This week I fell down a YouTube rabbit hole while cooking dinner – pretty standard for me, I tend to put it on like a kind of podcast radio mix when I’m doing chores that are going to take a while.

Anyway, I learned about revenge saving.

Some mid-tier YouTuber followed after something I was actually interested in (Pensioncraft) to talk about how “Gen Z is breaking the mould of capitalism”.

We all like a bit of trash TV every now and then, so I let it roll. I think I was chopping potatoes at the time and didn’t want to touch my earphones with potatoey hands.

To be fair, it was pretty fun. There was a dude in Scandinavia who decided to just bugger off into the woods with his dog and live off the land, hunting and building log cabins and stuff. I think that’s way cool and would consider it if I didn’t think Lady SierraWhiskyMike would freeze to death over the survivalist winter. Also, they never really give you a good explanation of how they keep their teeth clean after years in the wilderness…

But one of the topics was revenge saving.

What I was told “revenge saving” means

Allegedly, kids in China were trying to maximise their savings rate to get back at the capitalist economic system by simply not spending on consumer discretionary goods.

One lady was held up as spending only US $1.38 a day. Which, you know, would be nails to do in the UK.

It was a cool name for what seemed to be frugal living and I’d hoped there was some kind of subculture movement with it that might be good to bring to this blog. So, like any good blogger, I did some searching online to find out more!

What “revenge saving” seems to actually mean

Turns out that the only real sources of what “revenge saving” actually is (in English) are, um, mainstream media articles that reference back to a CNBC article from 2024. I guess the mainstream media love a circlejerk.

Well, if you read that article, there seems to be a whole thing about Chinese young people just being tight with money to up their savings rate in an economy that doesn’t work for them so that they can have a larger amount of capital to given them some options and freedoms.

Which sounds pretty familiar…

Overall then, I have to say that the “revenge” part is either a mistranslation or an attempted viral headline.

So isn’t “revenge saving” actually just “spending intentionally”?

Yes.

The big breakthroughs of the “revenge saving” movement seemed to include such obviously shocking tips as:

  • Make your own dinner
  • Take packed lunches to work
  • Don’t buy shit you don’t need
  • Make stuff if you can
  • Save the spare cash

All good points, but shocks = none.

Final thoughts

I’d gotten excited and hoped for more weird tips, but disappointingly “revenge saving” is kind of what we already do in the financial independence community.

Still, it’s pretty cool if this gets more exposure. Excessive consumption is an evil and there’s very little net benefit to society or the individual by just consuming and burning stuff.

As a more general observation: Gen Z seems to be getting a lot of needless flak. I’m not sure how much of this is real perception of people and how much is just dead internet theory playing out, but how can anyone really blame a generation of younger people for thinking “well, a pandemic, housing crisis, generative AI and some wars in and I’m only 20-odd, best just put aside some more money this month”?

If anything, I was hoping for a more stick-it-to-the-man attitude to go with this revenge saving movement, but sadly that doesn’t seem to be a thing.

There is however a good case for saving and learning to be a bit more self-sufficient to give late-stage capitalism the middle finger, and if this motivates you then you have my blessing to go forth and do just that.

My financial independence campaign continues!