At 44, my earnings have stalled - yet I'm splurging on farm shops and cashmere (2025)

A few weeks ago, my husband came home with a wine I hadn’t drunk in three or four years and hoped never to again. I buy plenty of supermarket wine and enjoy exploring bargain basement brands, but as I plough through my 40s my appetite has shifted from most bottles over six quid to specific favourites costing upwards of a tenner, and much more if from a local vineyard.

Quality over quantity, they say. Unfortunately, wine isn’t the only area in which my tastes appear to have upgraded themselves; a process that has evolved stealthily and mysteriously, as if I have no hand in the products I buy to fill my fridge or smear on my face.

I am an innocent victim of what is known as lifestyle creep. Strictly speaking, this is the affliction of spending more as your salary increases, with the result that you never have more money in your account, contribute more to your savings, or feel even a tiny bit better off. But there’s a bittersweet punchline to my personal tale of lifestyle creep which is that during my several decades of spending more, my earnings have in fact stalled.

If the money coming in is flatlining, while inflation soars, how do I manage it? With great care, and some considerable debt. I recently plundered my retirement funds to pay the dentist and have just sold Grandma Gladys’s gold. Can you imagine explaining to someone born to the backdrop of the First World War that you exchanged family heirlooms for M&S cashmere and linen bedding?

I have no idea where my tipping point was, or what caused it, but I am outstandingly sure of myself when it comes to defending it. Let’s take food shop creep, for example. I am driving to the farm shop and ordering from haute butchers and cheesemongers to support small, independent producers and the British farming industry, right? If I buy my cleaning and laundry products on subscription from the eco place, I am saving the planet and my loved ones from microplastics. With each purchase of natural wine, I spare my bloodstream additional sulphites. And buying books is a human right.

The obvious diagnosis is that I am living beyond my means and need to rein it in. Undoubtedly, there is some kind of grotesque entitlement in imagining I deserve these modest yet continuous upgrades simply because of my age, and because I see my peers touching up their lifestyle, apparently with ease. But I forgive myself because I’m not sure most people really deserve anything based on their earnings. If you’re not a nurse or a caregiver, why does one job, or one person, merit many times more money than the next? I know there are many perspectives and shades of gray within this spectrum. But, surely, very few of us think Elon Musk has genuinely earned his billions.

Thankfully for my overdraft, I see others creeping on habits I cannot fit into my diary. When did having a different design on your nails each month become de rigueur, for example? Who can keep up with hair appointments as you cycle between trying to change the mousey to blonde then deploying the blonde to offset the grey? At one point, going for Vejas over the Nike Internationalists that have served me well for years was an adequate stretch. Now I’m told to bung two hundred quid at a pair of Flower Mountains.

Why am I even looking at brands that don’t fit with my earnings? Once, this type of aspirational browsing took place via the medium of glossy magazine pages. One didn’t read Vogue and expect to be in London at a Bond Street “flagship store” seconds later. Today, the promise of a happier life is served to me moment to moment via social media, both through ads and others’ posts. It never ends.

A 2024 study in the journal Computers in Human Behaviour outlined the relationship between social media use and impulse shopping, finding we can quickly become addicted to brands, which we then consider essential to spend on. Living with lifestyle creep is like treading a perilous high wire between my admirably cultured needs and desperate consumerist greed.

Age is also key here. Don’t we all expect a higher standard of living as we grow older? In many industries, experience brings better money. Unfortunately, I didn’t choose to work in one of these sectors.

I have tried to cut back. I recently made a list of everything bought over three months that might be considered by some (me) as not essential but definitely reasonable and not at all extravagant treats, but by others (the man I am married to) as dispensable luxuries. Included were sauna membership and a massage (both important health outgoings as far as I’m concerned) and expensive deli sandwiches (only when feeling a bit blue). My concessions: I concluded that a £45 massage from a back-fixing genius is a better investment than a £20 bottle of wine. And I’ve swapped my upmarket sauna for the community one. But as for the odd chicken caesar focaccia when I feel the urge; I don’t feel that giving that up would serve either my bank balance or my mental health.

By the way, I’ve never been flash or splashy. I haven’t bought a car straight off the production line. Nor do I seek out new outfits for special occasions. I made so many cutbacks after having my daughter nine years ago, from gym memberships and yoga retreats to magazine subscriptions and snowboarding trips.My hair is a state, I only buy kids clothes on Vinted – and only with the money I’ve raised there – and I always say no to expensive things like gigs or theatre tickets, unless it’s something I really want to see.

My creep wears the shape of multiple pairs of Birkenstocks and a steady supply of really posh chocolate rather than Jimmy Choos and caviar. It’s other lifestyle upgrades that are the problem. Take the bedroom for example. With buying a bigger bed, from king to superking (a ‘necessity’ for co-sleeping children), comes extra spend on bedlinen.

And holidays are back on the agenda – a colleague noted how people seem to go away every time there is a break from school these days, rather than take a summer jaunt. Surely this, too, is spurred by social media? I further complicated my holiday situation by getting a dog, so not only do I desire the same number of trips as I took before the cost of living crisis bedded in, any foreign jaunt comes with the added price tag of Penny’s luxury farm stay. And, where others might study handbags or hair treatments online, I am mostly watching clips of rescue pups and errant goats, and dreaming of braving the leap from one dog to three (or four).

And then there are everyday things like fitness. ‘Start weight training’ has been at the top of my to-do list for three or four years, heavily influenced as I am by every other woman in her mid forties who used to run and swim and now dips and lifts. So when I see on Instagram that my friends have personal trainers or attend bijou bespoke gyms that won’t tell you the price before you schedule a meeting with them to discuss your life goals, am I to continue plugging away at my free YouTube tutorials?

In a word: yes. The principle tragedy of lifestyle creep, however violently afflicted you may be, is that even if your earnings are on the rise – and mine are not – inflation means that you should continue to spend in the same way as before to have a hope of breaking even. Do let me know how you get on.