Would you be prepared to tell a stranger how much you earn and let them broadcast it all over the internet?
For better or worse, it used to be the case that pretty much the only people who knew your salary were you, your boss and probably HM Revenue & Customs.
But now you might be asked “How much do you earn?” by an influencer armed with a camera and a ring light who stops you in the street as you walk to work. In many cases this blunt question comes later, cushioned by a run of lighter questions.
Or they will ask about other pretty personal aspects of your finances, such as how much rent do you pay, how much do you have stashed in savings, or what is your biggest money mistake or regret.
Plenty of people seem to be happy to play ball. Within 40 seconds of one interview, we have discovered that an architectural designer is on £38,000 a year. The interviewee is also willing to reveal the amount they have in savings, plus how much they expect to earn in the future.
In another clip, a 60-year-old man is asked about his biggest financial regret. Not being bolder, he answers. When he was younger, there was a flat that he didn’t buy because, at the time it seemed really expensive – but it has leapt in value from £64,000 to about £1.8m.
The clip, which has been viewed 1.3m times on Instagram, is part of a fast-growing genre: short, street-style interviews that ask strangers highly personal questions about things such as their income, rent and job satisfaction.
It is taking inspiration from the US, where Salary Transparent Street – a channel seeking to normalise conversations around salaries – has amassed 1 million followers in four years.
Those wielding the microphones say the interviews with Britons are helping to improve financial education and promote greater transparency on pay. Others would say it is about indulging our nosiness and trying to generate money by creating content that may go viral.
For creators, the pitch is simple: ask some fairly personal questions, film the answers, and post them online for an audience hungry to know what others are earning, spending and regretting. It is money and work, after all, that are said to worry young people more than social media, the climate crisis and culture war debates.
“My ethos is to drive financial education through conversation,” says Gabriel Nussbaum, a personal finance content creator also known as “That Money Guy”. Nussbaum runs Money Unfiltered, a channel he describes as “dedicated to interviewing the public about personal finance”.
What appears to be a one-person band is, in reality, a well-oiled operation. “We have a team,” says Nussbaum, “and our objective is to get as wide a range of people as we can – different ages, different backgrounds, different genders.”
The channel, which was launched about six months ago, now averages 3m views a month, posting one piece of content each day on Instagram and TikTok.
Is it as easy as simply thrusting a microphone in someone’s face and hoping for the best?
“It’s about how you position the question, or the context that you give them,” says Aydan Al-Saad, an entrepreneur and content creator who asks people about their pay (among other things) and posts the resulting videos on Instagram and TikTok.
“I might not always put this in the edit, but I’ll usually tell people I promote pay transparency, and want to make sure everyone feels they’re being paid fairly,” he adds.
Why does it work? Part of the reason, says Nussbaum, is “you don’t get these conversations anywhere”. Salaries – particularly the actual figures – remain one of the “biggest taboo” in Britain, driven, in part, by confidentiality clauses, workplace norms and a deep-seated reluctance to discuss money (with the exception being house prices).
This year, a survey by the job search site Indeed found British people were often too “polite” to ask about pay.
Now, creators such as Nussbaum and Saad are looking to fill the void. “The goal for me is transparency,” says Saad. “It’s about giving people visibility of what it’s like to work in different careers, how much money they can make and so on.”
Beyond information-sharing, there’s also a psychological pull. “It’s a bit like reality TV, right? I could go viral by speaking to billionaires all the time,” Saad says, pointing to examples from the channel The Venture Room, which interviews high net-worth individuals about their finances. “But people want to see real people and hear real things,” he adds.
That is all very plausible, but for the person being interviewed, what is it like to share your salary and subsequently find your face plastered across the internet? “No one knows what it’s like to go viral until they’ve gone viral,” says Saad.
“We’re not there to put people in a position where they’re uncomfortable,” he continues, adding that interviewees are able to contact his channel if they would like a post removed. “We’ll see it, we’ll remove it, no questions asked.”
The comments on some channels are filtered with the aim of making them a safe space to discuss finances. However, a quick glance at the comments on some videos suggests they can invite a very public audit of private lives. See, for example, a discussion on living in London and whether an income of £35,000 a year is enough to live comfortably or would mean barely scraping by.
So how useful are these videos? Kim Stephenson, a psychologist and financial adviser, says: “It’s good in theory, as knowing is usually better than not knowing.”
As a tool for comparison, though, they may be less useful than intended, says Vicky Reynal, a psychotherapist and the author of Money on Your Mind: The Psychology Behind Your Financial Habits. “Comparison is a human tendency that helps us evaluate how well, or poorly, we’re doing. But we’re more confused than we’ve ever been about how well, or how poorly, we’re doing.”
The main problem, Reynal says, “is how each person will use the information. I’m sure some will watch them for entertainment, or even for reassurance, but there’s a lot who might use them to keep themselves stuck in a state of feeling dissatisfied, not good enough – as confirmation that they’re falling behind.”
Nussbaum says his main intention is for the videos to be helpful, while acknowledging the potential drawbacks. But the feedback, he says, has been “overwhelmingly positive”, with the videos “opening up people’s perceptions of what’s possible”.
Saad agrees. “If one person can get value from a video, it’s worth posting,” he says, pointing to instances in which a video has helped a viewer to then receive a pay rise or change career.
“Let’s say you hear of someone on this channel with a similar job, at a similar age, earning three times more than you,” says Nussbaum. “It might cause some negative feelings – but the flipside is that that person could also watch that video and think: ‘I’m being underpaid in my role, and I need to look around and look at other companies.’ The same video can have two completely polarising effects.”
In theory, the videos should resonate more among gen Z, said to value salary transparency more than their peers. In reality, it is millennials who form a large chunk of their audience – more then 40% of Saad’s following is people aged 25-34, while more than 33% is 35-44.
The statistics are, in part, a reflection of broader financial anxiety among millennials, with 56% of the under-40s said to be considering delaying key milestones such as getting married, having a child or buying a house owing to financial pressures.
What’s next for Nussbaum’s channel? “It’d be great to get more noticeable people on, and have a range of people open up about their finances,” he says. “Speaking to, say, an 18-year-old footballer and asking: ‘You’re earning £100,000 a year, how do you manage that?’”
It’s a marked contrast to the story of your average renter, but Nussbaum maintains that his channel will retain its core theme of “speaking to regular people about their regular lives when it comes to money”.
‘Not today, thank you’
It’s a sunny day in Manchester as I try my luck asking total strangers about their finances in the Castlefield, the Northern Quarter and Spinningfields, areas of the city that often busy with office workers. A prime crowd, I naively think. Over the course of the afternoon, I approach 30 people. One man smiles and appears to look interested before taking a deep breath and saying: “Not today, thank you”. Perhaps another day, I wonder?
Others become hostile when I mention the media or personal finance. Most continue walking before I’ve had the chance to explain the piece that I’m doing.
Only two of the 30 people I ask are willing to provide any information – one seemingly doing so as a gesture of sympathy after an interaction with a standoffish friend. Another requests no surname, no identifying information – a caution at odds with the carefree nature of the TikTokers’ videos. They tell me they are earning between £25,000 and £35,000, and do think salaries should be discussed more, but also “don’t want to be sued”.
There are two things I learned from this exercise. The first is that the quickest way to turn a perfectly pleasant individual into a curt, tight-lipped stranger is to approach them in general, with or without a handheld microphone. The second is that people would rather talk about literally anything else – the bus timetable, the weather, the state of the city centre – than their earnings.
So I didn’t come away with much in the way of hard numbers. But I did leave with the nagging sense that maybe I should have talked about mortgage rates instead.
