Lifestyle Creep: The Thing Keeping You from Financial Independence in a way you never agreed to

“It’s so big!” She said.

I couldn’t help but agree. Chuckling lightly, still thinking about how much fun it would be. It was possibly too much, but we were already committed, so we had to get on with it.

Lifestyle creep in action.

As we loaded our belongings into the back of our rental car, a 2025 Ford Bronco, I couldn’t help but feel how cavernous the interior was, how wide it was, taking up the entire space, and how it dwarfed every single car I’d ridden in over the last two years. We just arrived back from Argentina, before that Japan, before that Thailand, and so on, where tiny Peugeots, BYD’s, and itty bitty Ford Fiestas were the rideshare cars and taxis I’d relied on. Here, back in Texas, where everything is bigger not by accident but by creed, we were picking up a truck that was massive by global standards, but, as I would soon remember, is just another cool car in the US.

From the freeway leaving Austin airport, open, brush-covered fields became neighborhoods of ranch houses with sprawling lawns. Both the individual greenspace and the size of each house were, like the Bronco, larger than the condos and apartments I’d lived in that filled the walkable neighborhoods of Southeast Asia and Latam. To imagine a single family, possibly only three or four people, lived on a space that would hold an entire apartment complex in Chiang Mai, or an entire family compound elsewhere, was a bit of culture shock I didn’t expect.

One could just blame Texas for making everything bigger (I love that Texas character), but the road trip we were on across the US revealed so much more. “McMansions” stretched beyond Las Vegas and Arizona suburbs. Los Angeles traffic backed up for three hours, filled with full-sized SUVs carrying only a driver. And nearly every person I passed walked with a new iPhone or new Samsung in hand.

If you’re lucky enough to live in the US and rarely leave your state, or your region, all of this might seem quite normal to you, because honestly it is.

But my last flight in was from El Salvador, after a stint discovering Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, and other places without such “polish.”

All I could think, repeatedly, was, “I wonder if they realize how much this all is?” as I compared it to my recent experiences.

Secondly, I had to wonder, “I wonder if they realize how much this all costs?”

Lifestyle Creep is the Reason Your FIRE Number Feels Unreachable

When it comes to achieving financial independence, most people think it is simply a process of earning, saving, and investing, leading to hitting a FIRE number and living happily ever after. Which, at its core, is the process.

But while the mechanics of this equation are accurate and would work perfectly in a vacuum, they don’t account for the realities of the society and culture that most people aspiring to Financial Independence live in. Budgeting, saving, investing, putting every penny where it needs to be, and not spending a penny more is a hard “simple” approach to execute flawlessly in reality because there is an invisible cultural mechanism driving a “consumption ratchet” of lifestyle creep. This invisible mechanism is continually increasing what “enough” is, faster than most people can save toward it and achieve it.

The good news is once you finally see clearly what’s happening, and how the norms of daily life drive you to slowly, incrementally increase how much you buy and consume, you don’t just understand why FIRE keeps sliding further out of your reach. You get the chance to opt out of the parts you never agreed to, hitting your financial independence number sooner without giving up anything you currently value now.

The House Got Bigger, Not Just More Expensive

Inflation. A hated economics concept in which the price for everything naturally goes up over time. In 2006, a Starbucks Latte cost roughly ~$2.40, while in 2026 that same Latte costs ~$5. Nothing changed about the latte, just its price. That’s inflation. Most people striving for financial independence, or just to save for retirement, think their biggest problem is inflation. It isn’t.

The biggest problem is the cultural mechanism that makes a massive Ford Bronco the expected norm, when a Toyota Corolla would do the same daily job just fine. The biggest problem is that we exist assuming the commonly accepted norm, or “enough,” is fixed and achievable, when in reality it’s moving, silently, and most people chase it without realizing.

The story goes like this: Yes, things cost more than they used to, and we agree wages haven’t kept pace, and we all see FI keeps sliding further out of reach. All true. But underneath this chain of events is a quieter mechanism nobody’s accounting for. The thing you’re saving up to afford isn’t the thing your parents were saving up to afford in 1976. It’s bigger. It does more. It comes with a longer list of features nobody asked for, but nobody can now imagine living without. The consumption ratchet isn’t pricing you out of 1976. It’s pricing you into a standard of living 1976 never had, and the extra cost that comes with it.

The House

Let’s start with the clearest case. Home ownership.

