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Those very rich people who are extremely thrifty are not maximizing their money, because their cognition is better spent on their work than on a hundred dollars here or there. But I think what’s going on is psychological: those small moments of spendthriftiness increase the perceived valuation of money, thus increasing their motivation to work harder (even though they already have enough money for multiple lifetimes of satisfying any whim). They go into work after picking the cheapest gas station, then when they see the dollar signs on their monitor it is imbued with salient meaning that is otherwise lost through habit.
I think thrift is just associated with competence. Having long time-horizons and diligently looking for the best deals gets you a long way in life.
Though it does get ridiculous, optimizing electricity usage to reduce bills is silly for >10 M net worth.
The obsession with turning the lights off to save on electricity bills has always infuriated me ever since I looked up the cost of it. LED light bulbs use about $2 of electricity per year, and they are supposed to last over ten years. You can get them as cheap as $1 per bulb if you buy in bulk.
Forget millionaires, someone living on minimum wage can afford to ignore optimizing electricity for light bulbs. Easy rule of thumb: if you can afford the space you can afford to light it.
Another easy rule of thumb: most actual electricity usage is related to temperature. Heating / AC / Fridges / Freezers / Stoves / Ovens / Dryers.
This is a boomer thing. Yeah, electricity wasn't as expensive back then relative to wages, but lightbulbs pulled an order of magnitude more electricity and could also burn out (not that the cheap LED bulbs you can buy for under a dollar each can't, but they're relatively bulletproof by comparison).
They also have this weird obsession with refusing to use the dishwasher for its intended purpose. Like, just run two loads. Not rocket science.
Ironically, it's much safer for an incandescent lightbulb to just stay on 24/7 than it is for it to be switched on and off several times a day.
Maybe, but the reason certain boomers will never be fully on board with LEDs is that incandescent bulbs were absolutely dirty cheap even if you didn't buy cheap ones.
As opposed to certain Gen Y/Z/As, who notice that the dirt-cheap LED bulbs don't instantly turn on when you flick the switch (you have to buy the 10-dollar ones to get that) and have a hard time being dimmed past certain points (where they just turn off and you blow out your eyes trying to turn them on). Or those who remember what standard lightbulbs are like in terms of color reproduction, since LEDs still can't fake blackbody radiation properly (as that's inherent to incandescence).
Personally, I'm on board with LEDs insofar as you can get lots and lots of light out of them with existing fixtures and they also don't heat up the room; if my fixtures are going to say "100W max" on them, then my LED bulbs are going to be 100W no matter how blatantly absurd that is.
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