I have a few stories to add, but I'm just going with this one for now due to time constraints.
We just had a big schedule change announced last week. My company is in manufacturing, so we have to run to meet demand. OT is usually 4 hours because you either come in early or stay over to help cover another shift. We work a lot of weekends... ie, this year we worked about every other until August, when we went to 2 on 1 off. Last year we worked every weekend in Nov/Dec except 4 days off for Thanksgiving, and 2 for Christmas. A lot of people will volunteer for the OT and work 12 hours a day, so 84 hours a week. Since I started here 2 years ago, I knew there was this plan to shift the schedule so you could only work up to 12 days in a row, and only 72 hours a week. This was supposed to happen by Jan 2019. Well, they moved it up a year. So the company has 6 weeks to comply (they found out about this in 2014, and they haven't even tried to move towards compliance, but that's a different issue).
People are freaking out. There are a lot of people who are seeking out those 84 hours a week, and they're going to lose 12 hours of OT pay. I understand that that's a significant chunk of money. But dear lord, what do these people spend their money on? They make $27-$32 an hour, get 1.5x pay after 40hrs and 2x pay on Sundays. If you're working 12 hours a day, and every other weekend, at $30 an hour, that's about $142k a year. Some of these guys are single, some are married, some have children. Some spouses work, some don't. So there's a lot of factors, sure. But if I pop that scenario into the ADP calculator, no allowances, one at single and one married, with the most expensive health insurance plan for each category, take home is around $90k. That assumes no 401k/HSA contributions. Unless I'm missing something here. Husband and I have a base budget of $2400 a month - currently free rent, but some categories are higher because we cover other things since we have free rent. So when we move out, that'll go up some, but some things will help balance it out. All of my OT went to paying off our student loans (and paying for our wedding/honeymoon), and it was nowhere near that amount. And that budget has some non-mustachian things in it. I just can't imagine where we would spend all that money, unless we were traveling overseas all the time (or investing, obviously! and maxing out the 401k).
But hey, there's a lot of nice cars in the parking lot, especially on the weekends. Because you can only drive your regular fancy car during the week, your super fancy car can only come weekends when the lot isn't full or someone might ding it.