As I wrote just a couple weeks back in another thread:
My mid-20s days of living off $25k/year and still maxing out my IRA were hardly “living like a college freshman.” Now obviously some people are already living like one before setting anything aside. But for the rest of us, there’s almost always someone who makes less and saves more. I suspect many of us have very high personal discount rates, so the present value of any future gains quickly approaches zero, even with seemingly hefty returns.
Not that a junior MBA at GS is exactly rolling in it.