Brian Earl Spilner said:
I literally specified focusing on experiences/travel, rather than "things".
I find that for most people that don't budget, a lot of money goes into categories that is not adding much to your life, whether it's overspending at restaurants, car payments, and that kind of thing.
Learning to budget and saving even a couple extra hundred bucks a month could translate to retiring several years earlier with not much change in your life.
I hope you are realizing you are painting with a very broad brush and making many assumptions about life decisions that are affected by thousands of variables.
Let's keep it simple, back to my first post that you responded to:
To Young People:1) If you want to maintain your standard of living in retirement, and be able to comfortably retire at or before full SS retirement age, then putting aside 15% of your household salary starting job 1 and onward, if invested even in just an S&P 500 fund, will achieve this goal2) If you want to retire early or achieve great wealth beyond the goal in item 1), then save/invest more than 15%Whatever you are saving there are people that save much more and look at what you are spending money on and think it's frivolous. They hate travel and what you refer to as "experiences" and can't understand why you spend money on that. A thousand variables, millions of individual viewpoints.
Whatever someone else may be recklessly spending on, at the expense of retirement funds, there are people spending more and vastly in debt.
Many people like working and being productive, they like the social aspect of being part of a team, they may never want to retire no matter how much money they have. There are billionaires in their 80's still wanting to work, it's what they love. Many people don't even work in an office - just an example of a very basic assumption you made about everyone.
Many people have a budget and put money to church, charitable donations, their own own health, their kid's health care, health care for parents, sending money to family members, hobbies like golf or cycling with course fees and expensive gear, season tickets to sports or ballet. It's not the binary restaurants/mindless consumerism or travel examples you give. It's endless.
One person may not understand why someone buys fancy cars and watches, another person doesn't understand why someone wants to retire at 50 while not enjoying the money they earn fully when they are young.
Those discussions are endless, and very very personal. There is really no point telling someone the car or consumer item they bought didn't enhance their life, or that someone will forget the details of their trip and photos have zero resell value, they won't agree. Certainly reasonable to just challenge people with a "is where you are spending money making you happy, rewarding to you, beneficial?".
IF YOU WANT A COMFORTABLE RETIREMENT SAVE 15%
OR MORE OF YOUR HOUSEHOLD INCOME OVER YOUR ENTIRE CAREER AND INVEST IT IN SOMETHING THAT HAS AN AVERAGE RETURN COMPARABLE TO THE S&P 500
OR BETTER
