How to avoid 'lifestyle creep'

Life Kit

NPR

Education, Self-improvement, Health & Fitness, Business, Kids & Family

4.5 • 4.9K Ratings

🗓️ 12 September 2023

⏱️ 23 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Making more money tends to lead to spending more money. It's a phenomenon known as "lifestyle creep." Paco de Leon, author of Finance for the People, shares advice on keeping your long-term financial goals in check and fending off the subconscious urge to automatically increase spending when your income increases. This episode originally published on July 14, 2022.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Support for NPR and the following message come from the Walton Family Foundation, working to create access to opportunity for people and communities by tackling tough social and environmental problems.
0:12.0	More information is at waltonfamilyfoundation.org.
0:15.8	You're listening to LifeKit from NPR.
0:21.8	Hey everybody, it's Mariel.
0:24.2	There's this personal finance phenomenon that's happened to many of us.
0:27.9	It's called lifestyle creep.
0:29.8	When you start to earn more money, you also start to spend more money.
0:34.9	Paco de Leon is a writer, illustrator, an author of the book Finance for the People.
0:40.3	So as your income grows, you're throwing down money like it's no object, until one day you look at your bank account or your credit card bill and realize it is.
0:50.1	And this topic gets complicated, right? Because it's normal to want to improve your quality of life,
0:55.0	to get that bigger apartment with the dishwasher or that ad-free subscription for your music streaming.
1:00.9	But we still need to know what we're spending money on. And these choices should be intentional.
1:05.8	We don't want them to creep up on us. So on this episode of Life Kit, which first aired in July of last year, journalist Ruth
1:12.7	Tam talked to Paco about how to avoid lifestyle creep. And part of that comes from understanding
1:18.2	your emotions. Support for NPR and the following message come from the Walton Family Foundation, working to create access to opportunity for people and communities by tackling tough social and environmental problems.
1:37.4	More information is at walton family foundation.org.
1:42.2	This is NPR's Life Kit. I'm Ruth Tam. What are common ways lifestyle creep surprises people.
1:48.8	Let's get some examples out here. Sure. Housing is such a huge cost, right? The cost of rent is something
1:56.3	that seems to just be creeping up and creeping up because it is a function of supply and demand.
2:02.7	And so I think folks who are younger, maybe they might not mind having one or five roommates,
2:09.5	right? There's this like idea in society that the older you get, you shouldn't have roommates,
2:15.0	right? And so I think that's one way people experience
	...

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