Easy_C said:Another one I see is clothing:
More expensive is NOT better. If you're in any kind of professional occupation you should have at least one custom fitted suit, shirt, and pants combo with a nice set of hoes and tie to go with. That does NOT mean you go out and buy the $2,000 suit because the custom-cut $300 IndoChino suit will usually look better. There's also no reason to buy a $200 Hermes tie (I know of multiple boutiques who will sell you a better and more stylish one for $80 with lifetime fixups provided) or the $5,000 Rolex (an Apple Watch looks more "hip" and costs 1/20th of the cost).
You'll have one or two outfits like that will spend most of their lives in the closet and ONLY come out when events or people who can change your life are involved (like you set up a coffee chat with a vice president at company you want to work for). The rest can be bought at discount retailers or often even thrift/consignment shops.
N°6 said:Money isn’t the root of all evil, the love of it is because loving mammon breaks the first commandment.
Easy_C said:Another one I see is clothing:
More expensive is NOT better. If you're in any kind of professional occupation you should have at least one custom fitted suit, shirt, and pants combo with a nice set of hoes and tie to go with. That does NOT mean you go out and buy the $2,000 suit because the custom-cut $300 IndoChino suit will usually look better. There's also no reason to buy a $200 Hermes tie (I know of multiple boutiques who will sell you a better and more stylish one for $80 with lifetime fixups provided) or the $5,000 Rolex (an Apple Watch looks more "hip" and costs 1/20th of the cost).
You'll have one or two outfits like that will spend most of their lives in the closet and ONLY come out when events or people who can change your life are involved (like you set up a coffee chat with a vice president at company you want to work for). The rest can be bought at discount retailers or often even thrift/consignment shops.
For example, imagine you are in a restaurant where you are deciding between a burger for $15 and salmon for $25. If your net worth > $100,000 then the $10 difference is trivial (<0.01% of net worth). If you continue to scale this logic upward you will see that the marginal impact of a single decision within each level of wealth could be as follows:
Level 1. Paycheck-to-paycheck: $0-$0.99 per decision
Level 2. Grocery freedom: $1-$9 per decision
Level 3. Restaurant freedom: $10-$99 per decision
Level 4. Travel freedom: $100-$999 per decision
Level 5. House freedom: $1,000-$9,999 per decision
Level 6. Philanthropic freedom: $10,000+ per decision.
When you view wealth in this way, it looks more like steps than a smooth, ever-increasing line. This is because most people in the same level of wealth consume in much the same way. If you are in level 3, you don’t fly private and you only fly first class if you are lucky enough to get upgraded. If you are in level 1, you rarely fly.
More importantly though, the best way to climb the wealth ladder is to spend money according to your level. If you are in level 1 and you book a vacation without caring about the costs (level 4), then you won’t progress further up the ladder. Until you have the money to spend frivolously within a level, you have to be strict about your spending in that level. Get this right and you have a far better chance of progressing up the ladder.
gework said:Another note on this is just how fast I have seen people's lives change in the window of about 29-34 years old.
People who put all their eggs in the cool weed guy, trying to bang what they can, worldly hippy guy with a man-bun ... baskets.
I've seen guys who have gone from quite confidently strutting about one year to staggering about, looking crusty with yellow teeth the next.
Around the age of 29 it seems a lot of people go through a deep introspective crisis, querying the child-like nature of themselves and trying to figure out a path in life. This period hits some very bad, with mental breakdowns and severe anxiety. A hurdle for them to overcome to become a proper adult.
Others put such thoughts out of their mind and you can see it burning in their minds at 33-34. By this time people think it's a bit too late to do anything in their life. In that period they have seen some people go from floating about to battened down with a wife, mortgage, normal life. The jealously of such things they would have thought irrelevant a few years ago is obvious.
Has anyone else seen such patterns?