I am one of those "children of immigrants [sic] and can still feel the aftershocks of their austere upbringing". I have shifted my mindset a bit away from the extremes described in the article, and definitely can identify a bit with "that’s good; that’s noble" thought.
The thought and the behavior, for me, isn't to be noble for noble's sake. The article felt a bit short for me as often financial woes are not mostly in our heads. Our individual bank accounts might show that we as individuals are ahead but the financial woes are still quite real with many of our parents. (Western) Society, and this article, disconnects the financial situation of the financially successful immigrant children with that of their aging and often financially modest parents.
Spending and saving is wrapped in the guilt and the dreams of our the upbringing. I do go out, but I know my parent's are still cooking the proverbially ramen at home because they are behind on retirement. It is having room mates but still having rent in an average apartment costing more than my parents mortgage. It's having more money than your parents and siblings combined, while seeing that your parents worked twice as hard being limited by their lack of network and English skills. All while home ownership is getting harder so for our generation. Secure our own future feels like a zero sum game with sharing and give financially to our parents, and, as importantly, giving the luxuries society says we can afford to ourselves.
> David Fox has plenty of savings. He earns hundreds of thousands of dollars each year. Recently, he allocated $60,000 to buying a new car—but when he arrived at the dealership, he could bring himself to spend only $30,000 on a used model.
David Fox may be making the right decision here.
The question for me is whether I have enough saving to sustain a decent lifestyle in an adverse, yet possible, scenario (getting laid off, declining stock market, inflation, reaching an old age, high medical expense...). And incidentally, will the $60K car make me that much happier than the used one for half the price?
Even with a high salary, it may not be a very good decision to buy the expensive car.
And the very next sentence is: "Despite making a conservative choice, he had panic attacks for a week afterward."
So whatever the "good decision" may be, this is clearly not healthy. This is really what the article is about, not whether a $30k or $60k car is better.
I guess it depends on whether he is having panic attacks or "panic attacks". Sometimes people exaggerate and say "I am literally having a panic attack" when they're mildly anxious. Maybe it's just run of the mill buyer's remorse. I know I would absolutely have buyer's remorse if I ever managed to spend $30K on a car, let alone $60K. I don't think that, in and of itself, makes me unhealthy.
This sounds like healthy psychology, incorrectly medicalized to me.. Who didn't question their big decisions like a major transportation decision before 1940?
I think there were a few exceptional places/people that lacked both normal scarcity and social norm pressure, but even the wealthiest people worried like these things mattered in most towns.
You can't just erase the entire cultural context of people and expect them to have no worries because there's a few more years to various peaks. They are experiencing the stresses of developing decision skills for a life that probably spans after peak petroleum, etc.
Panic attacks when there is nothing to panic about are absolutely not healthy or normal. Most people agonize over financial decisions such as this without panic attacks.
This sounds like anti-anxiety over correction to me.
We don't know how much future planning anxiety is warranted without knowing the future. We certainly know that past societies have a strong survivor bias for people who worried about the most significant life decisions they had.
A very flexible person and a turnip may both be well tuned to the economy at the moment but a less flexible person should be anxious as much for the behavioral effects of making decisions lightly on making future decisions in different circumstances.
We don't know if it was a panic attack though. The journalist could just be describing pessimism.
> “I have this feeling that the bottom is gonna fall out,” Fox told me.
Take this quote for example. If we take even a mildly evidence based approach, this is rational. Sometimes the bottom does just fall out of the economy. It happens around once a decade. It is entirely healthy to consider spending large amounts of money as potentially risky and consider the possible consequences.
Keep in mind, half of the hundreds of thousands of dollars goes to taxes: income, property, sales etc. It can actually be the case that you can’t really afford a $60k car even if you make that much money.
I make about 180k live alone in a mid sized rust belt town: until 2 years ago I lived like a king - the average income here is about 31,000. It’s still 31,000 now but I am hardly making enough anymore to save anything. How is anyone else ? Why do they keep making things more expensive ? Mg tax return flatly told me I was in the top 1.5% of wage earners. It I’m struggling , how are the other 98% doing ? How is this sustainable ?
