The Salary That Never Catches Up

Nearly half of India’s high-net-worth individuals are saving less than a fifth of what they earn. Not struggling-to-make-rent India - this is the India Wealth Survey 2025, conducted by Marcellus Investment Managers and Dun & Bradstreet, and the number gets worse the younger the earner. Among HNIs aged 30 to 45, half are saving under 20% of their post-tax income, and half of that same age group is carrying at least one active loan. These are not people without money. These are people whose money keeps disappearing before it turns into anything that feels like freedom.

It isn’t a uniquely Indian pattern. First Citizens’ 2025 Beyond Wealth Report found that more than half of wealthy Americans describe themselves as somewhat or very financially stressed this year. Wealth, it turns out, buys a better-dressed version of the same anxiety - not an exit from it.

The handcuffs are golden, but they’re still handcuffs

There’s a phrase that keeps surfacing in research on high-earning professionals, and it isn’t a coaching buzzword - it came out of a study by Great Place To Work, which combed through 1.7 million employee survey responses across more than 1,500 companies. When people were asked what kept them at a job that was otherwise making them miserable, “golden handcuffs” was the single most common phrase used. Not passion. Not purpose. The money was too good to walk away from, even when everything else said leave.

One of the women I interviewed for my book, Shaheen, a consulting professional based in Bangalore, put it precisely: “Every time I get a raise, somehow the expenses rise to match it. I’m earning more but feeling the same level of trapped.” She wasn’t describing bad luck. She was describing a system working exactly as lifestyle inflation designs it to.

The night Prateek opened a spreadsheet

Prateek Agarwal is 38, a Director of D2C at an FMCD brand, seven years into a career that by every visible marker was going well. Then his second child was born, and one evening he did something most of us avoid doing on purpose: he opened Excel and projected his expenses forty years forward. Children’s education. His parents’ healthcare. His own retirement, whenever that might arrive.

“When you have a few lakhs in your account and you just go and swipe your card, it’s very easy,” he told me. “But when you project expenses forty years forward... I realized I’ll need to be a lot more practical.” What struck me wasn’t the panic in that sentence - there wasn’t much. It was the clarity. Prateek hadn’t discovered he was in financial trouble. He’d discovered he’d never actually looked.

He has a rule now that I’ve started repeating to almost everyone I coach on money: “It’s okay to get a B rating a year. But it’s NOT okay to manage your money in a B way.” A B year is recoverable. A B-grade relationship with your own finances, compounded over a career, usually isn’t — not because the money runs out, but because the years quietly do.

Money and money consciousness are not the same thing

Across fourteen interviews I conducted for my book, one pattern surprised me more than any other. When I asked people to rate their sense of financial security on a scale of one to ten, it came out lowest of every single life dimension I measured — lower than career satisfaction, lower than relationships, lower than health. And this wasn’t a low-income sample. People earning fifteen to thirty lakh rupees a year were rating their own financial security a five or a six out of ten. Not because they didn’t have money. Because they didn’t have a relationship with it.

That’s the distinction I want to draw a hard line under: money and money consciousness are not the same thing. Money is the number in the account. Money consciousness is whether you actually know what that number needs to do for you, over what time horizon, against what future you’re actually building toward.

Five phases, and most careers stall in the second

In my work with clients, I use a framework I call the Money Evolution Framework, which maps five phases most people move through: Survival, Security, Freedom, Wealth Building, and Legacy. Here’s the part that surprises people: a six-figure salary can sit comfortably inside Security and never once touch Freedom. Income is not the variable that moves you between phases. Consciousness is.

Security is defined by what it’s still afraid of. Someone in Security-phase thinking checks their account before making a decision they’ve already made in their head; someone in Freedom-phase thinking has already priced the decision and is checking the account out of habit, not anxiety. The two can have identical bank balances. What separates them is whether the money is still running the show or has quietly become a tool being run.

“I haven’t done the math”

One of the more useful reframes I picked up from these interviews came from Shaheen again, on the specific sentence “I can’t afford to leave.” In her account, and in almost every version of this I’ve heard since, that sentence rarely means what it says. It almost always means “I haven’t done the math to know what leaving actually requires.” Those are two very different problems. One is a genuine financial constraint. The other is an avoidance strategy dressed up as a financial constraint — and it’s far more common than people admit, because doing the math forces you to face numbers that are easier to leave vague.

Pawan, a Key Account Manager in Mumbai, described a version of this that’s become common enough to have its own texture in Indian corporate life: EMI culture, where the job stops being about the work entirely. “The persons are going there just for paying EMI only. They’re not interested to go to the job, but for the bank’s pleasure, they have to pay the bills.”

The B-rating rule, in practice

Two concepts have done more for my clients than any budgeting app. The first is the freedom number — take your monthly expenses and multiply by twenty-four. That’s roughly the buffer that turns “I can’t afford to leave” into an actual, calculable answer instead of a feeling. Some people find they’re two years away. Some find they’re already there and didn’t know it. Either way, it’s a number, not a fog.

The second is the pre-provision shift: paying your savings and investments first, the moment income arrives, and spending only what’s left — rather than spending first and hoping something survives at the end of the month. It’s the mechanical difference between a life where lifestyle inflation eats every raise automatically, and one where growth in income actually becomes growth in freedom.

What actually changes this

None of this is really about spreadsheets. Prateek’s spreadsheet was a trigger, not a solution. What it did was force a confrontation with a question most of us organize our entire lives to avoid — not “how much do I have,” but “what do I actually want this money to make possible, and by when.” That’s a values question wearing a financial costume, and it’s rarely one people can answer alone.

This is exactly the kind of work we do inside The Money Mindshift, our CFP-led financial clarity coaching programme — and it’s a thread that runs through the broader work at Boundless You too, because financial security is rarely just a financial problem. It’s usually a consciousness problem wearing a financial number.

— Ranjeet