> you can't take it with you (at least in most religions) so spend it.
I don't understand this PoV at all.
I can't take it with me, sure, but I'm happy anyway if I leave it behind to my kids.
This PoV that you need to spend, spend, spend to get the most value for your money is very primitive - my kids will do better if I die before touching my nest egg, and if I don't at least I'll have a longer runway to live without working.
There is no downside here, other than the artificial one that dictates you spend it all and leave nothing behind.
> I can't take it with me, sure, but I'm happy anyway if I leave it behind to my kids.
You would be happiest if you could take it with you. Since you can't, you'll leave it to your kids, because it would even worse leaving it to somebody else.
Why are you working to earn that money - take unpaid time off to spend with the kids.
i get what you are saying, but leaving money to the kids isn't the answer. (Other than collage money)
The people who are against saving are also the people who want you to spend all your money on their product. It’s just the capitalist wanting more meat for the grinder.
Money is just an abstract, and the less it circulates, the less stuff gets done. For no purpose but insecurity.
The ideal would be that everybody operates without savings and without debt. Either of those tools only being used exceptionally, when the benefits are enormous.
This sort of high time-preference rabid consumptionist hucksterism is a symptom of the opposite of capitalism. A capitalist must favor saving because an economy grows through capital formation, which happens only following thrift and savings.
The point is just not to impoverish yourself in order to save more than you need. You don't have to spend, spend, spend, but don't eat rice and beans every night just so you can have more money than you'd ever need in retirement.
This is one of those things where generalized advice often makes little sense because circumstances are so different. If you make $500,000/year, you can save half of your take-home pay and still live very well, and have a ton of money when you retire. If you make $50,000/year, you might struggle to save at all if you're supporting a family, and there's going to be a lot of tension between saving for retirement and occasionally having some nice things before retirement. Living in poverty to save for retirement and then dying before you can enjoy any of it would be a sad outcome here. But if you're more towards the upper end of this spectrum, those cautionary tales sound a lot like "spend spend spend."