The point of lifestyle expenses is not to wring adventure out of them. They’re part of downtime for a reason; downtime is the opposite of adventure. It’s what you do between adventures. And the point of lifestyle expenses during downtime is to attach a concrete game action (in this case the depletion of resources) to the passage of downtime days.
To answer the question, I have used lifestyle expenses before, but I find they don’t have enough consequence to work well. The benefits and drawbacks of each lifestyle are purely narrative, which makes them feel not worth caring about. Plus, the amount of money they cost quickly becomes trivial to PCs anyway.
I’ve got an idea I want to try with them, which is to tie downtime days (as a resource you spend to perform downtime activities) to lifestyle. Each week you buy a lifestyle, and that lifestyle determines how many days that week you can spend on downtime activities (the remainder of the week going towards working to insure your basic needs are met). Squalid gets you one downtime day, and each category above that gets you an additional day, up to all 7 days for Wealthy.