When we decided to do an episode about Lifestyle Creep, a foggy deja vu washed over me,

because I was convinced we had covered it on the show before so I quickly

googled Money with Katie Lifestyle Creep as one does for their own five-year backlog, but no such episodes were returned, only a smattering of old

blog posts.

So very curiously, I opened each post and for an afternoon I just sat there and

ingested years worth of my own evolving opinions on the topic. The posts chronicle my journey with lifestyle creep over roughly six years and many tax brackets

in a way that would be hard to honestly recreate now without this unforgiving internet archive of unfiltered takes. Welcome back to the Money With Katie's Show. I'm your host Katie Gaddy Tossan and because I've covered this topic so many times from so many different angles over the years but have never done so in

this medium I thought it would be fun today to take a little stroll down memory lane and

deconstruct how my belief system about lifestyle creep has evolved over time.

Originally my vision for this episode I will be honest it was lifestyle creep through the lens of

influencer culture and I still want to explore the role of influencers in our consumerism and spending preferences and habits at some point,

but meandering through my own changing philosophy quickly superseded my original thesis.

So I'm going to go where the curiosity takes me.

When I first learned about the concept of lifestyle creep in 2018, also known as

Lifestyle Inflation, it was a term that described this insidious enemy to financial freedom.

Inflation is actually a fitting word choice in that sense as it's intended

in the personal finance literature, at least,

to convey how the expense of your lifestyle grows,

while the enjoyment you receive from it

tends to stay the same.

It's considered the reason people might not naturally save more as they

earn more because without a strategic plan in place they sleepwalk into more expensive habits

...