Learning to spend money

My wife and I are both naturally stingy people. When drafting our wedding list we spurned the posh department stores and I carefully picked out the lowest price best quality items on Amazon instead. I bought 100 dollar beds and 100 dollar mattresses, and we slept on them for a year and a half because "we're anyway emigrating soon". When we did emigrate, I ended up shipping them and we slept on them for another year and a half, much to my pregnant wife's annoyance. We might have overdone it given our means at the time, but the truth is this wasn't a bad decision: we put down a mortgage on our house in 2020, and that plus basic furnishings used every scrap of savings we had. Since then house prices in our area have risen about 70%. If we'd been a bit less frugal we might have been permanently locked out of owning a house, and been forced into the cheaper neighbouring apartments instead. On average overspending causes more problems than underspending, and it's far easier to course correct one than the other. A few months later I started as an L4 SWE at Google, and two years later I was promoted to L5. Without discussing my exact pay package, on levels.fyi you can see that an average L5 engineer in Israel earns $7K in stock each month. I have never sold my Google stock (except to diversify to other stocks), and since I joined Google both it's stock and the S&P 500 have shot up. If I do sell, my tax rate will be 50% on the initial grant and 25% on capital gains. In short, even if I spent my entire base salary each month, I'd have significant savings just from my stock. But my spending habits have only recently started to catch up. I've needed to manually learn to look for the solution that best fits my needs, even if the extra cost doesn't seem commensurate with the extra functionality, so long as the total cost is not huge and it's not a regular purchase. I spent 400 dollars on a good set of pots and pans recently even though I could've got a nearly as good set for a 10