Sorry, but this is ridiculous. $60,000 divided by five years (yeah, it will last much longer than that) is $12,000. If you're making hundreds of thousands a year and can't afford $12,000 for a car, taxes are not the problem.
Parent may have been talking about affording the car, not the car payment. It's a classic car sales tactic to get people to focus on the payment instead of the overall price.
I absolutely agree with this sentiment, directionally, but the “new car premium” in the US is really quite small - it takes way more than two years for cars to half in price, more like five years, and sixty thousand miles.
For example, a brand new Toyota sienna XLE is a little over fifty grand. Carvana have several 21-22 siennas XLE, 40-60k miles, most over forty grand. I do not understand this.
Agreed. This article (the part that wasn't paywalled) reads to me as representative of the mindset that leads to a country in $35T of debt with no fucks given.
The OP spelled out a lot of my own behaviours when it comes to spending money, but I didn't grow up poor. My parents did though. I definitely feel that my attitudes around spending come from them.
Ironically, they're often keen to tell me to spend my own money and enjoy my life, but aren't good at taking their own advice. Easier to spot flaws in others than in yourself I suppose.
I don’t even think it’s that. Being poor growing up is something you take into adulthood and your decisions are not about not spending the money. You simply don’t even consider it.
I seriously can't find anything that is worth buying that actually makes me happier. Travel is great, and probably where the bulk of my money goes. But it's temporary, and the expense is limited by my vacation time and doesn't scale that much.
So I save.. and eventually I will be able to buy time. Maybe with more time I can figure out something to make me happier.
I'm in the same boat, down to preferring travel/experiences over things.
But last year, I bought a "nice" car. Not a Lambo, nothing that makes people turn their heads on the street, but 3-4x more than I'd ever spent on a car before. I'm not a car guy, but I remain astonished by how much I continue to enjoy driving it and how much the little luxury fripperies like a really quiet ride, driver seat automatically adjusting to my preferred position, heated steering wheel, adaptive cruise control with lane following etc add to the experience. Maybe I've been underestimating the value of well-made things after all.
> I continue to enjoy driving it and how much the little luxury fripperies like a really quiet ride, driver seat automatically adjusting to my preferred position, heated steering wheel, adaptive cruise control with lane following etc add to the experience.
I might be in the minority but I dread having to replace my car because I specifically don't want little "luxuries" found in new cars these days. I don't want a car that forces me to use touch screens, or will brake or accelerate on its own, or jerk the wheel under my hands, or ignore my input if it doesn't like what it thinks I'm doing, etc.
I can't complain about quiet ride, and a heated steering wheel might be nice in the winters (for what's left of them anyway), but generally I don't want anything more advanced than a backup camera and warning indicators when someone is in my blind spot or there is rear cross traffic. I suspect it'll be near impossible to find new cars that don't come with anti-features and the push to end sales of gas-powered vehicles is only going to make it harder.
I felt the same. Then I decided to spend some of my money hosting others at my home and sharing nice things with them -- things that they themselves may not be able to afford or care to spend personal money on. For example, taste testing an expensive bottle of whiskey, Wagyu beef, etc.
Sad to hear this. Don’t you have any hobbies or interests? Perhaps being a little bit materialistic every now and then doesn’t hurt much. i.e. Get a better PC to play games, buy a better camera/lens to go out and take photos, get a bike to go for rides, you get the idea…
I know that things don’t make us happy, but the usage of them, the memories we create and the time we spent using them, many times makes us happy ;-)
I relate to the persona above you. I have plenty of hobbies, and almost all of them are free or cheap. I don't need a better laptop than what I have, I don't need an expensive bike to enjoy riding around, I don't need better running shoes -- or any shoes -- to go for a nice long run. The high of having the shiny new thing wears off.
