As the title says, I’m a low HENRY at ~£150k mostly paid through dividends from a company directorship. It’s a digital but high-touch business that will be very hard to scale and is at risk from AI. Four days per week.
I live in an extremely LCOL area with wife and young kids, 600k house with no mortgage.
Aside from the house I have about £500k savings plus about £100k in a pension.
Mid 30s.
With that out of the way – I’d like to get some opinions on future-proofing and priorities from this point. I’ve come to despise the industry my business operates in and do dream vaguely of doing something more ‘real’. Don’t want to dox myself but industry is finance adjacent.
My concern is that while I may be doing reasonably well by local standards, I’m coasting without a clear plan for the future or a sense of what I’m optimising for.
What would you guys be thinking about in my position? Would you want to maximise and extract value from the current business, even if the sector feels hollow and boring? I don’t see any obvious way to replace that income but I’m struggling to get my tail up for it.
I also don’t have much ‘optionality’ around a job switch as there is not much of a job market here. A serious office job in my current industry would involve a move to London, by whose standards we wouldn’t be especially well off. Would you consider that anyway to future-proof?
What about raising kids in the ‘regions’? Setting them up for success through lower pressure, or failure from lack of ambition and a lower bar? I don’t know if accent still matters in 2026 but the local accent is not RP English.
Please share your candid views folks, would be really useful to get some new perspectives.