A financial planner named Ted Jenkin coined a term recently that I haven’t been able to stop thinking about.
Lifestyle loopers.
He uses it to describe a rapidly growing population of Americans between 30 and 50 who earn six figures and are somehow still going nowhere financially. Every raise gets absorbed. Every bonus evaporates. The income climbs. The wealth doesn’t.
I’ve watched this pattern play out for years through SparkRental and the Co-Investing Club. Smart, capable people with impressive salaries who, when you look at their actual financial picture, have very little to show for it. Not because they’re reckless. Because they’re caught in a loop they can’t quite see from the inside.
Lifestyle creep is not a new concept. The idea that spending rises with income is well documented. But what doesn’t get talked about enough is how completely natural and justified each individual step feels.
You get a promotion. You move to a better apartment because you can now afford it, and the old one was genuinely a bit cramped. Reasonable.
You get another raise. You lease a better car because your commute is long and you spend a lot of time in it. Reasonable.
Your income climbs further. You start eating out more, traveling more, upgrading more. Each decision is defensible on its own. Together, they form a structure where your expenses perfectly track your income, and the gap between what you earn and what you accumulate stays exactly the same.
The Goldman Sachs finding that about 40% of people earning over $500,000 a year report living paycheck to paycheck isn’t about irresponsibility. It’s about structure. When spending is the default and saving is the afterthought, income alone doesn’t determine financial progress. Behavior does.
Most financial advice treats this as a discipline problem. Track your spending. Cut the subscriptions. Stop eating out so much. Set a budget and stick to it.
The problem is that this advice fails consistently for high earners. Not because they lack discipline in other areas. Because budgeting and willpower are reactive systems. You’re fighting against the current every month, deciding in the moment whether to spend or save.
And in any given moment, spending usually wins. It’s immediate. It’s concrete. The benefit is right there. The cost of not saving is abstract and distant. Even people who know exactly what compound interest looks like in 20 years still spend the money today.
This is not a character flaw. It’s how human psychology works. We’re wired to prioritize the present. Every financial decision is a battle between the person you are now and the person you’ll be in 20 years, and the person you are now has a significant home-field advantage.
The only reliable solution to a behavioral problem is to remove the behavior from the equation entirely.
Pay yourself first is the phrase. Automate the savings. Move the money before you feel it. The version of this that actually works for high earners isn’t a monthly transfer to a savings account you can see and access. It’s routing capital into something that genuinely locks it away.
This is one of the reasons illiquid investments have a real advantage over liquid ones for people with good incomes and lifestyle-creep tendencies. When the money is in an index fund you can sell in two clicks, the temptation to deploy it for something else exists constantly. When it’s committed to a three-to-five year real estate investment, that temptation is gone. The decision was made once, up front, and the money is doing its job in the background while you get on with your life.
I’ve seen this dynamic firsthand through the club. Members who describe themselves as poor savers but have done remarkably well as passive investors, because the investment commitment removes the daily friction. The money leaves. It works. Distributions arrive. The loop breaks.