Late last night, I stumbled upon a post on one of my favorite blogs to read, 20somethingfinance.com. The post basically outlined how there is two ways to live financially; to spend freely and live for the now, and to live frugally and save large portions of your income. While I enjoyed how the author, G.E Miller, showed how our financial choices can equate to large amounts of money that we could be saving, I didn’t like how it essentially preached giving up all non-necessities in favor of saving every dime you can. However, I can completely understand the point of the article and hope that others do as well.
The point is that by optimizing your savings rate, you can not only save large sums of money and become financially secure, but also realize an American dream, EARLY RETIREMENT! The point made by G.E Miller, that if you could sustain-ably save 60% of your income each year, over 12 times more than the average American, you could retire decades earlier than your peers was eye-opening! Of course, this would be obviously true since you are vastly exceeding the savings rate of your peers, but just stating that fact impressed me. It made me think about how great something like that would be…
Young Adults and Finance 
I don’t think it is all or none. You can have some luxuries, You just can’t buy so many luxuries that you have no money to save and invest or, worse yet but very common, spend money you don’t yet have and end up spending a lot of your paycheck on interest rather than luxuries or saving/investing. Once you start to save and invest, you can even increase your income to buy some luxuries starting as early as your late twenties or early thirties. For example, if you can put away and invest a couple of thousand dollars a year between 18 and 26, you will have about $20,000 with any luck by your late 20’s. You could start using about $500 a year from that account for something like a weekend away or a ski trip with friends. You would still be growing your wealth because you’d be making more than $500 a year over long periods of time.
The people “living for today” will end up spending half of their money over their working lifetimes on interest, then get to retirement and expect everyone else to pay for their medical care and even basic needs because they “lived for today.” That doesn’t seem like a responsible choice.
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I agree completely, I will respond further later on
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