This is an editorial opinion piece. A high income gets treated, casually and often uncritically, as the clearest marker of financial success — the number people compare, the milestone that gets celebrated. Having covered money and wealth for long enough to see the pattern repeat across income levels, my honest view is that this fixation is a genuine mistake, and it produces worse financial decisions than a more useful measure would.
Why income is such a seductive, misleading number
Income’s appeal as a measure is obvious: it’s visible, comparable, and updates regularly, which makes it feel like a real-time scoreboard. The problem is that income measures a flow — what comes in over a period — while what actually determines someone’s financial security is a stock: what they’ve accumulated and kept, net of what they owe. These are genuinely different things, and treating a high flow as equivalent to genuine security ignores the fact that a flow can stop. A high-earning professional living at the edge of their income, with minimal savings and significant debt obligations, is in a more fragile financial position than their salary alone would suggest — a reality that becomes obvious the moment that income is interrupted, and invisible before that.
The comparison trap income specifically encourages
Income also invites a particular kind of comparison that I think is genuinely corrosive: because salaries are relatively easy to estimate or discover, even informally, income becomes the currency of financial comparison between peers in a way that actual net worth rarely does, since net worth is far less visible and far less openly discussed. This produces a dynamic where people calibrate their sense of financial success against a number — peer income — that tells them almost nothing about their own actual financial position, encouraging lifestyle and spending decisions calibrated to match visible earnings rather than genuine financial capacity.
What a better measure actually looks like
My argument isn’t that income doesn’t matter — obviously it does, since for most people it’s the primary mechanism through which wealth eventually gets built. The better measure is net worth trajectory: assets minus liabilities, tracked over time, alongside the savings rate actually driving its growth. This reframes the relevant question from “how much do I earn” to “how much of what I earn actually converts into lasting financial position, and is that improving over time.” Two people earning identical salaries can have wildly different financial trajectories depending on this gap, and the person with the lower income but the healthier gap is, in any meaningful sense, the one actually building wealth.
Why this reframing changes real decisions, not just how people feel about money
This isn’t purely a philosophical distinction — it changes concrete decisions. Evaluated against income alone, a pay rise looks like unambiguous progress. Evaluated against net worth trajectory, the same pay rise is only genuine progress if it doesn’t get fully absorbed by lifestyle inflation, a well-documented pattern where spending rises in step with income, leaving the actual gap between earning and accumulating no better than before the raise. Income-focused thinking has no natural mechanism for catching this; net-worth-focused thinking does, because it forces the follow-up question income alone never prompts.
The honest counterargument, and why I don’t think it holds up
The strongest case against this reframing is that net worth is harder to track, feels more abstract, and doesn’t provide the frequent, visible feedback that a regular paycheck does — a fair practical objection. But I’d argue that’s a reason to build the habit of tracking it deliberately, not a reason to default back to income as the more comfortable proxy. A net worth figure updated even quarterly, however approximate, provides a fundamentally more honest picture of financial progress than watching a salary figure rise while quietly wondering, without ever actually checking, whether anything is actually being kept.
Why this matters most for people who feel financially stuck despite earning well
I think this reframing matters most for people who describe feeling financially stuck despite what looks, from the outside, like a strong income — a genuinely common and often quietly distressing experience. In my experience, this feeling almost always resolves into a net-worth-trajectory problem rather than an income problem once someone actually does the calculation: the income was never the issue, the gap between earning and keeping was, and no further income growth alone would have fixed it without also addressing that gap directly.
How this connects to the safety-net argument I’ve made elsewhere
This isn’t a disconnected argument from the broader case for building genuine financial resilience in layers, not just a single savings target — they’re really the same underlying point applied at different scales. Just as an emergency fund alone isn’t the whole of financial resilience, a high income alone isn’t the whole of financial success; both arguments rest on the same underlying discipline of looking past the single visible number to the fuller structure sitting behind it.
The specific habit I’d actually recommend, if I’m allowed one
If I had to reduce this argument to a single practical habit, it would be this: calculate an actual net worth figure — everything owned minus everything owed — at least once, today, however rough the estimate, and then again at fixed intervals afterward. The first calculation is rarely comfortable, and that discomfort is precisely the point: it replaces a vague, income-based sense of financial progress with an honest, specific number that either is or isn’t moving in the right direction, which is a categorically more useful thing to know than how a salary compares to a peer’s.
A note on this piece
This is a signed editorial opinion piece reflecting the author’s own view on how financial success should be measured, not a factual report of settled consensus, and it isn’t personalised financial advice. Reasonable people, including financial professionals, may reasonably weigh income and net worth differently.
Sources: General personal finance and behavioural economics research on lifestyle inflation and savings-rate dynamics.
