The other day my 21-year-old daughter borrowed my Amazon account to order supplies for two birthday cakes she was making for friends at university. Later that evening I happened to glance at my Amazon account and nearly choked on my cup of tea. The total came to £146. For a fleeting moment I assumed she must have accidentally ordered a KitchenAid mixer or perhaps a small piece of furniture. She hadn’t. Apart from an electric fan (which was entirely understandable given Britain’s recent heatwave), almost everything else fell firmly into the category of what my grandmother would have called “fripperies.”
There was £46 worth of cake decorations alone. Not the flour, eggs, butter or sugar. Just the decorations. There was edible glitter, cake toppers, body glitter spray, fake eyelashes because they were apparently “much easier than mascara,” and a collection of other items that, to my mind at least, hardly qualified as essential purchases for a university student who currently doesn’t have a job.
Naturally, I questioned her. Her response genuinely surprised me. She wasn’t apologetic or embarrassed. She honestly couldn’t understand why I thought the spending was excessive. In her mind, beautifully decorated cakes were simply what people expected. A glitter-themed birthday party obviously required glitter (for body and cake). Fake eyelashes weren’t a luxury; they were simply part of getting ready. My suggestion that she could bake two delicious homemade cakes, put a few candles on top and spend the evening laughing with good friends seemed completely inadequate.
It wasn’t that she wanted to be extravagant. She simply wanted her friends to have a birthday that felt special.
That conversation stayed with me for days because I realized we weren’t really talking about cake decorations. We were talking about something much bigger. When did ordinary stop being enough? This is where lifestyle inflation begins, not necessarily because our incomes rise, but because our idea of what counts as “normal” becomes more expensive.
This wasn’t the first time I had watched the goalposts quietly move. When my daughters were little, I bought many of their toys and clothes second-hand. They loved them because they didn’t know any different. Then around the age of ten they suddenly discovered the difference between charity shops and shopping malls. Nothing had changed about the clothes. Only the story attached to them had changed.
A few years later, my homemade birthday cakes, simple chocolate cakes with chocolate frosting, proudly presented on a pretty cake stand with ordinary candles, were no longer acceptable. Apparently they weren’t pretty enough for birthday photographs. By the age of thirteen, my eldest daughter preferred to make her own beautifully decorated cake rather than have one of mine.
I never took it personally. Looking back, I don’t think my daughters were rejecting me. They were responding to a culture that had quietly redefined what “special” looked like. I simply wasn’t prepared to compete with Pinterest.
Every generation thinks the next generation has become a little extravagant. Their grandfather used to tell us that he walked barefoot to school so he wouldn’t wear out the soles of his only pair of shoes. To my daughters, that sounds unbelievable. I, on the other hand, didn’t have my nails professionally done for my own wedding, which to my daughters also sounds unbelievable. Today, many young women think nothing of spending £30 to £45 every few weeks on acrylic nails with chrome finishes or intricate designs. When I suggested they already owned a perfectly good gel nail kit and could do their own nails before investing the savings into their Financial Freedom Fund, the look I received suggested I had officially become “that” mother.
Perhaps every generation sounds a little ridiculous to the next. What feels different today is the speed at which our standards are changing. This isn’t just lifestyle inflation. This is expectation inflation.
Lifestyle inflation is a familiar concept in personal finance. As our income rises, our spending usually rises too. We buy a larger house, a nicer car, more expensive holidays, and eat at better restaurants.
Expectation inflation is different. It’s what happens when yesterday’s luxury quietly becomes today’s necessity. Birthday parties become event productions. Cakes become elaborate works of art. Holidays become social media content. Even a simple picnic now seems to require matching blankets, carefully curated food and photographs that look as though they’ve come straight from a magazine. Expectation inflation and lifestyle inflation often work hand in hand, reinforcing one another until it becomes difficult to distinguish genuine wants from socially acquired “needs.”
