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PaperclipPerfector  6mo ago (text post)   2382 thread views

Wellness Wednesday for November 8, 2023

The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:

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This is a question which has been asked here before, as well as in similar places, but more ideas are always welcome.

Through career progression and timely company changes, next week I will be starting a job at which I will earn far more money than I ever expected to make at any point in my life. My cost of living has not scaled with this at all. Something on the order of 15-20% of my income will amply cover all my needs. The rest is just gravy.

With this being the case: what are some ways in which I can use a surplus of money to improve my life?

I am also in a similar situation (not so dramatic perhaps, but I definitely didn't expect numbers on my income sheet to go up so fast). I even made a post here half a year ago before accepting the job offer asking for advice! I personally have too much of a middle class upbringing to ever consider spilling money into something that I can't convince my brain is good value for money. So so far I have just been treating people around me to nice restaurants and stashing most of the earnings in a checking account. But still some suggestions that might be of interest, roughly in an order of increasing cost:

  • Hire a cleaner. Not even that expensive if you don't have a large house.
  • High-end gym and/or private trainer.
  • Build yourself a solid wardrobe of high quality pieces that fit you well and match each other well. You can even hire professional help for shopping if you aren't sure about your judgment and don't want to spill money on expensive items that you will later not wear.
  • Do charity. Not the type of charity where you are feeding Western NGO types with your donations or giving mosquito blankets to African villages but stuff that leads to you having some standing in your community. My parents used to pay for medical treatments of poorer family members/acquittances and help with college tuitions of their kids etc. The respect and loyalty you get from such acts is difficult to describe if you have never witnessed people building such charity networks around them.
  • For any sporty hobby (surfing, skiing etc) you can spend a couple weeks with great private tutors in the best possible location and you will achieve a level of skill you didn't think possible. Later on this can lead to amazing vacations.
  • If you are the type of person (no judgment intended), high-end sex resorts in some Caribbean countries are the closest a man can reach the Islamic idea of heaven with money (at least non-billionaire level of money).

Ideally you will recognize that your brain is wired to seek all such status markers and worldly pleasures ultimately only for the purposes of passing on your genes in the best circumstances possible to the next generation. Try to leverage your situation to find a good partner and raise children in a favorable environment.

What's your living situation like? Buying a house ate up most of my money and also improved my life. It also opens a lot of opportunities to spend money on upgrades that you can't do in a rental.

Nice furniture is another option. My Aeron desk chair is a lot more comfortable than my cheap old one from Amazon. I love sitting in my Ekornes Stressless chair and reading. I sleep a lot better on an expensive king size mattress.

Hire a personal assistant to do all your life admin tasks. Hire a chef, or spend money such that you don't have to cook.

Just whip up a spreadsheet to calculate the new date at which you will be able to retire, and revel in the fact that it is only a few short years from now. (I recommend using the Consumer Expenditure Survey's "size of consumer unit by income before taxes: annual income less than 15 k$" numbers.)

Alternatively, if you have a cheap-but-rare porn preference (like skinny belly stuffing), see whether you can pay a few grand to sponsor a few videos.

Blessed be he who is not victim to lifestyle inflation.

Honestly, I struggle to understand this mindset. You can spend $100k on a nice 2 week vacation now, and that’s not hiring a yacht or being a baller in Monaco, that’s a modest 10 days or 2 weeks in Bora Bora or the Maldives. A nice new luxury car is $150-300k. A decent house in a nice part of a tier one city is probably over $5m. There are vicuña jackets at Loro Piana that cost $30k, and they’re actually very nice. Last year I still spent double than that on clothes and bags, and that was a comparatively lean year. I could easily spend a million dollars in a good department store in a few hours (hardmode: even without jewelry or furnishings). Truly, you are blessed.

I have faced a few problems in my life, but finding things to spend money on has never been one of them. Even many billionaires do not suffer from this dysfunction. My advice? Consider yourself lucky, save the money, and leave it for your kids to spend if you think them worthy.

You can spend $100k on a nice 2 week vacation now

How?? Or rather, what do you get out of a $100k 2 week vacation that you wouldn't get out of a $7k 2 week vacation (which still gives you $500 / day to play with, which in my experience is the level where I run out of waking hours to experience things faster than I run out of money with which to pay for those experiences). The only people I know who blow through high-5-figure amounts on a short vacation are people with major gambling problems.

Yeah the numbers don't add up. Even if every single one of your meals is in a Michelin Starred restaurant, and you live in hotel with gold plated toilets, and have a 24/7 slave literally physically carry you around so your feet don't have to touch the ground, you might reach 100k.

I think OP's budget included buying 50 Louis Vuitton items somewhere in there.

My examples were French Polynesia and the Maldives. My favorite resorts there are probably the Brando and Soneva Fushi (not Jani, although that’s more expensive), where a basic room is maybe $6k a night. That’s before food and drink (which obviously has to be flown in and is therefore extremely expensive), scuba diving ($250/pp/day) and/or other water sports, tips, transport by seaplane, flights to the country and various additional expenses. But this isn’t one-off stuff, there are whole large resort chains like Aman in this price segment with several dozen hotels around the world. Amangiri is probably $4k a night now for a basic room, that’s just to relax in the desert in Utah.

Thanks for the detailed response. And yeah I could see blowing through $500 / person / day on activities if you like scuba diving or anything involving flight. Still, even $500 / person / day for a family of 4 is only $28k over a 2 week period. So I think the question stands: what does Soneva Fushi (best price I can find is $2700 / night for a basic room) have that makes it better than e.g. Kihaa Maldives (a different 5 star resort in the maldives where even an instagrammable overwater bungalow with its own private infinity pool runs $500 / night, and a more normal room runs $275/night which includes breakfast and dinner).

