Lifestyle creep is real. Personally know a number of folks from IB/PE hitting those numbers and yet feeling financially suffocated. Yeah sure you have the flashy guys who get all too caught up in the lifestyle that such salaries can buy you, but all too often, it comes from a detachment to money. When you're out of college and in your first year of IB, making 150k/yr, all your day to day essentials and mini-luxuries suddenly become affordable to you. That mentality sticks as you move up in paygrade. The long work hours means that you're inclined to throw any sort of money to buy convenience and this is usually comes in the form of renting expensive apartments near their workplace and throwing money at anything that gives you a sense of normalcy. I know this myself because there was a time where I (not in finance) would just head to this fancy sushi place regularly during the week and drop over $100 each time on a solo lunch. I didn't care too much for the food but it was the only place I could sit down for an hour by myself without seeing any crowds, having to queue up for food and being quiet enough that I could reply emails during lunch. When you get into that sort of mental state from long work hours, your judgement gets impaired and it's easy to snowball into very questionable financial decisions if you're hanging with the wrong crowd or dating the wrong types.