In 1973, the average new American home measured 1,660 square feet.

By 2015, the average American home size peaked at 2,687 square feet. Since then, average home size has shrunk to around 2,367 in 2024. Even then, it is still roughly 40% larger than the 1973 baseline.

Meanwhile, household size shrank from 3.06 people per home in 1972, down to 2.51 by 2023.

Do the math, and living space per person nearly doubled, from 534 square feet per person in 1972 to 1,041 person in 2023. The same number of dollars buys twice the space, for fewer people to fill it.

As a global baseline, the apartments for one person in Chiang Mai and Buenos Aires commonly run ~400 square feet (37 square meters)

But the bloat isn’t just in the square footage.

In 1971, 36% of homes had central air conditioning, and by 2023 that number hit 99.4%. Garages went from being in 59.8% of homes to 97.3%. Homes with four or more bedrooms nearly doubled, from 24.6% to 50.2%. Homes with 2.5 or more bathrooms went from 16.3% to 67%. None of these additions individually reads as excess. But collectively, they present the whole risk of “lifestyle creep” in miniature. A hundred small, defensible upgrades that quietly redefined what “a normal house” means before anyone voted on it.

Put a different way, would you be willing to live in a smaller home, without a garage, in exchange for owning it outright, sooner? Specifically, would you give up 40% of the house to own it 40% sooner? Whether or not you would, in effect, the average American is paying for 40% more house than most saw as “enough” in 1976.

No wonder homeownership and financial independence feel further off than in 1976. 40% further off, to be exact.

The Trick

Here’s the baffling complication: housing construction has actually gotten more efficient, and cheaper.

In 1972, one percent of household income bought 23.95 square feet of house. By 2023, the same one percent of household income bought 41.66 square feet. That’s a genuine 74% cost efficiency gain in total home construction costs. If you’d kept your consumption fixed at the 1972 standard, not only would you be buying a smaller house, but that house would be a smaller share of your income today than it was for your parents.

The problem is nobody kept the house size fixed.

Housing size bloated so much that the construction efficiency gain gets blown entirely on more square footage, more air conditioning, more garage, and extra bathrooms nobody strictly needed.

The system gave us an opportunity to achieve home ownership for cheaper, and society’s addiction to increasing consumption stole it back

The Truck

Cars tell a subtler version of the same story. Not creep in size, but a quiet swap of categories.

Since 1975, the average vehicle weight is up only 9%, per EPA data. That number badly undersells what actually happened, because it averages across a market that split in two.

Sedans and wagons actually got about 10% lighter over the same period. Pickup trucks got roughly 30% heavier.

The “average” barely moved because the mix of categories, and which was most popular, moved instead. Truck and SUV production has tripled its share of the market since 1975, and “truck SUVs” alone now account for half of all new vehicle production.

Along the way, popular, reliable, smaller staples have been sacrificed, while what remains enforces one more “click” in the consumption ratchet.

Ford discontinued the Fusion, Focus, Taurus, and Fiesta starting in 2018, telling the market plainly it would “not invest in next generations of traditional Ford sedans for North America.” GM did the same to the Impala and the Cadillac XTS.

The category didn’t get bigger across the board. It got replaced, model by model, and the replacement took the industrial infrastructure to make smaller cars with it. Parts supply chains, dealer inventory, repair specialization – all of it is reorganizing around the new, large vehicle that is now the default.

The tax code has also helped this category shift from tiny car ownership to tank-sized truck ownership, and not subtly. Vehicles under 6,000 pounds, which includes most sedans, compacts, and “cheap & efficient” cars, cap out around $20,300 in first-year business deduction. Cross 6,000 pounds, and you can deduct $32,000 under Section 179, plus 100% bonus depreciation on the rest, effectively expensing the full cost of an $80,000 to $90,000 truck in year one. Miss the weight threshold by a single pound because your car is too small, and the entire deduction disappears. A genuinely absurd cliff for a tax provision to hinge on, clearly dictating “buy bigger”, then locking the buyer into a larger vehicle’s fuel and maintenance costs for the life of the truck, regardless of whether the towing capacity ever gets used.

And the ratchet, forcing you into a more expensive category to buy, doesn’t stop once you’ve bought the truck. It just invents a new “it thing” category that you’ll inherently pay more for.

