“Keeping up with the Joneses” means trying to match the lifestyle, possessions, or social status of the people around you—even when doing so pushes your spending beyond what actually fits your own finances.
The phrase sounds old-fashioned. The pressure is not. The Joneses used to live next door. Now they live in your neighborhood group chat, your coworkers’ vacation photos, your kids’ friends’ houses, and the social-media feed in your pocket.
After nearly three decades around financial planning, here is the part I wish more people understood: you can see someone’s consumption. You cannot see their balance sheet. The new SUV is visible. The loan balance is not. The renovated kitchen is visible. The retirement account is not.
Quick Answer
The idiom “keeping up with the Joneses” comes from Arthur R. “Pop” Momand’s newspaper comic strip Keeping Up with the Joneses, which began in 1913. The strip followed the McGinis family as they tried to match their unseen neighbors, the Joneses. Today the phrase means measuring your own success against other people’s visible lifestyle and spending. Financially, the danger is simple: comparison can turn somebody else’s choices into your expenses.
Keeping Up With the Joneses: Meaning in Plain English
To “keep up with the Joneses” is to use other people’s lifestyle as a benchmark for your own. They upgrade the car, so yours suddenly feels old. They remodel the kitchen, so the room that worked perfectly well yesterday starts looking embarrassing today. They take an expensive trip, and now your perfectly good weekend feels like you are falling behind.
That is the important distinction: the purchase is no longer being judged mainly by whether it improves your life. It is being judged by whether it keeps your social position from slipping.
- The Joneses can be anyone: neighbors, friends, coworkers, relatives, other parents, influencers, celebrities, or strangers online.
- The comparison does not need to be conscious: sometimes your spending standard simply drifts upward because the people around you normalize a more expensive lifestyle.
- Wanting nice things is not the problem: the problem starts when another person’s spending becomes the reason for yours.
The Joneses Test
Before a nonessential purchase, ask: If nobody could see this, would I still want it? If the answer changes, comparison may be driving more of the decision than the thing itself.
Where Did “Keeping Up With the Joneses” Come From?
The modern expression is traced to cartoonist Arthur R. “Pop” Momand’s comic strip Keeping Up with the Joneses, first published in 1913. The strip followed Aloysius and Clarice McGinis and their family as they tried to keep pace with their wealthier neighbors.
The joke was that the Joneses themselves were never shown. They were simply the standard the McGinis family felt compelled to match. That is probably why the phrase aged so well: the Joneses were never really one family. They were whoever happened to make you feel one step behind.
The strip ran for roughly 25 years, through 1938, and its title quickly became an everyday American expression. Merriam-Webster still defines the phrase around showing that you are as good as other people by getting what they have and doing what they do.
Why We Keep Comparing Ourselves
There is a reason the phrase survived long after the comic disappeared. Social comparison is normal. We use other people as reference points for everything from careers and houses to parenting, travel, clothing, and retirement.
The financial problem begins when comparison becomes consumption. Research on conspicuous consumption has found that feeling inferior in a social comparison can increase interest in status-signaling purchases. Experimental research on visible consumption has also found that people can spend more and use more costly borrowing when their consumption is observable to others.
Social media makes the reference group almost unlimited. Your grandfather compared himself with the family down the street. You can compare yourself before breakfast with a coworker in Miami, an influencer in Los Angeles, and somebody from high school who appears to spend six months a year in Italy.
Your Joneses Change as Your Life Changes
At 18, it may be clothes, phones, or the car somebody’s parents bought them. In your 30s, it can become weddings, houses, kitchens, vacations, and children’s activities. Later it can shift again—to second homes, retirement dates, travel, golf clubs, or what grandparents are spending on the family.
That is why simply “earning more” does not automatically solve the problem. If your reference lifestyle rises every time your income rises, you can end up with more income and the same feeling of being behind. That is closely related to lifestyle creep, where spending quietly expands along with income.
Personal story: My teenage son once asked his doctor what he could do to get taller. She told him he was average height. He kept insisting because, according to him, all his friends were about 6’3″ and 185 pounds. She smiled and told him, “Get shorter friends.”
