The difference between performing wealth and actually having it.
Frugal Chic ® #45: Why Your 20s Shouldn’t Look Impressive
In your 20s, there is a quiet pressure to look like you already have everything together. Living alone or with a partner close to central. The right skincare and makeup products. The aspirational lifestyle of Alo Yoga and dinners at Nobu. Extravagant holidays that look great for Instagram. Becoming “that girl”. But as we all know, looking like you’re doing well and actually feeling that way are two very different things.
In my early 20s, I made the mistake of performing for Instagram. When I first started out in my fashion internship, my life didn’t look glamorous day to day. I was running around, picking up samples, cleaning, and rushing to get tea and coffee in a cramped office.
Because my day to day felt so unglamorous, I felt the need to compensate for it online. To prove something. To exaggerate parts of my life that felt more aligned with how I wanted to be seen.
At the time, my boyfriend was often travelling for work, so we’d stay in hotels. They were usually budget-friendly, but once or twice they were my first taste of a ‘nice hotel’. And instead of showing the full picture, I focused on those moments. I posted myself posing in a dressing gown, making it look like I lived this life of leisure.
The same thing happened when work occasionally came with perks. When an internship took us out for a fancy meal at Bacchanalia in Mayfair, from the outside it looked like I was living the dream. But those moments were snapshots, not the structure of my life.
I wouldn’t say I wanted to be an influencer, because I only had 1,000 followers, but I did feel that I bought things at the time that I thought would look good on Instagram. It became an expensive hobby with no real return.
Eventually, there’s a point where that disconnect catches up with you. For me, it was when I decided I actually wanted to take saving and investing seriously. And that required a completely different lifestyle to the one I’d been trying to portray.
It looked like staying at home for two years after I graduated. Filming content in my childhood bedroom. Feeling like I couldn’t be a traditional influencer because I didn’t have the aesthetic setup. Not buying coffee, not eating lunch out, and living far more frugally than what I had been showing before.
And during that time, something shifted. I completely abandoned my personal Instagram and focused solely on TikTok, because it was the only platform that actually felt like it was giving me a return. I showed up differently, in a more authentic way, often with breakouts, messy hair, or just when I had a spare 20 minutes before work.
And that’s the part no one really talks about. Building wealth, especially in your early 20s, often looks a bit unsexy. It’s quieter. Less aesthetic. Less immediately impressive.
The mistake I made, and the one I see so many people making, is trying to perform wealth before actually understanding what it takes to build it. I had to backtrack. Reflect on the money I’d wasted on things I wore once just to take a picture in. Re-evaluate what I actually wanted my life to look like, not just how I wanted it to appear.
And the shift only really came when I accepted that this phase of my life wasn’t supposed to look put together.
It’s only now, at 25, that I’ve given myself permission to step out of that mindset. Now that my income has grown from £30k to £100k+, I can actually start living parts of the lifestyle I once pretended to have. But the difference is, this time it’s built on something real.
A fully funded emergency fund, a now business that started out as a hobby, investments that compound in the background. These are things that took years to build to don’t photograph well but they provide real stability.
At Frugal Chic, we believe we shouldn’t sacrifice beauty and taste on our journey to financial freedom. I stand by that, you shouldn’t suddenly deprive yourself of things you love, but equally you shouldn’t feel pressured to be seen as having it all together.
The real flex is the quiet knowledge that if you needed to leave a job, you could. If you wanted to move cities, you could. If a situation no longer served you, you could walk away without having to negotiate your freedom with anyone else.
Consumption vs Ownership
You can still like nice things. It’s just a reminder that consumption and ownership are not the same thing.
Owning assets means having things that put money back in your pocket, protect your purchasing power, or increase your optionality over time.
Many of us fall into the trap of collecting beautiful things. If something speaks to us, we must have it. We see it as self-exprersThis is fine up until a point.
Research suggests that there is a ceiling to the amount of happiness that can bring. 1 After a point, we end up on a hedonic treadmill, where there is no satisfaction to the pleasure we seek because every time we acquire something, it becomes our new baseline of happiness.
At that tipping point, we start taking away from our freedom and optionality without realising it. The extra serum that is used for a week and left at the back of the cupboard, the bags of clothes eventually taken to the charity shop, it is all an opportunity cost. The money spent there, which has now been forgotten, could have been put towards something that pays you in the future.