Recently I got rid of my bed, entirely. I had an expensive latex mattress, but I realized I enjoy sleeping right on the floor. It's firmer, cooler, and easier to maintain. It's just one of the many cases where I realized that less was more.
Same here. My hobbies include learning languages, which thanks to the internet can be done for free. Same for reading research papers, programming stuff, etc. I walk instead of taking public transportation because I like it, it's free and good for health. I eat at home most of the time and depending on season I prefer meeting friends outside instead of going to a bat. The only thing I'm finding spending a bit too much on is cards (Magic, Pokémon), but it's still less than 100€/month on average.
On thing I noticed is that acquiring an object call for more objects. Let's say buying a new phone. It then need a case. The charger norm changed so an adaptator is need. We are already at 3 new objects instead of one, and all of that need to be stored somewhere (with may require a new box). I find myself more often than not taking pleasure into not buying things.
Depending on your hobbies that will require enjoying buying new things, which is not a given.
For instance if you're into photography, better gear can give more pleasant results. But if you already have a decently good setup, buying something better will require extensive research, comparison, probably a trip or two to a store to see the gear in person, potentially rent it for a few days to see how it handles etc.
If you enjoy the whole process you'll be happy to buy new gear, but if you only cared about actually taking photos, the time you spent to get incrementally better gear might not pay off in actual enjoyment of the hobby.
Check, check, check. Literally tried all of those things. I'm trying man. Not much is clicking. I'll keep trying things though.
The best purchase I have made in the past few years was a subscription to my rock climbing gym. But I can only go climbing 2-3 times a week since my body needs to recover.
My hobbies are cheap. $5 a month for my share of a Spotify family sub and a couple grand a year for the gym and ski pass. New bike and computer every few years so we’ll call that 1k a year. End of the day my hobbies cost 2% of my income.
I'd rather make less money if it means more time off, as I can't really enjoy my money if I haven't time to go places worthy of spending it at. The kink in that plan is having a family that expects a certain lifestyle, while still saving away for an early retirement (that could maybe never arrive?), necessitating a higher paying job, but without as much vacation. Europe does it right, with 20 days PTO being the minimum.
I suppose I have the exact opposite problem: I'll only spend money if I'm getting a thing that I believe I have a chance to resell later and re-capture at least a little of the value--even if it's just pennies on the dollar. And, I avoid buying things new because most things' resale value is gone the moment you walk out of the store. Sometimes I think everything I own I got on Craigslist.
I have a terribly difficult time allowing myself to spend on travel, shows, experiences and so on, because these things leave you with nothing but fleeting memories, and you can't re-sell those later on eBay when you're tired of them. I don't really feel the inherent value of the experience.
I used to identify with this, but made a hard switch the opposite way. When I look back on the last 10 years, the things I value are memories with friends. The idea of saving a few bucks to not going on a trip for a "fleeting memory" is crazy to me. That's all we have at the end of the day. I feel so much richer having experiences with friends and family, and the gear and stuff I buy gives me zero satisfaction compared to my honeymoon or another trip, or a nice dinner I hosted with friends.
I replied this to the parent comment as well, but I highly recommend journaling about your "fleeting memories". It will help you remember and enjoy your memories for longer.
> So I save.. and eventually I will be able to buy time.
I'm in the same boat, however lately I've been realizing that the time you can buy at 40 or 50 is not the same quality of the time you can have at 20 or 30.
I'm still saving anyway (again, same boat) but as soon as I get some wiggle room (money-wise) I'm going to restructure/rebalance my priorities around that concept.
Nothing makes you put time in the right frame except for realizing all the time you wasted.
- will buy an inexpensive electronics with all kinds of spyware/crap/ads/interruptions even though they could afford 10% more for stuff that won't behave that way
- driving used cars guzzling gas even though a newer efficient car or ev would pay for itself in fuel (or safety)
I think people are in this inverse boil-the-frog situation where things are getting more comfortable, but they don't notice.