This is the Disneyfication of everyday life. Everything has to feel magical, memorable and, above all, photogenic. It isn’t just birthday cakes. It’s baby showers, gender reveals, wedding proposals, holidays, picnics and even children’s lunchboxes. Somewhere along the way we stopped asking whether something would be enjoyable and started asking whether it would look good on Instagram.
I don’t blame social media entirely, but I do think it has poured petrol on a fire that was already smoldering. When I was growing up, we compared ourselves with neighbors, cousins and classmates. Today’s young people compare themselves with millions of carefully curated images every single day. Their benchmark is no longer the family next door. It’s influencers, celebrities and people whose full-time job is making ordinary life appear extraordinary, at no expense.
That’s rather like comparing your family kickabout in the park with the World Cup. Of course ordinary life feels ordinary by comparison.
That is an incredibly powerful force, and I don’t think we fully appreciate just how deeply it shapes our expectations. If every birthday party you scroll past has balloon arches, personalized biscuits, professionally decorated cakes and color-coordinated party bags, then of course a homemade cake with candles starts to feel disappointing. Not because it isn’t made with love, but because comparison quietly whispers that love isn’t enough anymore. And what mother wants her child to feel disappointed on their birthday?
As a life coach, I see this with clients all the time. They’ll tell me they “need” to renovate a perfectly good kitchen, spend thousands on a wedding, or throw an elaborate birthday party for a child who would probably have been just as happy chasing balloons around the garden. When we slow down and unpack the decision, the answer is almost always the same. They don’t really need it. They simply don’t want to be the only one who doesn’t. Awareness always comes before change.
One exercise I now use myself is the “Enough Test.” Before making a purchase that suddenly feels absolutely essential, I pause and ask myself four questions. Would this have seemed essential to me ten years ago? Would I still want it if nobody else ever saw it? Am I buying it because it genuinely reflects my values, or because I’ve absorbed someone else’s definition of normal? Finally, if I invested this money instead, what future freedom would I be buying for myself?
That last question has become particularly important because every small upgrade quietly moves our Financial Freedom Number further away. Lifestyle inflation and expectation inflation rarely arrive as one dramatic purchase. They creep into our lives one upgraded coffee, one manicure, one birthday party, one online recommendation at a time. Before we know it, we’ve accepted a lifestyle that would have seemed extravagant only a decade earlier, and we wonder why financial freedom still feels so far away.
One of the reasons I created my Financial Independence, Retire Early (F.I.R.E.) Course was to help people realize that financial independence isn’t just about investing wisely. It’s also about becoming aware of the invisible forces shaping our spending. Once you notice those forces, you regain the freedom to choose rather than simply succumb.
I also encourage clients to use Financial Mentor’s Ultimate Retirement Calculator because it allows you to model different spending levels throughout retirement instead of assuming your expenses remain constant forever. It’s one of the most practical tools I’ve found for helping people understand how today’s spending habits influence tomorrow’s financial freedom.
Do I have all the answers? Absolutely not. I still wonder how we teach children, and ourselves, that ordinary really can be enough when every screen is telling us otherwise. I still believe an egg-and-spoon race can create happier memories than an expensive bouncy castle. And I still believe a homemade birthday cake baked with love tastes better than one covered in edible glitter. At the same time, I recognize that my daughters are growing up in a world I never had to navigate. Their comparison isn’t occasional; it’s constant.
Perhaps that’s why I’ve become less interested in telling people to spend less and far more interested in encouraging them to notice more. Notice where lifestyle inflation has become part of your everyday decisions. Notice where your own expectations have become more expensive. Then ask yourself whether those new standards are bringing you greater happiness or simply greater pressure.
For me, that’s what financial freedom has really come to mean. It’s not simply having enough money to do what you want. It’s having enough confidence to stop chasing standards that were never yours in the first place. If we can do that, perhaps ordinary won’t just be enough again. Perhaps we’ll discover it was extraordinary all along.