A hybrid version of the same model now costs $2,800 to $4,300 more than its gas equivalent. The average new EV runs about $62,000 against roughly $47,600 for the average new hybrid, creating a $15,000 gap even before accounting for the eliminated federal tax credit.

Then there’s a layer of the ratchet that isn’t even about preference anymore, making efficient alternatives a luxury: a 100% tariff on Chinese EVs, in effect since 2024, makes the cheaper option of Chinese EV’s commercially unavailable in the US market, full stop. Not a subtle nudge, a wall. Other non-USMCA(US Mexico Canada Agreement) vehicles carry a 25% tariff, adding $8,000 to $15,000 to the landed cost of a European EV. Whatever you think of the policy reasoning, the effect on the anchor is the same either way: the floor keeps rising, and increasingly by statute, not just appetite.

Would the option of Chinese vehicles make a difference?

I saw this Chinese-made GWM Tank 300 for sale in a mall in Chiang Mai for only $30,000. This is a body-on-frame, truly rugged, trail-focused SUV comparable to a $45,000+ Toyota 4Runner, being sold for the price of a compact car. And…you don’t get it in the US.

That 1,029,000 Thai Baht number on the window of this GWM Tank suv translates to a $30,000 USD price tag.

There’s a behavioral trick hiding in the continuous category swap, from car to truck, to hybrid, to EV, to US-made, and it’s worth calling out so you recognize it. It’s what makes each purchase feel rational, while the total cost increase across all of the “car upgrades” runs wild.

Trading a car for a slightly newer car has an obvious ceiling. There’s no real reason why you need a “better” version of the same car model. It is essentially the same thing but newer, but unnecessary if the same version that you have runs just fine.

So, the upgrade has to justify itself on status alone.

Car to same car doesn’t make sense. But car-to-truck resets the entire comparison. Now the upgrade is justified by capability. You get towing, cargo, ground clearance; even if you never use them, it justifies the category upgrade, instead of just being a dismissible status upgrade. The ratchet in action. Even though the actual price and consumption jump dwarfs what a normal model-year and car-to-car upgrade would have cost.

The category jump launders a status purchase as a functional one, and does it so cleanly the buyer never has to notice the laundering. The kicker: Once you’ve accidentally upgraded, you’ll never accidentally go back. You’re locked into the new habit until you jump categories again, unintentionally.

Then the bill arrives in pieces nobody mentioned at the moment of sale.

A 2026 Toyota Corolla runs a five-year cost to own of $39,264, with an industry-estimated per-mile cost around $0.37 to $0.39. A 2026 Ford F-150 runs $57,349 to own over the same five years. That’s 46% more, for a vehicle most owners never come close to using at its actual capacity, hauling goods or towing trailers. Back-calculate that F-150 figure to a per-mile basis under standard mileage assumptions, and it lands around $0.76 a mile. That’s roughly double the cost of the Corolla, even though both vehicles carry comparable reputations for reaching 200,000-plus miles over their lifespans. The reliability is a wash. The cost to own it isn’t.

The Phone

Technology is the one place the ratchet doesn’t hold. Not purely.

A Nokia 3310, aka the “brick” that nearly everyone with a mobile phone owned at one time, would cost about $239 today, adjusted for inflation. The phone currently occupying the position of “the new standard” is Samsung’s Galaxy Z Fold 7, launched at $1,999. That’s roughly 8 times more, in real dollars, for the same basic job the Nokia did fine: staying reachable. Not because phones got more expensive to make. Because “phone” quietly stopped meaning what it meant in 2000, the same way “house” quietly stopped meaning what it meant in 1973.

This is the distinction to note: some goods are positional, as their value is partly due to what everyone else has and how rare they are. This feeds into perceived status and the perceived value of the good. Housing and cars are heavily positional. Raw computing power mostly isn’t; nobody’s impressing a dinner party with their processor’s transistor count. And the positional/non-positional split shows up exactly where you’d predict it would. Computing got radically, almost absurdly cheaper. A modern smartphone carries more than 100,000 times the processing power of the computer that guided Apollo 11 to the moon. A dollar of computation today would have cost roughly $10 billion fifty years ago, per Moore’s Law cost curves. An iPod that held 1,000 songs for $399 gave way, five years later, to one $50 cheaper that held forty times as many.

So, if computing power got cheaper, why do we pay more for tech now? And the bigger question is, do we need to?