Never assume the good times will last. Save. Live reasonably. If you get lucky and the good times do last, reap the benefits and retire early and comfortably.
This hits close to home. Despite our household income approaching 200k I was still driving a 17 year old car until the repairs exceeded the scrap cost. I got lucky and snagged a starter home just before rates shot up and continue to live well below my means. I hate spending money and can only make bigger purchases after weeks of consideration and only pull the trigger on an impulse. My SO still sweats over $50 purchases.
we still do this. My spouse and I drive a ten year old beat up Prius and I love it. it's a point of pride that I don't need a fancier car, and the utility and efficiency actually feel good (sadly EVs aren't an option for us).
This is pretty common for people who have struggled in the past and people who are uncertain about the future. There's a lot of uncertainty about the long term stability and sustainability of things right now.
It's why doomsday preppers are a growing market and a rising industry (https://www.newsweek.com/doomsday-prepping-246-billion-indus...), it's why rich people are building bunkers and securing citizenship in multiple countries so that they can jump ship if the one they're in starts sinking.
Once people's anxieties are alleviated by confidence in their security there should be fewer people with lots of money worried about spending it.
Why spend money just for the sake of it? Rich people don’t stay rich by spending their own money. I’ve always had a starving student mentality as wasting money on junk is just that. For any big purchase of more than three figures, wait a month. Do you really need it?
A "tightwad" here would be called a "Prodigious Accumulator of Wealth" in the book, a fancy name for a person who continually spends much less than their income.
Most of the rich didn't get there by spending money.
Being raised by a single mom, who tried to stay ahead of eviction, constantly had the power shut off, and often had bare shelves in the pantry, can 100% do a number on your psyche. You never feel far away from ending up back in that situation, short of being wildly successful financially.
Something interesting in the mix is that our emotions aren't calibrated to capitalism - we're turned to a sort of hunter-gatherer existence with maybe some farming. At a gut level most humans don't understand how to contextualise an offer of 2% compounding return on their capital.
I'd imagine evolution is (metaphorically) carefully monitoring the situation and working out what it needs to do to take advantage of these new options. It isn't actually crazy to expect people to develop twitchy panicked feelings at the though of spending money. The opportunity cost of being a spendthrift is very high, a lot of people came through the greatest wealth expansion in human history and had an opportunity to buy in to it and then spent the money on idle luxuries. Understandable but probably not optimal choices.
My grandpa lived through the depression. As a kid, I noticed he would meticulously clean every scrap of food off his plate. My mom explained what they'd lived through and how he couldn't bring himself to waste anything.
> Irrational stinginess is a strange problem to have, akin to complaining about being too beautiful.
Just to add another anecdotal data point: I kinda have that problem, most likely out of growing up through family financial difficulties.
I did amass a significant amount of money out of caution, should anything bad happen. I had way more money than I was indebted for, and a nice enough paycheck.
And... Something bad happened. I won't go into the details (I don't really want to share) but my house was on the line and I had to spend pretty much all of my savings to save the house and many years of work and sacrifices.
Now I'm in debt again, but thankfully only by less than ten thousand euros over the balance in my bank account, so it's pretty reasonable and manageable.
Still, I feel vulnerable and it's not at all a nice position to be in.
So yeah, "irrational stinginess" isn't that bad after all. Somebody else in my position would have either lost the house or gone back into living paycheck to paycheck (or both).
So just because some articles paint it as a not-optimal condition, don't assume it's automatically "bad".
Imagine trying to shame someone by calling them a tightwad because they spent 30k on a car, instead of 60.
And trying to paint living below your means in a negative light.
Here's the problem in buying "luxury" and enjoying life in 2024 - many things are just marketed as luxury, and impose a hefty markup for the seller. They aren't actually that much higher quality than something 1/3 or 1/4 the price.
These kinds of goods embody the worst parts of capitalism - withholding surplus value from the person producing the good in the maximum amount possible and also creating an item that isn't needed, this creating waste and putting pressure on already scarce resources.
