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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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.
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Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.
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Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).
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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?
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.
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.
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.
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