11. I Skipped a €150 Festival While Having Thousands in Savings, and Felt Like a Complete Idiot

One book killed my obsession with status symbols and changed how I see wealth, but I had to learn the hard way that building wealth without living is just a different kind of broke.

It was a few days after Christmas, a couple years ago, and most of my friends were at a liquid drum and bass festival somewhere in the Netherlands. It wasn’t the kind of event where people happily start singing to Bennie and the Jets with everyone around them, but rather the kind where they wear sunglasses in the dark for reasons that have nothing to do with the lighting. They were probably losing their minds to some heavy basslines and dreamy melodies.

I, on the other hand, was sitting at home. Feeling like the biggest fool on the face of the earth.

I’d been invited and the total cost would’ve been roughly €150, travel and food included. I also had over €30k in savings and investments, so the money shouldn’t have been a problem.

The problem was that my monthly expense budget said no. I’d already allocated all of my spending money due to the holiday season, and €150 simply didn’t fit anymore. So I decided to stay home, technically richer but practically miserable.

When my friends came back with stories about the energy, the bass shaking through the crowd, and the memories I hadn’t made, I was very disappointed with myself. I had literal thousands sitting in my accounts doing nothing urgent, and I’d still said no because of an arbitrary line I’d drawn for myself.

If you’ve ever declined something you could clearly afford because the budget said so, you know exactly how that feels. Building wealth to have the freedom to make memories with others, and then refusing to do so when it actually matters.

What made it worse was that I didn’t even see the irony yet. Because a few years before that festival, I’d been dealing with the complete opposite problem.

The World of Professors and Executives

During my studies I’d landed a student management position at my university, which meant I suddenly found myself spending the majority of my waking hours around professors and executives all earning well into the six figures. And that world looked a certain way up close.

Nice clothes without making a point of it, at least most of the time. Long lunches and dinners at good restaurants, all ordered without checking the prices. Accomplished careers that had produced nice houses, nice cars, and a general ease around money that I had never seen growing up. The occasional status game too, a dropped brand name here, a ‘casual’ mention of a famous or influential friend there, but mostly just a comfortable, unspoken confidence that came from never really having to think about what things cost.

I was drawn into it completely. Not in a calculating way, but by just being genuinely fascinated by a world I hadn’t had access to before. And I wasn’t alone. I watched other student board members gradually shift their demeanor and standards the longer they spent in that environment. The way you dress, the restaurants you suggest, and the things you consider normal started adjusting themselves almost without noticing.

I’d always prioritized saving enough to graduate debt-free, which probably kept me reasonably grounded, but even then I made the occasional unnecessarily reckless splurge along the way. Expensive clothing I didn’t need, dinners that were more about the looks than food, and new gadgets that felt justified but less so a couple days later. Nothing dramatic, but just the slow, ambient pressure of a world that made spending look both effortless and aspirational at the same time.

It was a compelling environment to be part of. It was also, I’d eventually learn, not quite what it appeared to be.

The Book That Changed Everything

After graduation my career progressed well, and the lifestyle I’d observed during those university years had always stayed somewhere in the back of my mind as a benchmark. Then I stumbled across The Millionaire Next Door, and my perspective about that world shifted almost overnight.

The author, Thomas Stanley, had spent years researching how America’s actual millionaires lived, and his findings were quietly devastating for anyone using visible success as a compass: the genuinely wealthy are often not the ones showing off. They’re driving reliable, unglamorous cars, living in normal houses, and building wealth out of sight. Meanwhile the people who looked wealthy, the ones with the effortless lunches and the carefully curated lifestyle, were often a couple of missed paychecks away from financial ruin.

Stanley called them UAWs, Under Accumulators of Wealth. High earners whose entire financial position was tied up in appearances, with almost no financial foundation to back it up.

And that’s when I thought back to the executive circuit. The nice clothes, the restaurants, the casual ease around money. I’d taken all of it at face value, assuming it reflected what was actually there. But Stanley’s research suggested something more uncomfortable: that even among those well-paid academics and executives, a significant number were likely living on or beyond the edge of what their income could sustain. That the lifestyle I’d found so compelling might, for some of them, have existed almost entirely on the surface. One unexpected turn away from quietly falling apart.

The realization landed immediately: wealth is what you keep and how you let it grow. It lives in your bank statements and the gap between what you earn and what you spend, visible to no one but yourself. So after finishing the book, I moved my money even more aggressively into savings and investments before I could spend it on anything else.

Suddenly I wasn’t chasing that world anymore. I was chasing something better: financial security and freedom that only I could see.

How Saving Smart Became Saving Stupid

In hindsight, I did go a little overboard with my shift toward aggressive wealth-building.

I’d come across Charlie Munger’s famous “The first €100,000 is a b*tch, but you gotta do it” quote early on, and it made me push extra hard toward a six-figure net worth. Extra motivation like that is normally perfectly fine, but I started pushing so hard that my budget became way too rigid. The line between saving and hoarding blurred, and somewhere along the way I forgot that the money was ultimately supposed to serve me, not the other way around.

And that’s how I ended up at home on a perfectly good festival night, thousands in savings while still telling myself that €150 was money that could better be compounding toward €100,000 instead.

It honestly still sounds almost rational when written out like that. At least, that is until you realize I’ve essentially started optimizing myself out of actually enjoying life.

The Dutch word for wealth is vermogen, which also translates as “ability”. I love that, because it captures the whole point about building wealth. Having wealth isn’t about having a lot of expensive things, it’s about having options. Like the simple ability to say yes when things matter to you, say no when they don’t, and to walk away from them if needed. 

I already had vermogen the night of the festival. More than enough of it actually, sitting in accounts I’d deliberately saved and invested so I could go to events like it without worrying. I’d just completely forgotten that was the point.

Being “The Festival Guy”

I did reach that six-figure milestone eventually, and Munger wasn’t wrong. Once a 1% portfolio fluctuation is worth €1,000 or more, the numbers start feeling genuinely meaningful. But looking back honestly, I actually could have gotten there a little later and still been perfectly fine. Missing moments with friends and family to accelerate the timeline by weeks or months wasn’t worth missing out on.

My friends and girlfriend still occasionally call me out when I’m being “the festival guy” again, too caught up in optimization and forgetting that the numbers aren’t the goal. 

I’m getting better at listening when they do, because the goal was never hoarding money for its own sake. It was building enough security to have genuine optionality and then actually using those options to enjoy life. Not doing one at the expense of the other, but both at the same time. In whatever balance actually makes sense.

Finding that balance has become easier now that the portfolio is quietly doing what it’s supposed to do in the background. Nevertheless, I still have to remind myself occasionally that all of it is pointless if I’m not trying to make the most of the life it’s supposed to be funding.

The festival regret didn’t last long, there will always be another party to attend, but the lesson stuck. Because sitting at home that night, technically €150 richer but actually much poorer in practice? 

That’s not being wealthy. That’s just a different kind of broke.