Splurging and spending money can be a terrible idea in a case like ours. Our food expenses only add up to 400-500 a month. Our electricity and phone+Internet bill add 100 to this. We still save 10% of our income, but as a result we have nothing left to treat ourselves.
If we had to pay a rent, we’d be deep in debt. Fortunately, we are allowed to live at my parents’ (provided we pay for electricity, our phone/Internet line and food), which is free, but not good for your self-esteem.

My advice would be yes, treat yourself. But do it in a smart way.
You can’t go out to have burgers, but you can buy everything to make your own burger and fries at home, and watch a movie on your computer (we don’t have TV). That reduces the cost to about a quarter, and you get exactly what you want in your burger.
Treat yourself to a game or book you really like, but do it with friends: you each buy a game/book, and you pas it over when you’re done with it. It reduces the price by the number of friends.
Alternatively, if you have richer friends, you can just borrow some of their stuff and they usually don’t mind. But it feels better when you can actually buy your own.

Sometimes, we just live off ramen for a week or so, and then we allow ourselves a big treat. (Big relatively. We only use the money saved).
We also have a cat, and I guess that would count as treating ourselves to one.

You can’t live happily if you don’t treat yourself to things you like. But if you are poor, you can often treat yourself cheaply. You can get many things second hand or from libraries. You can borrow others from friends, coworkers, in exchange for a service or from lending your own stuff.

Trades and exchanges work well. “I teach you how to use that program, and you treat me out for lunch”.
Sometimes you can trade things you get for free. A friend of mine works at a museum. She gets free entrances every months that she can use or share with friends. Often, she finds deals on the internet, exchanging the tickets for something she likes but can’t afford on her budget (she earns even less than we do).

So, definitely treat yourself, from time to time. But do it in a controlled way. Don’t spend more than you can afford. But if you exceeded your previsions in saving more/spending less, don’t feel like you have to keep or reinvest it all. You can use it to treat yourself: you didn’t even count on it to begin with, after all.

So it’s possible to be poor and choose to be that way ( I think choice is pretty broad, there are a lot of ways to increase income, but most people are complacent)and thus choosing to “need” to be frugal.

Personally I feel OK saying this because I consider myself one of these. I have a very low income compared to my intelligence and capabilities. I pretty much HAVE to be frugal.. But you know, if I really wanted to, I could be doing a lot better. No one forces me to do what I do. I could relocate, send out resumes, go back to school, get a 2nd job, whatever it takes. But I pretty much choose not to. Maybe I’m lazy or just unmotivated, but those are still choices. No one “owes” me a high paying job with a pension and full medical benefits. I don’t really like driving a cheap car with 200,000 miles (but I can always just say I’m frugal). Some things are just excuses. But deep down I would rather be a relatively frugal high-earner ( have a lot of money and buy quality goods that are well-made and durable, max-out investments, but not waste money on “stupid crap”).

The main point I was trying to make ties into the comment about how being thrifty can often be an issue of self-esteem, and is based on personal experience.

As my income has increased over the years I, like many others in that situation, also increased my spending. I became less poor, but because I had no savings, I certainly felt poor; even though the things I bought made me feel pretty good (for a little while, anyway). Though I tried to save money, I just couldn’t make it stick because I was trying to change my behavior without first changing my attitudes.

I had to do a philosophical 180 — I began to realize that being frugal, saving money, and being careful with my resources felt good. Reducing my spending, rather than being an awful chore, became something that had a positive impact on my emotional well-being.

Being frugal when you don’t have to be *should* boost one’s self-esteem. I think it’s a perfectly laudable thing to feel, especially since it means that you’re more likely to stick with it over the long term.

In the end, I was attempting to make a plea for moderation, because at one time in my life, any advice to occasionally splurge would have provided a rationalization for me to blow a paycheck or go into debt. Drawing a distinction between forced and voluntary frugality (states between which I have oscillated in my own life) was a rather hackneyed attempt to create a 1950′s horror movie-style “it-may-happen-to-yooooou!” vibe. The next time I am able to splurge, I promise to buy a book on writing, so that my posts will actually be lucid in future.

I have to agree with what others have said, having a little splurge money, even if it is only a dollar, is very important to the feeling side of being rich. Currently we don’t have a lot of room to have “play” money, but we make sure that we do at least one thing in the month that is just for fun. $30 may not seem like enough to have fun with, but it gets us a nice dinner out once a month. It’s important to treat yourself nicely at all income levels (just don’t get in debt for it).

I don’t think this is entirely true. While it’s very unrealistic for most, there are ways to live almost completely outside the market whereby even those at minimum wage could use to reduce spending. They are probably most easily summarized in books like Days of War, Nights of Love and similar texts. There is enough excess to live off in Western Countries, even if their not always things most people would consider participating in, like dumpster diving, squatting, and train hopping. There’s plenty of people of means that could afford to pay for these things, but choose not to for environmental / law-impact lifestyle reasons. Same with groups like Food Not Bombs, who feed the homeless using entirely ‘dumpstered’ (or donated ‘excess’) food.

If you read any of Anita Bell’s books (and I highly recommend the first three) she talks about the concept of sanity money. She is the queen of budgeting, but insists that each person in the household has some money of their own to spend with no questions asked. From memory, she suggests 5% or 10% of your take-home income, never more than $50 a week. She thinks it should be higher for people on lower incomes. You can save this up for your own personal splurge, or spend it on lattes every week.
The reasons for sanity money are
- it stops you feeling poor
- it helps you remember why you budget (to improve your quality of life).
- it guards against big budget blow outs.

Anyway, the point of Get Rich Slowly isn’t “get out of abject poverty”. It’s to “get rich slowly”. Duh.