Frugal Chic is based on the idea that once you have your signature style, you have a staple skincare routine, your go-to makeup look, anything else is just noise. In a world that suggests that more always equals more, actively choosing less can look like deprivation - but ultimately, it’s freedom.
Once you strip away the noise, and focus on the things that truly add value to your life, you can divert the savings into buying assets that can multiply and actually build wealth, not just the appearance of it.
Looks expensive vs is valuable
A lot of what we buy is social proof. It’s rarely about the object itself. It’s about what it signals.
We buy the £160 sweatshirt because it gives the impression we belong to a £160 a month health club. We might feel better on the surface, but as soon as ISAs and pensions are mentioned, we feel rocky again. So this isn’t about buying nothing; it’s about buying smart.
Here’s how to decipher if that purchase will help you build wealth or just look the part. I like to ask myself:
Does this depreciate the second I buy it, like a brand-new car or a designer label that you can also find in TKMaxx. If I tried to sell this now, would I make a significant loss?
Does it improve my future financial position? A tailored suit that increases confidence might. A coffee machine that replaces daily takeaways might. An impulse trend purchase probably doesn’t.
Does it increase my freedom over the next five to ten years? Even if it looks indulgent, paying for a cleaner or having your sheets laundered can reduce mental load and free up time, which matters far more when your calendar is full and your income depends on focus.
Not everything you buy needs to be a freedom-producing asset. But the more you tilt your spending towards assets instead of liabilities, the further ahead you get.
But I know what you’re thinking; it seems that the overall trend is moving away from traditional luxury being signalled through possessions and now we are seeing a bigger shift toward time, education, being offline as the new status symbols. This is evidenced in:
The analog trend
Luxury brands leaning more toward experience and access
The rise of the intellectual influencer
The part no one talks about is that this shift requires even more financial literacy. Going offline is easier when your income does not depend on visibility as spoken about in this letter. Prioritising experience over possessions is easier when you already have financial security. Even slow living requires financial backing. There is privilege embedded in some of these “new” status symbols.
We might not be swiping our credit cards on designer bags in the same way we once did, but many of us still struggle with the other form of cost that these “new” status symbols require. Time.
Which is why they only work sustainably when paired with sound financial strategy.
Build your ownership stack before upgrading your lifestyle
This is exactly how to build an ownership stack, before you start signalling wealth.
First, liquidity. An emergency fund and cash buffer. You can’t take on risk without a safety net.
Second, tax shelters. An ISA or pension, depending on where you’re based.
Third, broad investing. Index funds and diversified portfolios. Not trying to time the market or pick winning stocks.
Fourth, income assets. Skills, business, side income, scalable offers. Work that can exist independently of your immediate hours.
Fifth, optionality assets. A strong credit profile, a proper exit strategy, diversifying income streams.
It may seem daunting and seeing these 5 steps makes you think, it suggests it should happen quickly. It could take years but this is meant to be applied differently depending on personal circumstance.
Let’s say money is the restraint, as Naval Ravikant puts it, start with permissionless leverage. Digital products, media, writing, software, anything that can be created once and distributed infinitely at almost zero cost. These forms of leverage do not require large amounts of money or anyone’s approval to begin. It’s easier said than done, and it does require skill, but I would say there is an increase in Gen Z and millennials having side hustles, non linear careers, or choosing to monetise their interests or expertise.
I started out with zero financial literacy and just clumsily learning through the internet and books but thinking back now, I was unconsciously following this journey. The key is to slowly build these up over time.
The next time you feel like your early 20s are supposed to be this grand, aesthetically pleasing chapter, remember that in reality it’s often the opposite. It can look messy, unsexy, even a bit boring.
But that’s the point. The things that actually build wealth are slow. They’re built quietly, over years. It might take five years, it might take ten, but that’s the process.
Your life isn’t supposed to look perfectly put together in your 20s. And more often than not, the pressure to perform for Instagram, buying things you don’t need to look a certain way, or even getting into debt to prove an image, pulls you further away from the life you’re actually trying to build.
That’s all this week,
Daniel Kahneman’s research, notably a 2010 study with Angus Deaton, found that emotional well-being (happiness) rises with income, but plateaus around $75,000 annually, while life satisfaction continues to increase with more money. While higher income solves stress-related issues, it does not guarantee day-to-day happiness beyond meeting basic needs and comforts.