Like I need to be told that?
I don't spend on any such thing, track all my expenses, make a good high-tech income, and still spend most of my earnings.
There is something fishy behind this story.
> He got a computer-engineering degree in 1997, and skipped the graduation ceremony to begin working at a company near Ottawa called Newbridge Networks. This was the early upslope of the dot-com boom. He started at forty-one thousand dollars a year, with no savings or possessions except “a bike, a backpack, and a diploma.” He made the rookie mistake (“what a clueless young man!!!”) of buying a sports car with a loan from his sister. He got his first raise soon afterward, to fifty-seven thousand and six hundred dollars. By the end of year one, he’d saved five thousand dollars. A year later, he had twenty-three thousand. By year five, a quarter of a million.
It's quite apparent that yes, Adeney has done a ton of work to be rigorous enough to have built and to maintain the endowment.
However... it feels like he built this retirement nest egg on a rare period in the markets' history. I'd question how repeatable it is.
But it's a mindset thing too. Do you "give up" and take out the biggest mortgage and car loan you can, or do you act against it and take your destiny into your own hands a bit more.
If it brings a person a person emotional comfort to live as the willful anti-consumer, then that's the value in it. But I think it's unkind or deceptive to suggest most people can ride a bike instead of drive a car and suddenly save most of a semi-retirement nest egg in 6-7 years.
I have to question your story then.
Because I do drop big bucks on fancy restaurants and liquor, yet I still manage to save a ton every month.
Two hypotheses:
1. Your "good high-tech income" isn't good enough. Anything under $125k globally is not good. More if you're senior and in SF/NYC.
2. You're spending too much on rent. Particularly in tech hubs, this is a much more decisive factor in your financial health than whether you cook your own food.
If you track all your expenses, you should have a pretty good idea of where your spending is going. The question then becomes how you could reduce that.
Many people spend a majority of their income on housing alone; that's can be one of the harder items to fix, but one of the most critical. A long commute creates a pile of expenses, above and beyond an expensive or inefficient vehicle. An expensive area can worsen both of those problems; it's reasonable to evaluate whether you get a high enough salary differential to compensate for the area you're in.
Past big items like those, the details tend to vary greatly between people. There are a pile of case studies posted on the MMM site, analyzing specific budgets.