Mark Cuban recalls Dairy Queen dates with Warren Buffett — the wealth-building lesson behind a billionaire’s Blizzard

While this might be funny to imagine, there’s a wealth-building lesson here.

Cuban has always advocated for staying grounded and protecting your wealth even as you get richer. In a 2024 interview with the Washington Post, Cuban recalled a conversation with his broker after making $2 million, where he said, “I want you to invest for me like a 60-year-old. I don’t want you to invest like I’m young, because I want to live off this for a long time.”

This shows Cuban’s desire for sustainable wealth habits. He also drew a parallel to how Buffett refuses to let money reshape his everyday life, pointing to how he has lived in the same house since 1958.

“Look at Warren Buffett, you know, he lives in the same house in Nebraska… for 50 years or whatever,” he said.

Having no control over your spending and constantly upgrading your lifestyle as your earnings increase leads to lifestyle creep. This makes it hard to accumulate meaningful wealth over time.

Cuban said he still goes to the grocery store himself and he trains at the same gym he has used for decades. And he keeps the same friends from when he was much younger.

“My friends are my friends from high school, college, my rugby team, you know, my Dallas guys, my roommates,” Cuban told Papa.

How lifestyle creep ruins wealth-building efforts

Fidelity says lifestyle creep is when your spending increases as your income rises, while savings stay the same. You get a promotion with higher pay, and you immediately upgrade to a nicer car, a bigger apartment, and take on more paid subscriptions.

Seve, who runs a minimalist lifestyle YouTube channel called Sunny Kind Journey, also broke down the mechanics in a recent video this year.

“Lifestyle creep is what happens when your everyday life slowly becomes more expensive to maintain because your standards have gradually gone up,” he said. “It usually doesn’t happen through one big choice. It happens through small changes that seem reasonable on their own.”

Seve also explained the psychological angle. When you start spending on something new, after a while your mind registers it as the new norm. Once that happens, you’ve unconsciously set a new spending baseline, and you may struggle to go back below it. This is called hedonic adaptation.

“This is not something that only happens to people who suddenly win the lottery or inherit a lot of money,” Seve said. “This can happen to very ordinary people.”

How to keep your baseline from rising with your income

One way to avoid lifestyle creep and maintain a healthy baseline is to always spend below your means. But to do that, you need to shift your focus from flaunting wealth through material things to understanding wealth’s intangible benefits.

As James Clear, author of Atomic Habits, put it, “Real wealth is not about money. Real wealth is: not having to go to meetings, not having to spend time with jerks, not being locked into status games, not feeling like you have to say ‘yes,’ not worrying about others claiming your time and energy.”

According to Clear, “real wealth is about freedom.”

Here’s how to build your savings and avoid lifestyle creep:

1. Pay yourself first, and do it automatically

Fidelity suggests setting up recurring automated investments so a portion of your paycheck is routinely deducted and allocated to your savings and investments each month. This way, you don’t have to deliberate whether or not to save. It just gets done, and money that you would have otherwise spent is routed into a wealth-building plan.

2. Think before you upgrade your lifestyle

Impulse spending can seriously damage your finances. Before rushing to buy anything, give yourself about two days to think it through. You may find that the impulse has subsided and you’re no longer as interested as you were before.