Managing your life is about balancing risk. Having 6 months in an emergency fund is golden when (not if) you get laid off or something bad happens like a car wreck or illness or whatever. During the course of your career, it will likely happen. When it does, not having monetary worry be part of it is golden.

You can also broaden your opportunities by paying off your house and not borrowing to pay for depreciating assets (cars and other things with wheels or propellers). Getting burned out and want to take some time off? It's a lot easier if you are not having to make a big debt payment or rent payment each month.

I'm curious - what percentage of pre-tax cash per year would you recommend saving? All of my friends are on my case for not "saving enough" because I'm living my best life, but I'm not sure what the appropriate number is if my net worth is increasing.

15% of your pre-tax salary saved for 40 years should get you enough to retire at a comfortable level compared to your current spending. Lots of tech workers do not get 40 year careers. If you plan on a 25 year career, you need to save more like 35%.

I save around 30 pretax...theoretically it’ll get easier with a TC increase. Don’t know how to save more without drastically reducing quality of life though.

Why?

So you can be old and crippled finally going on the vacation you dreamed of? Barely able to walk out in to the ocean, much less surf like you dreamed of?

Nothing is guaranteed. Quit living off rehydrated beans and eggs like you’re winning a merit badge and start financially planning to see the things your heart desires.

If you have left over savings when you die, you did it wrong.

No. So you can be old and crippled and still live.

If you are assuming that you will always be able to work, making the wages you make today, then you will have a rude awakening the day that you cannot. Living below your means has been almost universally good advice since the dawn of civilization.

I do appreciate your sentiment however, in that there is a lot of advice from FIRE types who talk about even the most minor indulgence as some hedonistic waste of money. And it makes sense to remind those who go to that extreme, that spending money now can actually buy a little happiness. But I think you're being slightly disingenuous by taking the parent comment to the extreme of living off rehydrated beans when they're simply reiterating the idea of saving as a virtue.

> old and crippled finally going on the vacation you dreamed of > living off rehydrated beans and eggs

I'm continually baffled by this kind of reaction.

I spend ~30k USD per year - more than the average american and more than 99% of the world. I live in a nice apartment with a garden, a 10 minute commute from the centre of one of the most expensive cities in the world. I buy organic food from the local supermarket and eat out multiple times per week. This year I vacationed in Tenerife, Greece, Italy, San Francisco and Vancouver.

This is, by any reasonable standards, a life of luxury. And on a typical FAANG salary it would take ~7 years to save for retirement - https://networthify.com/calculator/earlyretirement?income=13...

You would think most people would be interested to learn that their level of wealth opens up the option of complete financial independence in a comfortable middle class lifestyle before the age of 30, but instead it's always straight to yelling about dried beans.

The last 10 years of life gets incredible expensive unless you children who want to be full time caregivers... $30K per year + social security likely will not cut it. $30K today will maybe just cover the in home assistance in a medium to low cost city. Unsure how inflation will affect things.

You'd need much more than that....

> So you can be old and crippled finally going on the vacation you dreamed of? Barely able to walk out in to the ocean, much less surf like you dreamed of?

> Nothing is guaranteed. Quit living off rehydrated beans and eggs like you’re winning a merit badge and start financially planning to see the things your heart desires.

I never said you should live on beans and eggs and skip vacations. Most engineers are paid well enough to live well on their base salaries while saving a reasonable amount of money.

What I'm advising against is stuff like spending so much on your mortgage that you will go broke if your RSUs drop in value or your annual bonus is less than you expected; in other words, live a lifestyle you can afford with your base salary.

> My advice is similar: live on your base salary, and save a lot of it

To be fair, that comment doesn't exactly align with advising someone against getting a mortgage they can't afford unless they receive a bonus.

I'm currently reading "Narrative Economics" by Shiller and it mentions propaganda historically being fed to the poor/middle classes in regards to saving as much money as possible (so banks could profit or earn commish off it)...I'm by no means against saving/investing money, but your original comment (and the multitude of others that are similar) makes me wonder how much of that propaganda is alive and well today.

> If you have left over savings when you die, you did it wrong.

which would be a fine statement if we knew exactly what is going to happen.

As we have no idea if we are going to live till 100, and drop dead in the act of procreation with one's 50th life partner, or die at 32 of bone cancer after 5 years of off/on chemo and other invasive procedures. One has to build in slop to cope with all that life might throw at you.

The amount you save is entirely up to you. Some people might be willing to live off beans if they save enough to move to a pacific island in 5-10 years.

Other people are contented to live a bit larger, because they plan to stay where there are.

As with all things you need to figure out your goal and plan for that, and have enough slop to account likley occurrences (family, illness, recessions)

There’s a middle ground which is to spend intentionally so that you’re not wasting money. You can set aside a percentage for purely fun stuff. But a lot of us waste money — we spend on stuff we don’t need, things with diminishing marginal utility. How many dinners out a month are really necessary to improve happiness — and at what point does it cease to move the needle? That’s subjective, and will vary from person to person.

It’s about being intentional.

Or retire at 40-50 and live the good life doing all the things you didn't have time for when you were working, without being crippled like people working regular jobs are when they retire.

And have enough left over so your spouse can keep living comfortably after you're gone. Even if they were a SAHP and thus had a gap in their retirement savings.

And have enough left over so your kids and grandkids can get a head start in society.

It's not just about you in this very moment...

This is an extreme, uncharitable interpretation of the parent comment.

I think on the types of salaries this article is referring to, you could happily do everything you want to reasonably do lifestyle wise while still save a safety net for the future. Travel, coffee and restaurant meals, expensive hobbies, nice neighbourhood. Should all be achievable.

If you want to play it safe, then you're really just trying not to leverage your wage into insane debt. You could live a decent lifestyle while putting money away and be financially fine if wages went down. But if you get loans for a $1.5m home and a $200,000 car you might find yourself with payments too high.

> So you can be old and crippled finally going on the vacation you dreamed of?

No, so you can retire early, as in your 40s. It's stated clearly in the article and not easy to misinterpret.

And if ageism in the industry is as bad as it seems to be, being able to retire in your 40s might be a pretty important consideration. If nothing else, it gives you a way to turn down work you don't like doing.

By this logic the eptiome of efficiency would require my children to die on the same day I die. I can't bring them with me after all.

I think there's a balance between what you and grandparent are suggesting, but it's hard to strike, and there seems to be a lot more advice about either retiring by 40 or yoloing it than striking that balance.

You seem to be fighting your own personal demon here. This is not what the parent commenter meant. If you can't meet basic needs, there is no point trying to save a lot of money. The advice becomes relevant as your income begins to rise above cost of basic needs.

This definitely flies in the face of what the economist Milton Friedman[1] perceived as our societal values.

I personally hope this kind of thinking isn’t the trend.

[1] https://youtu.be/km9OCw3f5w4

In my experience, people with this argument are often trying to rationalize exceptionally unaffordable hobbies, like leasing a top end Audi or Tesla every 3 years.