The income illusion

Hi everyone!

The first time a proper salary got paid into my account, it felt significant.

I wouldn’t say I was wealthy, not by any stretch of the imagination, but for the first time, I had access to money. My money! After years of not being able to afford what I wanted, it felt like progress. I got to a place where I could allow myself to buy things without worrying about buyer’s remorse.

As a student, most things lived just out of reach. Even simple things like supplements for the gym felt like such a massive expense. So I stuck with my two-minute noodles. If you know, you know. When I finally started earning, I loosened the restrictions a little bit. I upgraded things that worked well enough, and I justified purchases that were not really urgent. I guess I figured that after waiting so long, it was finally my turn to spend freely.

None of it felt reckless at the time. In fact, it felt well deserved.

After some time, though, I noticed something uncomfortable: my income had increased, but my margin had not. This was especially true when I received my first increase. The money came in, and somehow it left just as easily, if not more easily.

That was my introduction to what I think of as the “income illusion”.

We assume earning more means having more. Yet, money flowing through you is not the same as money that belongs to you. Affordability is not the same as alignment.

Earning an income quietly raises our expectations over the long run. What once felt like a privilege becomes our new baseline. The lifestyle we dreamed of turns into the standard we become accustomed to, and it turns into a lifestyle we’ll defend with all we’ve got. I don’t think the issue is greed or even poor discipline. It is a misunderstanding of what income is for. Income is not surplus; it is not money we can freely spend, and it is not a signal to inflate our lifestyles. It is a tool. Klaar en simple! (…or is it simple en klaar?) Either way, it’s final. The reality is, if you do not give a tool a purpose, it will be used by default. So if you don’t have a plan for your income, you’ll naturally end up spending as much of it as you can.

I still feel the pull of upgrades that make emotional sense before they make financial sense. I’m human after all, but the difference now is that I try to ask a better question. Not “Can I afford this?” (Why? Because I’ll always tell myself that I can), but I now ask “What is this income meant to build? Am I using it for that purpose?”

Euan