Good job, no savings: meet the young professionals with less than a grand in the bank

Once upon a time, there was a young woman with £40,000 in the bank. This princely sum was garnered over a decade of scrimping and saving, with a little bit of help from the government’s lifetime ISA scheme – where they gifted you £1k if you managed to deposit £4k in a year – and topped up by, oh-so-inevitably, the Bank of Mum and Dad (in this case just mum). She felt safe and secure, knowing that if something happened – a sudden job loss or unexpected health condition – she would have a financial buffer to help weather the storm.

Then, she did what you’re supposed to do when you finally acquire that level of cash: she bought a house. And, within the year, nearly every last penny of those once-lofty savings had been obliterated. She – or should I say “I” – had officially joined the 11 million-strong contingent of working-age Brits who currently have less than £1,000 of savings in the bank.

This is according to a and the abrdn Financial Fairness Trust, which found that those with access to less than a grand accounted for about one in three working-age households. It calculates that the UK has a £74bn shortfall when it comes to set aside for emergencies and retirement, compared to if each household had a minimum of three months’ salary saved.