Great article, Akarsh!

You make an excellent point when you mention the fancy car and the luxury apartment, or rather the slow leak of growing broke in order to look rich.

Student loans and credit card debt, while disastrous to our finances, are often incorrectly portrayed as the demarcation between being "good with money" and not. Like you, I learned the hard way that debt can happen in an instant when we live within an inch of our means.

I think one of the simplest ways we do this every day without realizing it is conflating needs and wants. I see this most often with car payments and housing.