In 2020, I made an offer on an apartment.

Five hundred and fifty thousand euros.

The bank said no.

Not maybe. Not “let's see what we can do.” No. Your salary is too low for this mortgage.

I remember sitting there thinking: how did I get here?

Not how did I fail to get approved. How did five hundred and fifty thousand euros ever become a number I was comfortable putting on an offer?

The number had changed before I noticed

I joined Big4 in 2014.

My colleagues were senior managers and directors. People I respected. People who had been earning and spending at a level I had not seen before.

Dinner after work became normal. Sixty or seventy euros on a Tuesday night no longer seemed unusual. People talked about four-hundred-thousand-euro apartments and four-hundred-and-fifty-thousand-euro apartments as casually as I had once talked about a hundred-and-fifty-thousand-euro apartment.

My reference point moved.

I didn't consciously decide to move it.

I absorbed it.

By 2020, the number in my head and the reality of my own finances had drifted far apart.

The anchor you didn't choose

Psychologists call this anchoring.

The first numbers we encounter can influence how we judge the numbers that come afterwards. In everyday life, that can be almost invisible.

A salary becomes normal because everyone around you earns it.

A restaurant becomes normal because your colleagues go there.

A house becomes affordable in your head because everyone around you is buying one.

Eventually you stop asking whether the number belongs to you.

You simply compare everything else against it.

That is what happened to me.

Whose definition of normal?

Since then, I have become much more interested in the question behind the number.

Whose numbers am I actually living by?

It is a surprisingly useful question.

Your own financial reality has a set of numbers: your income, your expenses, your savings, your investments, your goals, your responsibilities and the life you actually want.

Your environment has another set.

The danger begins when the second set quietly replaces the first.

The bank saying no was uncomfortable. But it did something useful. It made the distance between those two sets of numbers visible.

Build your own reference point

I don't think the answer is to ignore everyone around you. Other people's experiences can teach you a lot.

The answer is to notice when observation becomes imitation.

Before a large financial decision, I now want to know where the number came from.

Was it calculated from my own life?

Or did I hear it often enough that it started feeling true?

Turn the question into numbers

This is where the practical side moves over to NobodyToldMike.com.

On the NobodyToldMike YouTube channel, I tell the full apartment story and explain how anchoring and lifestyle creep changed my sense of what was normal.

If you want to replace someone else's reference point with your own, the NobodyToldMike.com FIRE and Retirement Calculators let you start with your own expenses and goals rather than the numbers you happen to hear around you.

The point isn't to find the biggest number you can afford.

It is to find the number that belongs to your life.