25% of people earning $100k to $200k are living paycheck-to-paycheck.
Among those earning $300k or more, it’s 40%.
So people earning two or three times more are more likely to be financially stuck? How does that make any sense?
This, by the way, is not some shady online survey. This comes from an official 2025 Goldman Sachs report.
So the verdict is in: income is not what produces financial security. Past a certain point, it stops helping at all.
Today, we discuss why this happens, and what you can do about it.
Let’s dive in.
What Paycheck-to-Paycheck Actually Means Here
When you hear paycheck to paycheck, you might picture someone struggling to make rent, or barely being able to afford groceries.
That's not what Goldman measured. The statement they asked survey respondents to agree with was: "I find it tough to make progress on any long-term financial goals."
So they’re not broke, exactly... they’re stuck.
If you’re reading this, I’m guessing you aren’t broke either. But you might be feeling stuck.
Bills are being paid. Lifestyle feels… fine. Net worth is relatively flat. Every year you earn more, and every year you end up in roughly the same place.
Goldman's explanation for the jump above $300k is lifestyle creep, which they describe as "the phenomenon of luxuries becoming necessities."
Lesson 3.2 in the Wealth Potion Academy covers Lifestyle Creep: what it is, how to spot it in your own spending, and how to fight it. It goes live next week. Join now, before the price goes up on November 1.
You’ve probably experienced lifestyle creep before, even if you didn’t know it by that name.
You get a nice raise at work. You celebrate. The apartment gets nicer. The car gets newer. Dinners out stop being a treat and start being a normal Tuesday.
None of it feels reckless, because each step is small and you can afford it. In fact, you earned it.
Until the new income is fully allocated to stuff. Just like the old income was.
At the same time, costs really are going up.
Some of this really isn't your fault. In the same report, the cost of owning a home went from about 33% of income in 2000 to 51% in 2025. There are real economic dynamics at play that we are all fighting against.
But here's the part of the report that personally, I can't stop thinking about.
The Most Important Variable Isn’t Income
Goldman measured something they call Financial Grit, which incorporates “perseverance, long-term orientation, attention to savings growth, optimism, and resilience”.
With income held equal, people high in Financial Grit had 49% more saved for retirement than people low in it.
Financial grit had a greater impact than early savings and even access to a 401(k).
To be clear: they had the same income. But nearly 50% more saved.
This isn’t about how much you earn. It’s about what you do with it, and whether you keep doing it when life starts getting in the way.
That's the good news. You can't always control your salary. You can control your system.
And notice that Goldman’s definition of Financial Grit is not purely about how much you scrimp and save. It introduces another element. The element of Time.
If you’re a long-time reader of the Wealth Potion newsletter (or viewer of the YouTube channel), you know that we talk A LOT about time.
Specifically, long-term thinking or “time preference”.
Because a proper wealth-building system is incomplete without accounting for time, even if you’ve got your income, savings, and investing dialed.
What to Do About It (10 Minutes, Today)
The simplest way to beat lifestyle creep is to never let the money reach your lifestyle in the first place.
In other words: Pay yourself first. Automatically.
Set up a recurring transfer from checking into a separate savings account, scheduled for the day after payday. Not the end of the month, when the amount is whatever's left. The day after payday.
Set up a second recurring transfer into your brokerage account on the same day. Money you have to move into investments by hand mostly doesn't get moved.
Start with an amount small enough that you won't cancel it. 5% or 10% counts. Then raise it every time you get a raise, so the next lifestyle upgrade never gets funded by default.
The size doesn't matter too much yet. What matters is that the decision gets made once, instead of thirty times a month.
Me at my first sales job, right around the time I turned on auto-deposit into my brokerage account.
I remember when I got my first job, I turned on auto-deposit from my checking account to my brokerage. At the time, it didn’t feel like an important decision at all. I almost did it on a whim. But looking back, it was clearly one of the best decisions I ever made.
So don't wait until you can do the "right" amount.
Time does more of the work than you do. But only if you start.
Why I Built the Wealth Potion Academy This Way
Those two automatic transfers are the backbone of two Academy modules:
Savings (Defense) is about protecting what you earn: your savings rate, your emergency fund, and a subscription audit you can finish in an afternoon.
Investing (Intelligence) is about putting that money to work: index funds, asset allocation, and letting compounding do its job.
But the module I care about most (and, dare I say, the one that makes the Wealth Potion Academy unique) is the last one: Time (Endurance).
Because the Goldman data confirms something I've believed for years. Knowing what to do is important… but it was never the hard part. Doing it long enough for it to matter is.
Do the right thing, over and over again, for years.
I don't think grit is something you're born with. I think it's something you build, one hard task at a time.
The Wealth Potion Academy is $299 for lifetime access through October 31. After that, it goes to $399.
And for the first 10 people who join, I'll personally walk you through your own subscription audit or net worth setup, with my read on what to fix first. Your numbers, not a template.
Either way, go set up those two transfers today. They'll work whether you join the Academy or not :)
To your prosperity,
Brandon @ Wealth Potion