The entire unexamined premise behind all these types of articles is that money is an end unto itself. I'm by no means a profligate spender, I drive a 15 year old car with 150,000 miles on it. But at the same time during my 20 years in the military I certainly spent more than 3/16 of my salary on rent, especially when I lived in the Bay Area and Hawaii where I spent at times more than half my salary on housing. And I am not only happy my family and I got to live in decent housing near where I worked but I would have be absolutely kicking myself now had I wasted 2 hours a day in traffic when my kids were little or lived in a slum to save what is now just a few years later to me an utterly trivial amount of money. I see folks making themselves miserable with this arbitrary frugality and the question I always ask is why? They seem to have elevated it to some kind of moral superiority play and become completely untethered with the reality of why you want money in the first place! If you're spending an extra 500 hours a year commuting that you could be spending playing with your kids to save a few hundred bucks a month on your housing costs to meet an arbitrary savings goal, well you have to ask yourself who's the morally superior one there again? (unless your kids are assholes, of course
)