I had a client a while back. Consultant. Earning well over £150,000 a year. Smart, driven, the kind of person who had worked hard for everything they had.

They came to me because they had nothing saved. Nothing. Not a meaningful pension, not an emergency fund, not investments. Just a very expensive life and a salary that funded it month by month.

They weren't unusual.

There is a difference between being rich and being wealthy and most people don't know it. Rich is about income. What comes in. Wealthy is about assets. What you have. And for a surprising number of high earners, those two things look very different.

Think about two people.

One is a GP. Earning £90,000 a year. Two cars on finance. Private school for the kids. A beautiful kitchen put on a remortgage. Holidays twice a year. They look, from the outside, like they are doing brilliantly. And if their salary stopped tomorrow, they would be in trouble within three months.

The other is a secondary school teacher. Earning £38,000. They bought a modest house fifteen years ago and have paid it down steadily. They put money away every month without thinking about it. They have six months of living costs in savings and a pension that is growing. If their salary stopped, they could breathe. For a while at least.

Which one is wealthy?

Income is a flow. It comes in and it goes out. Wealth is a store. It sits there, grows, and gives you options. And the thing about a high income is that it doesn't automatically build wealth. In fact, it can do the opposite. Because a high income brings a high lifestyle, and a high lifestyle is very hard to pull back from.

The technical term is lifestyle inflation. Your salary goes up. And somehow, within a year, so does everything else. The car. The holidays. The school fees. The restaurants. It all expands to fill the space. And the gap between what you earn and what you actually keep - which is the only gap that matters - stays exactly the same.

I see this again and again. People who earn extraordinary amounts and feel permanently on the edge. And people who earn what looks like very little and feel completely secure.

The question that cuts through all of it is simple. If your income stopped tomorrow, how long could you manage?

Not comfortably. Just manage.

A week? A month? A year?

That answer tells you more about your financial situation than your salary ever could.

The awkward thing about being a high earner is that the expectations attached to that income are enormous. From your social circle, from your family, from yourself. There is often an unspoken idea that earning well means you can afford everything. That the salary will always be there. That later is fine because later you will sort it out.

And so the wealth never gets built. Because it keeps getting spent on the life that is supposed to go with the income.

Real wealth is options. The option to work less. To say no to something. To weather a bad year without panic. To make choices based on what you actually want rather than what you financially have to do.

It doesn't require a huge income. It requires a gap between what you earn and what you spend, and the discipline to put something in that gap every single time.

My consultant client is in a different position now. Same salary. Very different relationship with it. The car is older. The lifestyle is smaller in some ways and bigger in others - because financial security turns out to feel better than a new kitchen.

They are not yet wealthy. Yet they are becoming it.

And that shift - from just earning well to actually building something - is one of the most satisfying things I get to watch.