Nice read JR8! My approach so far has been to spend only what we need, ensuring a reasonable and a gradually rising lifestyle and then set aside every else remaining, as savings. At the moment my financial position is such that I have set aside enough corpus that my annual returns on my investment is same as my current annual savings.
i.e. I save like 40k SGD a year from my salary and also generate another 40k SGD a year from my corpus
It helps that my entire corpus is India based and investment predominantly(82%) Fixed Deposits and the rest in Mutual funds and Fixed deposits in India return 10% CAGR
At some point the returns from my corpus will be much much higher than what I can save from my salary, that will become an interesting point of time in life I am not sure how far it is. Right now my salary has stagnated and I dont see it rising a lot, unless I jump to the next level and I am too comfy at the current level I am. I think having enough savings is also like a trap and makes you less ambitious and risk averse in your career. I dont know, or may be I am indeed risk averse and hence need those savings.
Since I benchmark against India, it is very difficult to predict what inflation is likely to be like 10 years from now but India has been rising since the last couple of decades and the next few decades are going to be even better so I hope I will come out good.