Like don't get me wrong, Soneva Fushi looks nice but as far as I can tell it doesn't actually look substantially nicer than other nearby options.

I've never actually stayed at a $1000+ / night hotel - there has to be something better, or people wouldn't pay the extra amount. Unless it's just one of those things where once you're pulling in mid 7 figures a year you don't really care if you're spending $20k or $200k during your two week vacation because you run out of free time for vacations faster than you run out of discretionary money, so it's worth spending 10x as much for a 10% better experience.

I love seeing this and absolutely can't relate. My 2-week long Italian trip for $7k was extremely exorbitant. I felt like I bought whatever I wanted (Except for the 100 year anniversary edition Moto Guzzi I suppose), went to at least one Michelin star restaurant, and stayed in amazing places.

I'm knocked a Michelin star restaurant off my bucket list at it was like $5 per head. No regrets!

Yeah, we didn't go for something insanely expensive. Our biggest problem was assuming portions were tiny and vastly overbuying food. Could have got more wine.

Which? The only ones that cheap I can think of is probably that Chicken and rice hawker from singapore.

Also if you want to show off, eat at Michelin starred places. If you want to eat good, go to places that are "Bib Gourmand". It's a rating given out by Michelin for places they think is great value for money.

It was in Bangkok, but I can't recall the name rn, it had stars in two consecutive years, but I don't know if that makes it a two star restaurant or still a single one!

What's money good for if you can't spend it?

Then again, I count myself lucky that I'm not particularly consumerist, and barring buying a nicer house or car, my most expensive hobby, video games, has little to offer beyond splurging maybe 10 grand total on a top of the line PC, a ridiculous monitor and so on.

At least that's the case unless my income increases by an OOM or two, I'm sure I can find more hobbies to splurge or then, or donate some of it for political causes I care about.*

Fine liquors, ridiculously expensive clothing, fancy vacations, none particularly appeal to me, not that I'd complain if I got them.

*And invest heavily into index funds and tech companies but I intend to do that even with my minimal money, when I have more of it.

What's money good for if you can't spend it?

Safety, security, peace of mind coming from knowledge that you do not have to live from paycheck to paycheck, knowledge that you do not have to do cling to shitty job at any cost, knowledge that whatever is going to happen, you and your loved ones are not going to end destitute (barring some great catastrophe).

Trust me, I'm well aware of all of the above, and those are covered by "spend it". The potential spending is just deferred to the future, and in this case, we're talking about the lucky few who don't need to worry about that even if they're profligate purchasers otherwise, so I feel no need to spell that out myself.

Are you billionaire rich or mentally ill ?

I know people with 8-9 figure net worths and 1M USD + monthly incomes who don't spend even a fraction of this.

I don’t buy most of the things I cited and I’m not even close to billionaire rich. I was just illustrating that there are always things to spend money on. As for fashion, it’s my primary hobby (or at least expensive hobby, next to relatively cheap stuff like commenting here) and I buy a comparatively small number of interesting things a year. The spend a million dollars in a store thing was to say that I could if you gave me the money, not that I have or would, to be very clear.

There are vicuña jackets at Loro Piana that cost $30k, and they’re actually very nice.

I've never personally understood the allure of Vicuna, and I say this as someone who impulsively bought a $5k+ vicuna sweater when I was visiting New York this year shortly after getting my yearly bonus deposited into my account. I wore that thing like twice and didn't notice any difference from high end cashmere stuff you can get for $500, so I put the tags back on and it went back into its box where it has stayed. The sweater is extremely light too, significantly lighter than my other sweaters which psychologically makes me associate it with cheapness, as if the manufacturers had skimped out on yarn (my conscious brain knows vicuna wool itself is super light and LP would not do such a thing but that doesn't do anything for my subconscious), whenever I pick it up or wear it.

I have had many problems in my life, but finding things to spend money on has never been one of them.

Indeed, in the words of Oscar Wilde, “Anyone who lives within their means suffers from a lack of imagination.”

if you like a relaxing form of travel, stay at top tier all inclusive resorts for 4-5 days at a time.

Do you have children? My surplus money vanished around the time they began arriving.

Unfortunately not, lol. I'm in my 30s now and it's been very strange how I continue to meet women that don't want to have children. That's a separate conversation of course, but yeah, it's just surprised me.

I'll second learning to Fly. I haven't and won't, but it's one of those things you consider as just what "other people" do. But it doesn't have to be. You can do it. There's nothing stopping you.

Ever wanted to learn to fly? Before I was married and had children I got my private license, it's easy to spend money on expensive hobbies. 12 weeks of skiing in Austria with a private instructor / guide. There are lots of skills where time with an instructor can really speed mastery.

In my early 20's I wasn't meeting woman that seemed interested in marriage. ~26 I started telling women / everyone I wanted to be married before I was 30. I was married at 29 with 8 months to spare.

Spend some on things that will save time. Invest the rest. "Retire" early in the sense that you keep working, but now with total freedom.

I've been in your shoes for a long time and I still can't think of ways to spend my money. I tried to enforce a monthly minimum budget, but couldn't make it work.

Here's the one nice thing I have which gives me the most joy: A cleaning person.

I'd caution against giving a lot of money to charity unless you think through all the externalities. Giving money to people directly or to EA-type causes is probably good. Giving to more traditional charities is probably net negative.

Hire staff.

Cleaners, and landscapers.

It really depends on what level of wealth your at beyond that. Honestly the best thing you could do would be to live frugally for a while, invest heavily, then retire.

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