Gen Z thinks ‘marrying rich’ is the easy option – trust me, it’s not
In a world where working feels more insecure than ever, the next best thing to having a trust fund of your own is to find someone else with one. Or so the theory goes. But marrying for money comes at a high price, says Helen Kirwan-Taylor, who has seen what happens next...
On 30 April 2024, an American comedy creator called Girl on Couch (or Megan Boni as the 28-year-old is known in real life) uploaded a video to TikTok. Speaking directly to the camera, she spoke the lyrics, “I’m looking for a man in finance, trust fund, 6’5, blue eyes, finance…” before moving into techno electronic beats.
Cut to summer 2025, and Boni now has a record deal with three labels. The song has been seen in millions of videos and remixed by various famous artists, including French DJ David Guetta.
Flash mobs of male dancers routinely perform to the beat on TikTok, wearing the trademark banker gilets, and hundreds of spin-off videos depict women wanting to be “spoiled” by finance bros.
Boni didn’t put bankers on the map: they’ve been in the public’s psyche for some time (at least since the Eighties). We all saw the movie Wall Street and The Big Short. Before the crash of 2008, bankers held a mythical place in our minds. Young men barely out of college could walk into the Salomon Brothers investment bank and earn millions within a year.
New York and London became the world’s two banking hubs with thousands of international (mostly) men relocating and taking over entire neighbourhoods, including mine, Notting Hill. Once a staid profession, banking became seen as sexy, fast, and above all, lucrative. Virtually no profession to date offers the possibility of accruing so much wealth so quickly without the accompanying risk (startups mostly fail, whereas banks offer salaries and bonuses).
When the next generation decided it cared more about lifestyle (smoothies and yoga) than greed, the tide shifted towards softer professional career routes, including tech. However, when the dotcom bubble burst in 2000 and the once “cosy” employers who offered sleep hubs and free lunches showed their true colours by firing swaths of workers by text, it all ended abruptly. Working didn’t look like the safe career option it once was. Marriage, to a finance bro on the other hand…
Back to Gen Z star Boni. Her lyrics express an underlying truth that is rarely discussed in the open, which is that a certain percentage of modern women don’t want to work, period. Or they want to work, but on their terms and timetable. Some want to raise a family, some just want to have an easy life with pilates classes, holidays and coffee mornings. To achieve this seemingly regressive goal of being looked after means finding the funding. Enter the finance bro...
I know some of the (late twenties, early thirties) women she’s talking about. A few are even lawyers who quit almost as soon as they started working. They don’t want to be “trad wives” baking their own bread and churning out fresh butter (with four children underfoot) because that is another form of domestic slavery. What they want is to do whatever the hell they want. The next best thing to having a trust fund of your own is to find someone else with one.
The TikTok song highlighted the shift back to the more traditional world of the Eighties. Banking is now seen as the most desirable and stable career choice among 18-25-year-olds, according to a report by the non-profit CFA Institute, which polled 10,000 current college students and recent graduates from 13 countries.
In 2021, by contrast, finance was ranked fifth in popularity with tech and healthcare on top of the list. Though men and women enter the finance industry in roughly equal numbers, only 11 per cent of senior executives in banking are women.
Finance does not just mean banking. In fact, a young private equity professional tells me that banking is where you go to cut your teeth before moving over to glossy venture capital firms and hedge funds, where the stakes are even higher (because they take more risks). One British graduate of a top American business school agrees that he’s noticed that several of the women seemed to be shopping more than studying.
“They had their eye on the prize,” he says. “We’ve seen a few weddings already.” Business school, he says, has become a competitive hunting ground for finance and trust fund kids. Indeed, my very own roommate in New York went to Harvard Business School to find a husband. She succeeded.
Wanting to marry a finance bro is the 2025 version of a get-rich-quick scheme. As the wife of a banker who also worked in hedge funds, I have some reality to offer. I have seen what happens decades in.
The first is that the best match for a man in finance is a woman who is also good at finance because when the s*** hits the fan, the glamorous younger wives with impeccably decorated multiple homes often find themselves on the wrong side of the art of the deal.
Divorce rates are especially high in this sector. One report by Business Insider in 2011 claims that 68.3 per cent of male bankers have been divorced at least once; 23.7 per cent twice. It also says that 92.5 per cent of divorced male bankers’ second wives were younger than their first wives.
The bankers’ wives I know who quit any semblance of work to spend decades flexing on yoga mats in Ibiza had the said mat pulled right from underneath them. Finance is extremely complex today, so complex that even accountants find it hard to follow, meaning whatever he earned in the bank may either have been spent or invested or deferred or efficiently hidden in trusts.
A friend of mine who gave up a flourishing career in fashion married a charismatic banker who was running his life entirely on debt. She had absolutely no idea he was spending three times what he earned because the bank he worked for also happened to be his lender. When they divorced, she found herself homeless and unable to keep the children in private school.
Today, there is a prenup of course (trust fund babies are always lawyered up) and the harsh reality. Nobody earns large sums of money easily. Banking requires the sort of stamina few mortals have. The hours are unsociable and long, especially with today’s 24-hour digital workday.
Financiers travel constantly. My husband never managed an entire holiday without having to fly off somewhere (twice to Australia for the day). The glamorous depiction we see of Mayfair hedge funders wearing Anderson and Sheppard handmade suits, driving their Porsches to the Cotswolds for weekends, is an advert. These men don’t do weekends. They work.
The glamorous wives find themselves at home alone. After years of raising their children on their own, the resentment starts. I remember a Goldman Sachs wife telling me, “I didn’t sign up for this” when her marriage ended, meaning she never planned on raising their four children alone.
Many put up with the loneliness because of the perks (houses and holidays), but then comes the reality of finance, which is that people get sacked all the time. Culls happen when the markets change. Finance marriages are a deal that is predicated on big bonuses coming in every December and favourable conditions. When they don’t, the hollowness that underlies the relationship rapidly manifests.
And if these women do intend to pursue a passion of their own, trying to hang on to a career is tough when married to someone in finance. Two stressed-out professionals fighting over a few free hours on the weekends is not ideal when there are small children. Bankers’ employers have little sympathy for domestic crises. Their view is, “We pay you enough to sort out your home life.” (My husband tells me one banker was written off when he was spotted carrying Sainsbury’s bags into the office.)
I would say 90 per cent of the bankers’ wives I know gave up their jobs. The irony is that in at least two cases, the divorce that followed resulted partly because the husband found his long-time stay-at-home wife boring. And the more the banker or hedge funder earns, of course, the more other beautiful and younger women with a similar ambition to do nothing present their credentials.
Then there’s the self-respect issue. Working means being part of the real world. Sitting at home waiting for the finance bro to turn up for dinner (which he never does) is hardly a fantasy.
The song was, of course, intended to be satire. My advice? Listen to it carefully.
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