Problem is that while there's a limit to how much you can spend on (I guess student, not mortgage) debt, groceries, and restaurants, the amount you can spend on

Problem is that while there's a limit to how much you can spend on (I guess student, not mortgage) debt, groceries, and restaurants, the amount you can spend on holidays, houses and philanthropy vary on a much larger scales. You can go on a holiday flight to another country for a few hundred dollars. Or you can rent a private jet to tour the world, staying at a 5-star hotel each place. That could easily be the difference between a 3 figure price and a 6 figure price. Houses, you can get them for a few annual average salaries, or a few hundred. Depends on where you want to live. And donations can vary as much as you like, a dollar or 100M. For software devs, I would think the real ladder is not whether you can buy the groceries you want. My guess is most of us in the West can buy the truffles every week if we really felt like it, and likewise with restaurants. What you perhaps want to consider is whether you have the resources to not work for a while, whether to educate yourself, travel, or do your own startup. This comes down to the opportunity cost of lost income being worthwhile to do those things.