None of that deflation, with reducing costs, stuck enough to make a difference financially, because we began buying more devices. Not generally over time, but as individuals, we purchase and own more tech at any given time.

The average person’s device count in North America rose 63% in just five years, to 8 devices per person in 2018, and 13 by 2023. A household that once ran on one shared landline a generation ago now averages 17 to 25 connected devices. Phones, tablets, laptops, smart speakers. Each one is individually cheap, but collectively creates an initial purchase and continuing replacement cost that nobody would have called “necessary” fifty years ago. The technology price deflated. The number of units deemed mandatory per household inflated fast enough to eat the potential savings from deflation, then keep going.

Not only do these tech devices come with initial costs, but also the replacement costs implied now that they are “required” in our lives, and an additional intangible cost that has inflated as their capabilities increased.

A 2013 study on mobile email devices found that while they promised knowledge professionals more autonomy, they actually delivered less autonomy. The convenient access to workers outside the office, via email, messaging, and video calls, normalized an expectation of constant availability that ate the convenience and the autonomy hoped for. Professionals “using mobile email devices to work anywhere/anytime… actions they framed as evidence of their personal autonomy…ending up using it everywhere/all the time, thus diminishing their autonomy in practice.”

The jump from landline to dumb cell phone meant you could be reached anywhere, and free time got smaller. Dumb phone to smartphone translated to an expectation of work and accessibility everywhere at a larger scale, with email and video calls layered on top, for your boss or client to contact you on and expect you to work on, anytime, anywhere.

Lost free time was the invisible cost of tech upgrades.

The category upgrade never arrives alone. It brings costs nobody priced into the original decision, and by the time they show up, the older, cheaper category isn’t even available to go back to.

The Push

These consumption increases don’t happen in a passive population by accident. Very few people wake up with enough for daily life and say, “How can I spend more today?”

But enough small, powerful, subtle nudges can push a population off a cliff. In this case, 500 to 1,600 nudges daily is enough.

Most research clusters estimate we were bombarded with around 500 to 1,600 daily ad exposures in the 1970s, versus 4,000 to 10,000 today. Call it conservatively a five-to-tenfold increase in the sheer volume of pressure to purchase “more,” landing on the same population whose houses, trucks, and phones were simultaneously being redefined upward, right beneath their feet.

Estimates vary by source and methodology, and this is genuinely one of the messier corners of the data, traceable mostly to a handful of marketing-industry estimates rather than one rigorous study. However, in this case, you can open your phone, scroll for 5 minutes, and count the number of ads for something you don’t need and see the directionally correct truth we’re fighting against as consumers trying not to unnecessarily consume more.

A joke widely shared online captures the idea well: “In 2006, if you got more than 3 ads, you had a virus on your computer. In 2026, if you get more than 3 ads, you’re on the internet.”

The advertisement exposure didn’t cause the ratchet by itself. It convinced people that the increased version, the next notch up, was the normal they needed, before anyone had finished using the last one. Just as the next notch up was being released.

The Number

Here’s what all of this actually costs, converted into the currency that matters for financial independence: net worth.

Average annual household spending in the US is $78,535, per the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ 2024 Consumer Expenditure Survey. Housing and transportation alone eat more than half of it, the two categories this entire piece has just walked through. Run the total through the 25x rule, the standard FI calculation: 25 times annual spending, assuming a 4% safe withdrawal rate, and sustaining the current, accepted American consumption standard requires $1,963,375 in net worth to retire into a normal life. Not to live large. To live normal.

Now go back fifty years. Average household spending in 1972–73, per the same BLS series, was $8,348. Adjusted for inflation to today’s dollars, $1 in 1973 buys $7.52 today, per the official CPI; that’s $62,777 in real terms. Run the same 25x rule: $1,569,425. (One honest caveat: the 1972–73 figure reflects an average family size of 2.9, slightly larger than a modern BLS consumer unit. A minor wrinkle, not one that changes the point of the comparison.)

Side by side: it costs $393,950 more, in required net worth, to fund today’s accepted standard of living in retirement (as FIRE) than it costs to fund the same daily living costs Americans had fifty years ago. That gap isn’t inflation. Inflation is already priced into both numbers. Both are stated in identical, apples-to-apples 2026 dollars. That gap is the culture-driven consumption ratchet, isolated and measured.

The cost of an ever-increasing “normal” quietly moving the finish line of financial independence for every single person trying to reach it. And not a single vote was ever openly taken on whether the financial finish line, the net worth required, should move.

