What we don’t have is an expensive car - we bought a cheap new car that is less than half the median cost of a car in the US. We don’t have expensive housing - we downsized to a 1200 foot condo after our youngest graduated. We don’t have state taxes - we moved to state tax free Florida. We also don’t have any debt besides the condo that we put 30% down on. Our mortgage is much lower than the average mortgage.

In the grand scheme of things, our travel budget is less than 10% of our gross comp and I don’t work at BigTech (been there done that). Even half of that is offset by not having to pay state taxes which we did before we moved in 2022.