Photo-Illustration: by The Cut; Photo: Getty Images
I’m a nurse with a good job at a hospital in Manhattan. I’m making more money than I ever have before (about $120,000, plus overtime), and I’m thrilled to be living here after spending years in the small midwestern city where I got my degree. Overall, my life is great. I have an apartment I love, good friends, and I get to do fun stuff on weekends like travel and go out and enjoy my life as a 28-year-old. I don’t want kids, so I don’t feel pressure to “settle down.” But lately, I’ve realized that my spending is catching up to me. My rent went up this year by $100 a month ($2,900 per month total), which is manageable, but still a lot. And when I go through my credit-card bill, it’s a million $40 or $150 paper cuts that I barely even remember.
I’m not in financial trouble; I can afford to pay my bills most of the time. (I do have pretty hefty student-loan bills; I have never missed a payment, but occasionally my credit-card bill suffers for it.) I don’t have much savings at all, and that worries me. I wish I didn’t feel so strapped and high-maintenance. I’ve tried to stick to a budget before, but I never seem to manage it. When I think back to my early 20s, I used to live on almost nothing — I don’t miss that lifestyle, but I do miss how self-sufficient I was, and how little I needed. How do I reverse some of this lifestyle creep so that I can save more?
Lifestyle creep encapsulates the small, insidious upgrades you make as your income grows. You get a raise — congratulations! — so you try a slightly more expensive moisturizer, take an Uber or three, and discover that $32 workout classes really are better than the grungy basement gym you never used. Eventually, you might move to a more expensive apartment, opt for a meal-subscription service, buy a new car … the list goes on.
These choices aren’t necessarily bad, but they do add up. Sprinkle inflation on top, and suddenly it seems like your money is disappearing, even though you’re making more of it than ever and you haven’t done anything wildly indulgent.
The worst part of lifestyle creep is that it’s hard to reverse. Maybe you spent the first 25 years of your life perfectly happy without grocery delivery, but now you feel like you can’t function without Instacart. Or your higher-paying job infringes on meal-prep time, so you’re spending a lot on takeout and don’t know what you’d eat otherwise. Or your friends always want to go out to dinner, so you go along to spend time with them. Lifestyle creep isn’t just an endless parade of treating yourself — it might feel fun and luxurious at first, but it quickly becomes habit. You’re spending this money just to maintain your standards.
The first step in fighting lifestyle creep is realizing that it’s happening in the first place — and that you have some agency to stop it. How do you put the brakes on in a way that gives you more control and doesn’t feel like a downgrade? I talked to a number of people who successfully reversed the hamster wheel of spending and kept it at bay. Here’s how they did it.
When I spoke to Mallory Baska, a financial coach who found herself in a similar position to yours about a decade ago — making decent money but blowing through it quickly — she told me that it helps to have a strong motive to change. Hers was simple: She was harassed at work and desperately needed to quit her job. “I felt trapped because I couldn’t afford to leave,” she says. “I had no choice but to return to this awful environment every day, simply because I’d prioritized material goods over my own financial security.”
I hope your situation doesn’t come to this (or worse). But no matter what, get some clarity on why you want to turn your financial ship around. No reason is too small or mundane, but it does need to be compelling to you — otherwise it won’t stand a chance against the temptation of a new sweater/weekend trip/whatever your kryptonite happens to be. Once you pick your motive, create reminders that will steer you straight. (I recently took a photo of my overstuffed closet and look at it whenever I’m tempted to buy yet another item of clothing.)
It also helps to save up for something specific. “A rainy day” isn’t very inspiring, but if you can envision something you genuinely want, keep it front of mind. When a friend decided she needed to curb her spending, she renamed her accounts after certain goals — for instance, the down payment for her dream car goes in the “vroom vroom” fund. “The slight change in language makes saving feel like a joy and not a sacrifice,” she says. These objectives can change over time, but make them fun! This doesn’t need to be a slog.
