Due to family financial pressures, I had to graduate early. Fortunately I was taking enough credits to graduate a year early.
I really didnt want to discuss numbers, but I realize that the comment seems a bit misguided if not put in perspective. I started out with salary 250K (not including signing and year-end bonus), but most of my salary excess went to helping out my parents, so I really couldnt save much. Most of the savings came from saving bonus checks and not increasing spending when I was promoted.
My remark about the car specifically was to point to the fact that almost all of my coworkers were fortunate enough not to have that type of family pressure, so they could afford to get nicer cars (my BMW is a 40K 3-series, for which I could take a lot of deductions because I was running a startup at the time, compared to some of my subordinates driving 160K porsches). It's easy to say that you won't scale up your expenses when your income rises, but its hard to do so when your coworkers and social network are scaling up much faster than you.