The Actual Question

You can get the higher-paying job. You can build the side hustle, buy the business, optimize the portfolio. None of it moves the needle if the standard that you’re chasing keeps inflating faster than your income does. The perceived need for a bigger house, a bigger truck, the newest phone, a fourth device on the family plan, each one justified in isolation, each one quietly resetting what “enough” costs you before you’ve finished paying for the last upgrade.

So, before the next non-essential purchase, sit, and ask: is this new purchase solving something you actually need a solution for? Or, is it just chasing a standard someone implied but isn’t actually necessary in your life?

That’s the only question that’s ever mattered here.

Everything else, the extra square footage, the luxury badge, the fold in the screen, is the ratchet, working exactly as designed.

Do you need it? Or do you need your financial independence more?

Sources

• AEI/Census: https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/new-us-homes-today-are-1000-square-feet-larger-than-in-1973-and-living-space-per-person-has-nearly-doubled/
• Rocket Mortgage/Census: https://www.rocketmortgage.com/learn/average-square-footage-of-a-house
• Housing Abundance (Census/BLS synthesis): https://galepooley.substack.com/p/housing-abundance
• EPA Automotive Trends: https://www.epa.gov/greenvehicles/light-duty-vehicle-trends-1975-text-only
• EPA Automotive Trends Highlights: https://www.epa.gov/automotive-trends/highlights-automotive-trends-report
• ConsumerAffairs, citing EPA data: https://www.consumeraffairs.com/automotive/average-car-weight.html
• NPR, 2018: https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2018/04/26/605971051/ford-to-phase-out-traditional-ford-sedans-such-as-fusion-and-taurus-in-the-u-s
• Section179.org: https://www.section179.org/section_179_vehicle_deductions/
• Crest Capital: https://www.crestcapital.com/section-179-deduction-vehicle-list-over-6000-lbs
• TaxGoddess: https://taxgoddess.com/section-179-deductions-and-vehicles-2026/
• Crivelli Chevrolet: https://www.crivellichev.com/blog/what-suvs-weigh-over-6000-pounds
• S&P Global Mobility, Feb 2026: https://www.mobilityglobal.com/en-us/automotive-insights/blog/the-price-premium-of-hybrid-electric-vehicles
• Carzing: https://www.carzing.com/blog/car-buying-tips/hybrid-vs-ev-in-2026-which-should-you-actually-buy-and-can-you-afford-either/
• DriveAuthority: https://driveauthority.com/us-ev-tariffs-2026-how-they-affect-car-prices/
• Nature/npj Climate Action (peer-reviewed): https://www.nature.com/articles/s44168-025-00330-6
• KBB: https://www.kbb.com/toyota/corolla-hatchback/2026/cost-to-own
• KBB: https://www.kbb.com/ford/f150/2026/cost-to-own/
• iSeeCars: https://nextcarreview.com/toyota-corolla-2026-review/
• Mazmanian, Orlikowski & Yates, Organization Science 24(5), 2013 (peer-reviewed): https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/112333
• PhoneArena: https://www.phonearena.com/news/Heres-how-much-these-classic-phones-would-cost-in-todays-money_id173032
• The Gadgeteer: https://the-gadgeteer.com/2026/05/23/samsung-galaxy-z-fold-7-sale/
• Georgia Tech: https://hg.gatech.edu/node/687990
• Stanford, Martin Hellman: https://ee.stanford.edu/~hellman/opinion/moore.html
• UN Trade and Development, Digital Economy Report 2024, via Statista: https://www.statista.com/chart/32691/average-number-of-devices-and-connections-per-capita/
• Parks Associates: https://www.parksassociates.com/blogs/press-releases/at-ces-2024-parks-associates-announces-new-research-showing-average-number-of-connected-devices-per-us-internet-household-reached-17-in-2023
• Average annual household expenditure, 2024: $78,535. Source: BLS Consumer Expenditure Survey: https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/cesan.pdf
• Average household expenses, 1972–73: $8,348. Source: BLS, 100 Years of U.S. Consumer Spending: https://www.bls.gov/opub/100-years-of-u-s-consumer-spending.pdf
• $1 in 1973 = $7.52 today (CPI). Source: in2013dollars.com, official BLS CPI — https://www.in2013dollars.com/us/inflation/1973?amount=1