My MBA program was FILLED with people who loved what they did, but found that the material comforts (going without health insurance, no retirement plan, postponing necessary dental work) was not, in fact, worth the sacrifice. YMMV and of course, everyone defines “material comforts” in a slightly different way.
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It certainly depends on what one considers to be life’s necessities rather than luxuries. However, there’re some things that almost all of us consider them to be necessities, presumably including basic healthcare.
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@blossom, there are folks who really know what they want to do coming out of the box (university). Some may absolutely love things like AI and aren’t going to have a problem paying for their expenses.
Others may want to be performance artists or sculptors more than likely can’t afford to live that dream, or, as you point out, don’t want to make the material sacrifices. My wife is an incredibly talented and pretty successful painter – she shows in galleries and museums and is meaningfully cash flow positive but if she weren’t married to me, would probably have had to teach (and slow down her painting career) and might never have gotten to the point of being meaningfully cash flow positive. When we were going out, her art school friends couldn’t understand how she could go out with a non-artist. A couple of students or young artists asked her how she could have been so productive over a whole career and she said her advice was to marry some not in the arts.
But, my contention is that a lot of people who don’t have a singular passion coming out of the box but can discover a passion by playing to their strengths, keeping attuned to work that feels meaningful/fulfilling, and always building skills so that they become extremely good at addressing a class of problems. When they discover the passion, they actually will have work that makes excited about what they are going to do that day.
@ucbalumnus, my point was merely that you need income to exceed expenses but that you have two choice variables (at least): what kinds of jobs you look for (and become skilled for); and how you set your expense levels. My income is global and not at all dependent upon the local economy. So my Plan B if we entered a world in which my income really dropped dramatically without a likely snap-back was some combination of a) moving to a place where the cost of living was much lower than our current expensive Northeastern life; and b) moving to my wife’s native Canada where health insurance was covered.
I agree with @1NJParent that healthcare and car insurance and food should not be in the luxury category. One would be much better off living in some other countries if one were at the middle or lower end of the income distribution.
@MWolf, maybe he should have studied dumpster-diving engineering. Or not gone to a school that ingrained a sense of self-loathing. I think it is a great thing to recognize one’s privilege and use that to craft a lower income career to be able to give back. A number of our wealthy friends’ kids have chosen that path. Less useful to think dumpster-diving and living in an urban park is doing something useful.
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Maybe Dumpster-Diving Engineering should be a major?
PS. I agree with you, I was just being facetious.
Actually, some engineers are very good at squeezing out usefulness from what other people consider junk or useless, or otherwise figuring out how to live well on less money than is typical to maintain a similar standard of living. Indeed, Thomas Stanley (author of The Millionaire Next Door and related books) has mentioned that “Engineers typically are people who are frugal. They view products in terms of their performance characteristics and their durability. So they are big on Toyotas and Hondas and cars like that. And they do quite well. Plus, they [engineers] are analytical; they’re very good at investing, typically.”
As to why there is somewhat of a frugalness tendency among engineers? Perhaps it may be the fact that engineering commonly involves solving design problems within constraints, a major one of which is cost, so the daily work of engineering often involves squeezing the maximum value out of minimum cost.
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@ucbalumnus, we actually chose where we lived in part based upon TMND. We wanted a town with good public schools but found one where 2/3 of the town was extremely well-to-do (several biotech CEOs, MBB partners, finance types, successful entrepreneurs) and 1/3 had been the working class neighborhood. In the old days, it was the WASPs on one side of the tracks and the Irish and Italians on the other – the firemen, the Italians, the folks who worked in the lumber yard, etc. By the time we moved in, that neighborhood was folks who worked in public radio, engineers, folks who worked in non-profits, some teachers (though they would have had to buy in earlier), etc. We thought it was useful for our kids to grow up with normal folks rather than the kids of biotech CEOs and finance types AND that being surrounded by folks with lower incomes would reduce our spending levels, which it did. The other neighborhood, where we now live after 25 years in the first one, is full of gardeners’ trucks. We used to shovel our small driveway and now we spend a fair bit having someone plow our many car parking driveway. We probably drove less nice cars than we would have if we’d lived where we do now (where the median car is an Audi). We took nicer vacations, but probably spent a lot less than we would have in the other neighborhood (although interestingly, my friends from the town tend to be in the other neighborhood).
@ucbalumnus, do economists and operations researchers and statisticians, all of whom are familiar with constrained optimization, exhibit frugality as well?
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Don’t recall Stanley mentioning those professions, although it may not be surprising if there is a tendency toward frugality among people in those professions. Stanley did mention teachers as well as engineers as having frugal tendencies.
I don’t believe economists have a reputation for living frugally, or in fact- for extreme wealth creation other than the very few (i.e. elite or bust) who are at the top of their profession.
Frugality isn’t really a function of one’s profession. It’s more likely a function of how the money was made. As the saying goes, “easy come, easy go”.
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My D and SIL are both engineers and fit this description. They are driving 15 year old cars and are saving for replacements that will be paid for in cash. They bought a home and plan on it being paid off by the time they are 30. They have a budget for everything and are content because frankly they just don’t have to worry.
