I make over 150k a year in the UK, my wife has a decent income, pension through salary sacrifice, ISA almost maxed every year, and two BTLs that I have been filling forms for over the last six or seven years. On paper it looks fine, but when I put everything into a simple sheet with months, tax, NI, childcare, school costs, mortgage and the rest of the cost of living around London, the yearly net worth growth feels very small compared to what comes in gross. I have had years where my salary went up by fifteen or twenty thousand and at the end the change in net worth is more like an ok, it went up a bit, nothing that really matches the level of stress and hours spent in calls.
At some point I got tired of guessing on my own and I turned to Optimise Accountants, mainly because this pattern where part of everything is in my own name, part in a limited company and some invested outside the UK started to feel like it serves HMRC more than it serves me. I did not go to them as some kind of guru, just as people who sit in these numbers all day and can tell me directly if the structure is badly set up or if this is simply how things look when you are a HENRY in the UK. Right now I am just trying not to end up in another five years with the same charts, only with more weekends lost at the office.