That line stuck with me because it applies to money too. Sometimes you do not have an income problem. You have a comparison group that keeps moving the finish line.
Want Fewer Expensive Comparison Decisions?
My weekly email is about making money decisions on your terms—not because a neighbor, coworker, influencer, or headline moved the goalposts. I break down the tradeoffs, the hidden cost, and the practical next move.
Get the free Michael Ryan Money newsletter and make the next purchase answer to your plan, not somebody else’s lifestyle.
The Financial Trap: You See Spending, Not Wealth
The old headline on this page said, “The Joneses are broke.” It is a fun line, but here is the more accurate version:
Michael’s Take
The Joneses are financially unknowable from the driveway. You can see the house, car, clothes, trips, and restaurants. You cannot see the mortgage balance, credit-card statement, pension, brokerage account, inheritance, savings rate, or the argument they had about money last night.
In financial-planning work, I saw enough private balance sheets to stop assuming that visible lifestyle and financial strength move together. Sometimes they do. Sometimes they absolutely do not. A person can look rich and be wealthy, look rich and be stretched thin, or look ordinary and quietly have a very strong balance sheet.
That is why the better comparison is rich versus wealthy. “Rich” is easy to display. Wealth is often invisible because it lives in assets, low debt, flexibility, and choices.
How to Stop Keeping Up With the Joneses
You do not beat comparison by deciding you will never want anything nice again. That is not realistic, and it is not the point. The goal is to make your spending intentional enough that somebody else’s purchase does not quietly rewrite your priorities.
Use This Five-Question Pause Before a Lifestyle Upgrade
- Would I want this if nobody knew I owned it? This separates usefulness and joy from signaling.
- What am I giving up to buy it? The real price can be a smaller emergency fund, more debt, less investing, or a later retirement—not merely the monthly payment.
- Can I buy it without changing a financial priority that matters more? If yes, enjoy it. Money is meant to support your life, not just sit in an account.
- Did my desire appear only after seeing someone else’s version? If so, wait. Comparison-created wants often lose urgency once you step away from the trigger.
- What would “enough” look like for me? If you never define enough, the Joneses get to define it for you forever.
If higher income keeps disappearing into higher lifestyle costs, the next useful step is not guilt. It is a system. My guide to making the most of a pay raise shows how to direct new income before your lifestyle claims all of it. And if the problem is that spending decisions keep breaking the plan, start with the budget mistakes that sabotage otherwise good intentions.
Spend on What You Actually Value
One of my favorite car purchases happened because I knew exactly what I wanted and exactly what I was willing to pay. I told the salesperson, essentially, “When you are one car short of quota and willing to hit my number, call me.” I bought it on New Year’s Eve and saved thousands. I loved that car.
That is very different from buying a car because your neighbor’s new one made yours feel inadequate. Same category of purchase. Completely different reason.
And yes, sometimes the thing you carefully choose still becomes ridiculous. My wife wanted a great juicer. I found a top-of-the-line one for about the cost of a midrange model. It was amazing. It could do almost everything—including, after about three months, collect dust better than the cheaper models.
You are allowed to enjoy your money. The win is not owning less than everyone else. The win is knowing why you are spending and being able to afford the tradeoff.
The Bottom Line: Let the Joneses Keep Up With Themselves
“Keeping up with the Joneses” started as a joke about an unseen family more than a century ago. The joke still works because the financial trap has barely changed.
Someone else buys something. Their choice becomes your benchmark. Your perfectly adequate lifestyle suddenly feels inadequate. Then your money starts solving a problem that did not exist until you looked sideways.
Remember This
You do not need to know whether the Joneses are broke. You only need to know whether keeping up with them would make you poorer.
Build the life you want. Buy the things you genuinely value. Save for the freedom you cannot post on Instagram. And let everybody else explain their own credit-card statement.
Sources
- Merriam-Webster: Keep Up With the Joneses definition
- The Phrase Finder: Meaning and origin of “Keeping Up With the Joneses”
- Journal of Business Research: Social comparison and conspicuous consumption
- Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization: Conspicuous consumption, borrowing and inequality
- Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization: Consumption and upward social comparison
