It’s most prominent when you get married, buy a house, have a kid, or do a major renovation.
Each of those big life events requires a whole lot of money to fly out the door all at once. And when that happens, we often completely lose our grip on financial reality.
The concept of “expensive” is always relative. What’s expensive for someone making $20k is not expensive for someone making $200k. And what’s expensive for a $200k household ain’t so much for someone making $2M.
But a behavioral glitch happens when you go through one of those massive transitions: You are suddenly spending money at a scale and velocity you aren’t used to.
Normally, you would never justify a $20 salad for lunch every day. But suddenly, $100 a week on lunch feels like chump change when you are Venmo-ing your contractor $5,000 at regular intervals.
You haven’t deliberately adjusted your actual lifestyle budget, but your brain gets so numb to writing massive checks that you fall victim to the Relativity Mirage.
OUR MOST RECENT PROOF
We’ve had four FZ Members buy homes over the last six weeks.
One of them moved in last month. When we sat down to review their cash flow statement in our last meeting, we noticed something wild (and yet totally normal and expected).
Even when we stripped out all the actual “house” expenses—the closing costs, the new furniture, the movers—their normal, day-to-day lifestyle spending had nearly doubled last month!
When you are wiring five-figure down payments, a random $200 Target run barely registers on your radar.
The fix? Awareness. You have to recognize when the mirage is taking over, and actively plug the leaks before your temporary “wedding/house/baby” spending becomes your permanent lifestyle burn rate.
And one of the easiest ways to keep awareness is to review your spending daily (like me!) or at least weekly.
The Relativity Mirage only drifts out of control when no one’s looking out to the horizon.