Overcome Lifestyle Creep with Empowering Tactics to Secure Your Health Effortlessly
Have you ever wondered how most people seem to live incredible lives?
Truth is, most people aren’t doing as great as you think they are.
Lifestyle creep is very dangerous and can impact your health in many ways.
Keeping up with the Joneses is the old age version of lifestyle creep.
There is a slight difference, yet, what most people don’t understand is that times are not always good.
We have seen this in the last 20 years between the housing crash from 2008 and the pandemic.
People generally start to prosper a little, or a lot, then they begin to increase their standard of living.
That’s lifestyle creep in a nutshell and it’s dangerous.
Imagine you get a new job and your pay goes from $46,000 a year to $67,000!
First of all, congratulations as that’s a huge jump in pay and it’s happened to me so I know what that feels like.
It’s challenging not to upgrade your lifestyle with a new home or apartment, a newer car, a vacation….finally!
I’ve been there and done that more than once and I have always suffered afterwards.
I still remember the summer of 2013, I took my kids to South Dakota for 10 days.
Then in early December, I was let go from a job that paid very well.
What a gut punch that was. Here I was struggling to get by and this company let me go.
Little did I realize that this was lifestyle creep that caused it all.
So here are 3 things I should have done to avoid this disaster.
I should have kept my standard of living the same and used the extra income to either pay off debt or build up a larger emergency fund. It would have been beneficial to have waited until my family was in a better financial situation to enjoy the Black Hills.
Gratitude. I wish I had learned that word earlier in life. Rather than spend the extra money I should have been grateful for the boost in income. I would have had a better plan if I had practiced gratitude.
Concerned with my image, I wanted people to know I got a large raise as I was very proud of my accomplishments. There is nothing wrong with being proud, but spending to my heart’s content was a bad idea.
It was not a very fun Christmas that year due to the financial stress. My mental and physical health suffered.
I decided I was going to learn how to manage money from people who had some.
I’ll never forget what a casual millionaire once told me — most people spend money they don’t have, on things they don’t need, to impress people they don’t even like.
Thank you for reading :)