My life costs a lot more than it used to.

There was a year shortly after I moved to Toronto when my rent was $500 a month, and I mainly ate hamburger and noodles.

Now my rent is … more… and that hamburger had a much happier life (or so my butcher assures me).

It happens to lots of people, but there’s definitely a gap between how much I feel like things have changed, and how much they’ve actually changed.

And I’m left to question whether the growth in my spending is good or bad?

Simply… is it okay to grow? Or is that growth a sign of financial failure?

A hard question, and one that I came face to face with in another, non financial, part of my life as well.

You can’t hide from a dance belt

The opera company that I’m working for right now has beautiful costumes. The women have these huge dresses, and the men wear tights.

Really nice tights… but tights.

Something I didn’t know about wearing tights is that you can’t just wear normal underwear underneath them. You also can’t wear nothing at all.

I won’t get into the reasons, but they have to do with physically oversharing with the audience.

So they invented ‘dance belts’.

Wikipedia defines dance belts as“a kind of specialized undergarment commonly worn by male ballet dancers to support their genitals. Most are similar in design to thong underwear.”

Putting on a dance belt also has the added bonus of a wide band around your midriff which makes you very aware of … growth.

It’s not a particularly comfortable piece of clothing, and since I work for this company quite often it’s become a yearly ritual.

Every fall I try on the dance belt and every fall it’s a little bit different.

Not because the dance belt has changed, but because I have.

5 seconds in a dance belt will show you very clearly every cupcake and every evening spent at a desk instead of going to the gym.

It’s a stark window into my own personal ‘lifestyle creep’.

Extracting a lesson from a form fitting dancing thong

People expand – both physically and financially.

And sometimes that’s good, and sometimes it’s not.

That’s why the idea of lifestyle creep is a tricky one. The general personal finance take on it is that it’s bad and you have to watch out for it.

And that’s true.

It’s really easy to let your finances expand as you get older without much thought. You start making more money and it just gets eaten up with a slightly nicer car and more dinners out. 

This kind of default spending can leave you wondering where all your money is going, and why you can’t seem to make any progress on big financial goals.

But there are also people who hold themselves to the impossible standard of sticking to spending habits that worked 10 years ago…

…people who see the growth in their spending and feel immense shame. Like every dollar spent is a failure, and they should still be able to scrape by on $800 a month because that’s how it used to work in college.

Sometimes growth is good.

It’s okay to eat better in your 30s than your 20s. It’s okay to invest more in things that make you happy.

The expansion isn’t necessarily the problem.

But don’t let it just happen by default. Be aware of where your costs are growing so you can continually check-in to see if you’re still okay with it.

You’ve got to be okay with your flab (or stop eating cake)

My dance belt didn’t fit as well as it did last October.

But it wasn’t a surprise.

As I squeezed into its embrace I remembered three months of cooking and baking with my partner. I remembered a fair amount of stress eating as I navigated some tricky life situations this summer. And I remembered the hours I chose to spend behind a desk learning a new trade, instead of at the treadmill.

I’m a little softer, but I’m still healthy. I’m still happy.

And right now, this is growth that I’m okay with.

So here’s my challenge for you – I want you to put on a financial dance belt next week. Take half an hour and write down what you think you should be spending, then compare it to your actual spending. Where have you ‘grown’? How do you feel about that growth?

Hopefully it won’t be too painful of an experience, but if it is just remember that 6 out 7 evenings this week I’ll be wearing two literal dance belts and know… it could be worse.

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