moving in on London, earning more in a day than we do in a year.
In fact, the Queen’s bank Coutts has suggested that to stand any chance of feeling remotely rich these days, you now need to be a ‘‘thrillionaire’’, with assets of at least £3 million.
It seems old-fashioned that the Great Train Robbers went to all that bother for just £2.6 million, and Viv Nicolson became a celebrity in 1961 for winning just over £150,000 on the Pools.
No wonder, in a world of dwindling pensions, flatlining salaries and highearners’ redundancies, we middle-class millionaires hang on to our homes like life-rafts, guiltily wondering how we’ll ever get our own children on board.
As David Boyle, author of Broke: How to Survive the Middle Class Crisis, writes, our quiet fear is that “this generation is the last to live the aspirational middleclass lifestyle”.
Of course, the average UK home is worth £195,000. So I’m not moaning that, through hard work and prudent investment (rather than inheritance or parental hand-outs, I hasten to add), I have managed to end up in such a house.
But I’m not apologising, either, for pointing out that joining this once-exclusive club has taught me that wealth is a relative concept.