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Engineers make for the most challenging estate planning clients. Second only to brain surgeons.
They read every word, challenge every concept, and put you through your paces. They get their money’s worth and make sure they are getting exactly what they want - which is never cookie cutter. They are excruciatingly organized. They are among my favorites, though the most frustrating at times.
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My engineering H proudly wears the title Chief Staff Weenie for our household.
I do all the budgeting and monthly bills, but he handles everything else from our kids’ school projects to taxes or even passport renewals. None of the rest of us are thorough enough. 
Heck, he even wraps all presents since none of the rest of us can do it correctly. 
There’s no way we could ever get divorced. I’ve come to depend upon him since I’m solidly Type B. I still love every part of him. He’s learned to overlook my shortcomings.
The interesting part is he fails “dishwasher loading.” To him, if it fits, it should be able to get clean. To me, water needs to be able to get to it to clean it. He can put more in, but mine get clean.
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ok, have to ask, why are the brain surgeons difficult?
I respectfully decline to answer publicly in case any are lurking here. 
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I have 3 engineering degrees and have worked with engineers for many years. It’s been my observation that this a correlation between engineering a frugality, but that correlation is weak with many exceptions. I think a lot of it relates to people who have certain personality/ability/… traits both being more likely to both choose to go in to engineering and being more like to avoid wasting money unnecessarily . These include things like often having a risk aversion, practicality, thoughtfully solving problems for optimal utility, and lower dopamine receptor sensitivity. For similar reasons, I’d expect engineers as a whole to be far less likely to urban park and dumpster dive for food than other majors.
At the other extreme, I have known many persons who earn a good income, yet spend money as fast as they make it, often on extremely wasteful purchases. For example, I knew one woman who would throw out clothes after she wore them once and buy new replacements, rather than do laundry. She was a math major, but also had worked a good variety of other fields, including as a stripper. I expect this group is more likely be among the urban park + dumpster diving group than engineers. There are obviously a lot of other related contributing factors besides just frugality and major. I expect drug use can often be a key factor, which is another area where engineers are likely to be lower than others.
I also agree with INJParent that how the money was made plays a role. For a long time, the primary source of my income was a small internet company that I started, which resulted in highly variable income. It was not uncommon for my income to suddenly triple and be far higher than I ever earned as an engineer, then suddenly drop by 1/3 and return to old levels or below what I made as an engineer. The rapid jumps in income led to far more dramatic shifts in my spending and generally feeling of wealth than occurred while working in a standard engineering job with a more gradual #% salary increase per year, even when comparing to periods with approximately the same income level. Along the same lines, it’s not unusual to hear about celebrities or athletes who earned very large incomes at their peak, then are bankrupt or near bankrupt when the sudden drop in income occurs (without corresponding changes in lifestyle).
There are enough of people like her to be a “group”? 
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Not as extreme as that example, but a good portion of persons with higher incomes do spend money as quickly as they make it, in many cases living paycheck to paycheck.
At a company where I previously worked, the external group that handles the 401K had meetings from time to time about 401K and retirement planning. At one of those meetings, we were asked to enter various information in to a retirement calculator to assist with 401K and retirement planning. The calculator didn’t even support an option for wanting to spend less than 100% of post tax, post 401K income each year.
Interesting piece in the WSJ on the imbalance between PhD graduates and well paying career jobs requiring a PhD. Covid Makes Doctorates Harder to Get—and That’s Good - WSJ
Some excerpts:
" There are too many graduate programs in fields where there are no jobs. Take philosophy. During the 2018-19 hiring cycle, there were openings for about 180 junior jobs, roughly 70 postdocs, and about 60 spots open to those of any level of the profession, according to calculations by Gonzaga University’s Charles Lassiter. Meanwhile there were about 450 newly minted Ph.D.s in 2014 alone. The situation is similar in history, where the American Historical Association Career Center advertised 538 full-time positions for the 2018-19 school year. But 948 new history doctorates were awarded in 2018."
“People who earn doctorates in the social sciences and the humanities have few job options outside academia. They can look for work in government, journalism or nonprofits, but they could have done that without spending six or eight years earning an advanced degree.”
“The lost time, combined with the impossibly small number of jobs, creates a permanent class of students who are never able to move on to gainful employment… These students will end up serving as teaching assistants and in some cases teaching undergraduate courses as adjuncts for a fraction of what it costs to get a full professor to do the same work.”
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This all well-known long before COVID, but the long odds still didn’t stop some people going into these programs. A few of them will beat the odds. If a college cuts back on these programs, what would happen to these departments and the college overall?
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The selections cited from that article presupposes that all Phd’s wish to teach. ( I didn’t read the article only your quotes).
Many receive a Phd with no intention of teaching.
The assumption that someone who has a Phd in one subject and is unable to find meaningful work is flawed at best. There are many people/most people who find work in a field not related to what they studied. And Phd level work can be useful in research, writing and analysis. Among other things.
The idea that spending time doing a Phd with its underlying assumption here that someone is missing out on income, assumes that no one getting a Phd is also working.
I get the basis of saying there aren’t many teaching jobs in that field so don’t count on it. But they should have included many other metrics of what Phds have been doing.