Maybe these "tightwads" just don't care about this kind of negative signaling? Of course such a thought doesn't even occur to the author. Instead it's labeling and trying to somehow tie it to immigration.
Note: this doesn't mean complete aversion to spending money. I have no problem with people or myself spending thousands of dollars on their tools of the trade for a hobby they enjoy like woodworking/photography/sports, whatever.
Except that's not at all what the article is talking about:
> But the tightwads I spoke with have very real agita—panic, guilt, stress—over their financial situation, even though there’s no real reason for them to worry. They drag around a phantom limb of poverty, burdened with the sneaking sense that something isn’t right, no matter what their bank account says.
It's the reason the article was written by a marketing professor, it's motivated by exploring why people are resistent to marketing and the end goal would be to change the thinking about people who save rather than spend.
You can see yourself the language used to describe saving not spending as that used to describe abnormal behaviour driven by unreasonable delusions.
My apologies, I should have said written by Olga Khazan, drawing extensively upon the works of marketing professor Scott Rick and marketing professor Abigail Sussman.
This seems more an error of attribution than flat out wrong, but sure, take a performative extreme by all means.
So it's not even a mistake or confusion, and you knowing and willingly lied through your teeth. That you attempt to shamelessly defend your outright brazen lie only makes it worse. Absolutely indefensible and morally decrepit. Among the worst I've seen on HN.
I am immune to marketing, and I'm not letting the marketing guys figure out my brain so they can increase their stranglehold over society! I'll take my secrets to the cremation oven!
Yet a financial problem my country has is generational wealth transfer, with wealthy kids inheriting large amounts from wealthy parents who did not spend enough.
I fail to understand why this is a problem. One of the reasons I save money is so that my children will have financial security lasting beyond my lifetime.
It is making income disparity worse and causing problems to the larger economy, such as contributing to ballooning housing prices. Wealth accumulates with the retired and elderly, with children generally inheriting in middle age, also becoming rich old people.
For children, it would generally better if you could give them money while you are still alive and while they are at a stage of life they will benefit. Yet over here we tend to have tax and financial laws that discourage that. Or for the more radical socialist mindset, if financial security of your children is what you are after it may be better to massively tax wealth and fund proper social security.
I would be okay with this, but mostly because I had no inheritance. I'm one of those being forced to help my parents with their terrible choices, as well as my partner support her family (4 other siblings with no support structure). It's like generational debt instead for us.
I get the emotions behind wanting to leave inheritances, but we'd be better off as a society long term if we had better safety nets and systems instead.
I don’t get any enjoyment from spending on frivolous things. I also don’t buy replacement stuff just because. E.g. heating system is ancient and gas dryer is 25 years young. Why spend money?
This is kind of ridiculous. Like there is something wrong with living within your means and being financially responsible. Guess it's bad for business. First time I'm glad for a walled off article on here. Saved me some time.
This is about people having panic attacks after spending money... Maybe you do need to at least actually skim the article to avoid making stupid comment such as this that doesn't connect with the article at all.
The thought and the behavior, for me, isn't to be noble for noble's sake. The article felt a bit short for me as often financial woes are not mostly in our heads. Our individual bank accounts might show that we as individuals are ahead but the financial woes are still quite real with many of our parents. (Western) Society, and this article, disconnects the financial situation of the financially successful immigrant children with that of their aging and often financially modest parents.
Spending and saving is wrapped in the guilt and the dreams of our the upbringing. I do go out, but I know my parent's are still cooking the proverbially ramen at home because they are behind on retirement. It is having room mates but still having rent in an average apartment costing more than my parents mortgage. It's having more money than your parents and siblings combined, while seeing that your parents worked twice as hard being limited by their lack of network and English skills. All while home ownership is getting harder so for our generation. Secure our own future feels like a zero sum game with sharing and give financially to our parents, and, as importantly, giving the luxuries society says we can afford to ourselves.