[moate]

FWIW, the original point I was trying to make seems to have gotten lost which is that tech workers (a high earning cohort relative to the rest of the population) extolling financial advice that amounts to “make more money than you need to survive and save the excess” isn’t helpful to the vast majority of the population.

As someone in a less financially prosperous section of world than the US, do you think that advice is particularly helpful to your countrymen? Is the problem that people are wasteful and unwilling to make obvious choices, or that those opportunities aren’t as widely available as HN’s commenters might make them out to be?

[burntoutfire]

You really need an income considerably above average to be able to think about FIRE in Poland (whereas in US you could probably retire early on an average salary). In that regard, it's less applicable.

[moate]

I think this really gets to the crux of my original point: What is "average" (average for our industry, average for the country as a whole?) and retire "where" (I assure you, if you make an average US salary and want to retire early in the US, you have to have front-loaded a lot of financial sacrifices and been extremely lucky)