We are fortunate to live in a city where we are surrounded by just about everything we need within about 20mins. Public transport is generally cheap and fantastic and there is an abundance of shops just about everywhere. On top of that, domestic help, fast food and even laundry is quite cheap. In some ways the most difficult thing we have had to wrangle with is lifestyle inflation.

One downside of living where we do is the size of apartments. Kitchens are occasionally just a burner in the corner of the room so cooking can be a miserable experience. In some ways, this is a perfect encapsulation of the expat problem – it is far too easy to pay for the problem to go away. You could pay for domestic help to cook for you. You can pay for grocery delivery using services like Deliveroo. You can get restaurant food delivery. You can even pay for meals to be delivered to your place of work for you to heat up.

While some of these options are handy, we can’t help but wonder what is being given up by using them. We have heard many conversations where people justify the “convenience” of these options. I particularly like the line of thinking that when you factor in time and all the different ingredients you need to cook a meal, pre-made and delivered food ends up cheaper (how many ingredients? hundreds? thousands? what are people cooking??). I strongly suspect this is not the case- how often is paying someone for a service you could do yourself actually cheaper? It overlooks a more important reason to try and reject this particular lifestyle inflation: habits and skills.

The skills you develop by not outsourcing are so useful as well. It can be genuinely challenging to plan a weeks worth of meals and end up with no food waste at the end. It can be difficult to learn to cook with ingredients you find intimidating. It can be a real pain to wash up every evening! However, these are skills that can really make a difference to your life, as well as imbue you with a slightly greater sense of control.

Lastly, your future self is unlikely to remember the convenience you did or didn’t pay for. In which case, consideration of the outcomes of your decisions are worth considering as these are what become habits. How much of the irritation do you remember from doing a chore yourself? Probably very little, but you have formed a habit based in developing a life skill. It might be irritating at the time, but becoming adept at a skill always provides satisfaction.

• If you won’t remember the convenience (How many food takeaways do you remember?), you are left with less money and less developed skill. You are more reliant on the habit of having to pay others for something.
• If you won’t remember the struggle or irritation of a task you complete yourself, you are at least left with more money, more developed skills and the habit of relying on your own initiative and work.

This might be an oversimplification (it’s certainly Mr Money Moustache-esque – Financial freedom through badassity), but it’s a guiding principle that generally works for us. It helps to fight lifestyle inflation as well as making us feel more able to take care of ourselves. Obviously everyone has their own line in the sand, but the consideration of skills and habits you wish to form is worth spending some time on. Is this action turning you into the best version of yourself? Are you paying for a skill that you should be learning yourself?

As a return to the title: you won’t remember the convenience you paid for, but you might come to regret the skills and habits you didn’t develop or form.