Like many of you, I’m frugal to a fault. For 13 years after college, I saved 50% – 70% of my income partially due to humble living conditions. From 28-37 I drove a $8,000 car that depreciated to $3,000 even after my income grew by 3X. And even after I had finally escaped the corporate world in 2012, I still couldn’t stop saving at least 50% of my income.

By the third year of early retirement, however, I started seriously questioning the point of working and saving so much if the money was never going to be spent. Saving for retirement in retirement is illogical. I started getting angry at being unable to kick my frugality addiction to the curb. People with much less were spending so much more and having a great time doing so. Why couldn’t I be more carefree?

Despite my best efforts to spend more like everyone who posts about their fabulous lives on Facebook, touching principal still felt like a crime. Instead of relaxing as a good retiree should do, here’s what I did instead to maintain a 50%+ savings ratio:

* Worked on ways to generate $200,000 a year in passive income

* Took on part-time consulting gigs with three fintech companies over three years

* Continued publishing 3X a week on Financial Samurai

* Developed new online business partnerships

* Downsized to a smaller house to free up cash flow

* Bought a Honda Fit instead of a Jeep Grand Cherokee Limited

* Invested 90% of every dollar saved

Then one day, I burned out. I dropped all my consulting gigs, wrote the biggest e-mail autoresponder known to man saying I was too busy, and finally found some breathing room to spend a little more than normal.

Instead of limiting myself to $100 shoes, I ventured out and bought a $240 pair of shoes (on sale for 50% off of course). The guilty feeling only lasted for an hour while the pair of Tod’s loafers is still my favorite shoe three years later.

Instead of taking an Uber Pool to save $6 to go downtown, I began ordering my own Uber. I still feel guilty for some reason, but the feeling has lessened because I remind myself that time is way more valuable than money.

Instead of staying at a 3-star hotel in Angkor Wat, Cambodia, we decided to stay at a 5-star hotel for $100 more a night. We knew we were never coming back, so we also hired a private van with much needed AC to be our driver for $50 a day. It was so worth it.

Then I realized something. Keeping spending constant after a certain age eventually leads to lifestyle deflation because everything is relative. If everybody still watched cathode ray tube TVs, you’d be happy with your tube TV. But you’re no longer as happy when everybody else is watching a paper thin 4K TV. If you don’t at least increase your spending at the rate of inflation, your quality of life will begin to deteriorate because you can’t help but notice progress all around.

For those of you who can’t seem to lift your spending despite an increase in your income and net worth, let me share with you five ways for overcoming frugality so you can maximize your lifestyle. Dying with way too much is poor consumption planning. 

“When I was trying to buy my first home, I wasn’t buying smashed avocado for $19 and four coffees at $4 each,” Tim Gurner, an Australian property mogul told 60 Minutes.

“We’re at a point now where the expectations of younger people are very, very high,” Gruner said. “They want to eat out every day, they want to travel to Europe every year. The people that own homes today worked very, very hard for it, saved every dollar, did everything they could to get up the property investment ladder.”

Tim’s words have ignited a backlash from millennials who are offended someone would attack their eating desires. Eating expensive food is a sacred right! The nerve of this guy. Next thing you know, he’s going to dissuade people from buying $300 designer jeans when they already have a credit card balance.

As fate would have it, I just had a $10 bowl of guacamole the other day at Tacoliscious in the Marina district, after spending time doing some ceiling patch work on my rental house. All around me sat a bunch of young and fabulous looking folks who enjoyed the 78 degree San Francisco sunshine. Oh, how I wish I didn’t have a house to do work on. I could have gone straight to brunch!

Bottom line: If you’re a millennial who wants to spend $25 on the finest breakfast consisting of avocados, bacon and crumbled feta cheese, go for it! You don’t need to save for a house because you’re either living with your parents or your parents will eventually buy you one when they can’t stand you any longer. And if they don’t buy you anything, they’ll at least leave you their house when they die. 

About once every couple of years, a Financial Samurai post goes a little nuts on the internet. Recently, Twitter got a hold of “Scraping By On $500,000 A Year: Why High Income Earners Can’t Escape The Rat Race” and consumed it like a rabid dog shaking a rag doll.

I first started noticing Twitter activity Friday morning, March 24. Overnight, it seemed, about 500 new tweets of the post had appeared. By Monday, March 27, the tweet count had risen to a whopping 40,000+! What the heck was going on?!

Apparently, the internet found the $500,000 a year couple’s budget so absurd it started poking fun at the post. Some say my chart has even reached meme status. Well pinch my nuts! I get to check off another bucket list item before I croak.

The budget I originally posted is actually a real life couple’s budget shared with me to share with you. Their budget has been corroborated by hundreds of other couples and individuals making similar incomes while living in an expensive city like NYC, SF, London, Paris, LA, and Hong Kong. Financial Samurai already gets over 1 million organic pageviews a month, so it’s easy to gather feedback. Just check the comments on the post to see for yourself.

Here are some points I wanted to make from the post:

1) It’s not what you make, it’s what you keep. Without discipline, it’s easy to spend everything you earn. Lifestyle inflation is the biggest culprit for why folks never feel like they have enough. It’s not just the cars and houses that people compete on, it’s also the schools parents want their children to attend. Hopefully, the post encourages everyone to take a hard look at their own finances or if they haven’t already done so, create and monitor their own budget. “If you can’t manage it, you can’t improve it.” – Peter Drucker.

2) High income comes with high costs. Yes, it’d be nice to earn big bucks living in the heartland of America, where I’m bullish, but in the heartland, those high income jobs are harder to come by. If one shouldn’t spend any more than 3X – 5X their gross income on a home, how much does one have to make in order to afford the $1.2M median home price in SF or NYC?  Answer: $240,000 – $400,000 AFTER coming up with a $240,000 downpayment. Unfortunately federal income taxes adjust based on income amounts and not on the costs for living.

3) Think about geo-arbitrage. Technology and the internet are allowing people to untether themselves from an office. Find companies that allow you to work remotely in a lower cost area. You might not get to relocate to Bali, Indonesia, but there are plenty of fantastic cities that are much cheaper than NYC, SF, LA, Boston, and Washington DC. I’ve interviewed several CEOs in SF and they all say that given SF’s tight labor market and high cost of living, they are hiring more remote workers. Better yet, have your own internet-based business. Take advantage of the best technological shift in history.

4) Save and invest often over the long run. There’s great value in maxing out your 401k and building home equity over time, even if you have very little left over. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, only about 55% of the American workforce has access to a 401(k) and only about 38% of the total workforce participate. Doing some low level math, that means roughly 31% of those who have access to a 401(k) are not participating. I strongly believe that over time, home equity is one of the major reasons for a widening wealth gap between home owners and renters. Find a place you know you’ll be for the next 10 years and try and get neutral real estate by owning your own place. Of course, be responsible with your purchase.

5) Ask what it’s all for at the end of the day. I know plenty of high earning people who are not happy because they are stressed at work and can never spend as much time with the people they love. Not only that, they know the work they’re doing isn’t really helping society so they feel they’re selling their souls. They can’t leave due to an unhealthy desire for prestige, money, and power. Realize there’s a wonderful life beyond just making lots of money. Seek your happiness before you look back on life full of regret.

I realize it’s only human to judge others, even if we’ve never walked in their shoes. However, simply judging others does nothing to improve our own situations. Therefore, let’s do our best to approach things with open minds. With open minds, progress can be made.

Financial Samurai has always been about finding solutions to problems. I’d like to provide an optimized budget for this $500,000 couple. I’ll conclude by highlighting some interesting observations I’ve made about the public’s reaction to my original post as well.