We modeled the five fixed costs that quietly eat a "high" income (housing, taxes, childcare, healthcare, transport) across 30 US metros at a $400K HHI. The spread between the least-squeezed and most-squeezed metro is roughly $97,000 a year. Same gross income. Same family. We're calling it the Quiet-Broke Index.
Five inputs. Thirty seconds. You'll get a 0–100 Quiet-Broke score, a verdict, and the line items doing the most damage.
We send one Henry Finance issue every Tuesday and Friday. No spam. The next one ranks the tactical fixes for your top three line items — childcare arbitrage, the AMT/SALT shift, and house-rich/cash-poor traps.
Three findings that should change how you think about "high income."
A $400K household keeps about $194K in Tampa after the five fixed costs. The same household keeps about $97K in NYC. Same gross. Same family. Different geography.
San Jose, San Francisco, New York, Honolulu, Boston, Los Angeles, San Diego, and Washington DC. In all eight, the after-tax-and-fixed-cost slack is small enough that a 20%-of-gross savings rate (the textbook number) is a stretch goal, not a baseline.
NYC clocks 42.1%. Hawaii 41.2%. The SALT-cap interaction means high-tax-state HENRYs pay roughly 10 percentage points more in combined federal + state + local tax than peers in Texas, Florida, or Tennessee at the same gross. That's about $40K/yr that never makes it past the paystub.
Higher score = more squeezed. The number to the right of each city is the share of after-tax income consumed by the five fixed costs.
| # | Metro | Quiet-Broke score |
|---|
Plain numbers, plain assumptions. The whole point of an index is that you can argue with it.
We take five line items at the metro level, sum them as a share of post-tax income, then anchor that share to a 0–100 score where 0 is the cheapest 30-metro household and 100 is the most expensive.
This is a one-page index from one publication, version 0.1, refreshed monthly. It's a starting point for a conversation, not the IRS. If you think a number is off, tell us in a comment on Henry Finance and we'll fix it publicly.