> I denied myself nothing my eyes desired; I refused my heart no pleasure[...] Yet when I surveyed all that my hands had done and what I had toiled to achieve, everything was meaningless, a chasing after the wind; nothing was gained under the sun
Saving 70% of your take-home in some place like the SFBA is saying you're an extremely high earner and/or you really like studio apartments.
Any spending above it leads to no, marginal, or only temporary extra happiness.
I put that bar far lower, personally. We already have the stuff we need and don't enjoy shopping. We're basically stuck at a particular spending level whilst income grows over time. Saving a large portion of our income is effortless, and not at all a sacrifice of quality of life.
The secret to life is to not want so much. It makes life so much easier and better.
There is certainly an argument that diminishing returns is true in terms of happiness, but at the same time incomes explode beyond a certain point and data points become a lot more sparse and difficult to correlate back to the population.
It’s quite difficult to not want so much given much of social pressures in developed countries are around consumption. This, the criteria to me is more broad than merely not wanting much - the question is about resisting social pressures and to be comfortable and thankful, and this seems to be inline with the data so far on happiness and social relationships as a whole (happy couples tend to have certain habits and innate drives prior to marriage like being selfless, gracious, etc for example)
For very high incomes, even without research data, I still find it only logical that excessive spending doesn't add much to happiness. This is due to almost every product/service not linearly improving as you spend more on it.
A sports car is awesome but after 2 weeks you realize it still only takes you from A to B, and you internally normalize it. You can buy 30K worth of audio equipment but it will not sound 30 times better than 1K equipment, more like 5% better.
Note that I'm purely looking at it from a spending perspective.
As for societal pressures, I disagree. There's a lot of room for a compromise here. For example, our expenses on daily consumables is zero. We don't do Starbucks, going out for lunch, or any of it. Zero.
Nobody is pressuring us to make those daily expenses and by looking at us, you can't tell whether we do or don't. This alone is a considerable monthly savings.
We may use our clothes and shoes twice longer than a typical person, yet the wardrobe is large enough that absolutely nobody would be able to tell. Or care, for that matter.
When you enter our house, you won't see some stripped down project by a frugalist. In fact, it is above average luxurious. We have furniture that is of such quality that it is effectively ever lasting. We have very high end electronics, not budget stuff. And so on.
We may even appear richer than average whilst spending less than average. So the societal pressure is zero, because we don't appear poor or poorer compared to our peers.
Cut daily expenses, buy quality and utilize the longer lifespan, put this delta into additional savings. Spend part of savings to lower cost of living (mortgage, energy bill), and get even more savings.
Difficult? Easy.
As someone that's had a great deal of difficulty justifying a lot of longer lifespan timeline consumption patterns due to moving constantly weighing living circumstances and career I'd say that difficulty varies considerably for households even when one's aware of the TCO. I'm not going to tell an undocumented migrant family that they can just save more and spend less with more conspicuous consumption like buying a reliable econobox car like I did. Decisions and habits are also much easier when one has a partner or support system aligned with one's longer term goals and habits. It seems quite tone deaf to outright declare all of these factors are simply "easy" because it is easy for one's own intrinsic and extrinsic factors.
I started saving at age 6, on a 1 guilder (I'm from the Netherlands) weekly allowance.
When I landed my first job, still single, low income, I still saved 30%. I save significantly regardless of income. This to say that I'm not some privileged armchair commenter. I come from the lowest of the lower working class, and have plenty of experience with poverty.
So it's not tone deaf, it's an attitude. Which indeed most people don't have. That's a lack of education or awareness. Not a matter of it being difficult. A few minor tweaks do wonders.
I do agree with one point: it won't work if you don't have a partner that aligns with such a strategy.
> Any spending above it leads to no, marginal, or only temporary extra happiness.
You are quoting an outdated study. New research [1] has shown that happiness does in fact not plateau at 70k, unfortunately
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/alexledsom/2021/02/07/new-study...
Most people don't have the option to save 70% of their take home pay and still live comfortably.
I’m glad I realised this, and I totally agree - once you realize that consumerism doesn’t materially improve your life, your “minimum income threshold” drops considerably.
For me, the biggest exception is travel, which really adds up if you want to take a couple of overseas trips per year.
For me, FIRE is a side effect of trying to live a fairly simple life with little impact on the environment. I don't deprive myself. I genuinely struggle to find things worth spending money on.
If you can save most of that, pretty soon you'll have a good savings rate and pretty soon have some good savings.
Also, when you start thinking about retirement and look at rules of thumb about savings amount vs income, you can discount your income significantly if you have a high savings rate. (Looking at needed savings vs predicted expenses is a better methodology though)
I'm quite happy not owning a huge house, a Tesla and the latest iPhone.
Instead of paying say $2000/mo on rent you could be paying say $2500/mo on a mortgage but only $1000/mo of that might actually be interest.
So even without capital appreciation on property you're ahead of the renter.