Okay, this part might suck, but bear with me: You need to go through your bills line by line. It might be a crime scene, but you can’t move forward until you sift through the evidence and know where you stand.
Manisha Thakor, a certified financial planner and author of Money Zen: The Secret to Finding Your Enough, recommends doing what she calls a “joy audit” of your expenses. “Go through all your transactions and highlight the things that brought you the most enjoyment,” she says. “The objective isn’t to deny yourself. It’s to be more aware of what actually makes you content and what doesn’t.”
Do this audit every week at first. You’re basically Marie Kondo–ing your finances: dumping everything out, sorting through it, and deciding what to keep going forward. Sure, paying your phone bill might not bring you joy, but you’ll learn to weed out the stuff that truly no longer adds value to your life (so many subscriptions!), and the process will become easier — maybe even satisfying. This practice is often called a “money date”: Designate a special time for it, light a candle, get a snack, pour yourself a beverage, and make it nice. Once you get a better handle on where your money is going, you can space them out to once a month.
Quit Amazon Prime. Delete your credit-card information from your phone and internet browser. Try a no-spend month or shopping ban. Move to a cheaper apartment, neighborhood, or city. These are just some of the tactics that people shared with me when I asked them how they managed to wrestle lifestyle creep into its rightful place. When in doubt, try living without something for a while — you might not miss it as much as you think.
One of my friends decided to quit all beauty maintenance at once, cold turkey, because she realized it had become too much. “I went through a withdrawal period and felt SUPER ugly for a few weeks, especially quitting eyelash extensions and manicures, but then I arrived at a new normal and now I feel just as good as I used to,” she says. (I did something similar a few years ago, and maybe I’m delusional, but I actually think I look better now that I’m using fewer products and not trying so hard.)
Feeling unencumbered is its own reward, too. When Thakor and Baska were going through their respective lifestyle overhauls, both sold a lot of stuff that they had acquired — fancy handbags, shoes, and jewelry. “I told myself that if I really regretted getting rid of it, I could always buy it again,” says Baska. “But I never did.”
This probably won’t surprise you, but a 2018 study found that social-media consumption directly correlated with more impulse shopping. Pay attention to who you’re following and what they make you want to buy! Baska says she did a massive purge when she started her financial overhaul. “I scrolled through every single account I followed and, if they weren’t a close friend or a person who made me feel good about myself, I muted or unfollowed them,” she says.
Thakor says she also found herself getting the shopping itch after she took a gander at her feeds, so she decided to create boundaries: She looks at Instagram during a two-hour window of time on Friday afternoons, and that’s it. She’s also not allowed to buy anything she sees until she’s waited at least a week.
Remember, though, that you’re not just comparing yourself to people you see online. Your peers affect your desires, too. When Thakor first moved to a rural area of Maine a few years ago, she was happy as a clam with her bare-bones cabin. Then, after a year, she noticed that her neighbors had paddleboards and a fancy water pump, and she started wanting them too. “We are all socialized to want what we see other people in our circles having,” she says. “Be aware that this is normal — but you don’t have to give in.”
Your desires will change, and that’s okay! “Maybe you get really into a show for a few seasons, so you subscribe to HBO, but then the show ends and you realize you’re not using it anymore,” says Thakor. “It’s normal to change priorities or realize that something you once loved isn’t working for you anymore. Just get rid of it.”
A big driver of lifestyle creep is that the rush of “leveling up” or purchasing something new wears off quickly. This is known as the hedonic treadmill: the idea that most people have a “set point” of happiness that they return to after good or bad things happen. According to this theory, money and achievements can’t make you that much happier than you already tend to be — or at least, not beyond a temporary bump. The good news is that giving up certain things won’t make you that much less happy, either. Sure, that loss might feel a little sad and constricting at first, but then you’ll get over it. Or you might feel better than normal, actually, knowing that your long-term self-sufficiency has won out over your ephemeral urge. There’s only one way to find out.
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