Increase Your Lifestyle Without Being a Hypocrite
Level 2 - Value Investor
Welcome Avatar! Recently, there was a viral post on X from Chamath where he states the following: "Possessions are BS. They are worthless. They are a sign of insecurity, a rampant ego, and an unsettled mind. And that is okay if you are going to be a mid."
This sounds good until you see that he has a $2,000-$3,000 hoodie on the entire time.
Don’t think it takes a lot of intelligence to see the hypocrisy there. We’re aware that a billionaire spending $3,000 is similar to a typical dude spending $10. However. The context is still broken. If you’re going to state that possessions are meaningless, your expensive items should be saved for special occasions. The contrast caused the message to land flat.
This side of the web is anti-FIRE (living like you’re poor to save money just to live like you’re poor for life) and anti-consumerism. Surprisingly, there is a happy medium. We’re going to write that out here which will help explain your future purchases.
Big Picture - Where to Spend
We wish we wrote this ourselves. Credit goes to Michael who came up with a pretty good framework for spending up.
Spend Where Your Time Is: The first thing is always a home/condo. You’re going to to spend 12+ hours a day there, work there (hooray for WiFi $) and you’re going to bring friends/family into the location frequently.
We’ve got no real problem with people who spend up on their houses because it also appreciates over time as well. Seems like a no-brainer. Even if you get the slightly nicer flooring/countertop, it ends up being a break-even investment by the time you move.
The only time this becomes a problem is if you go into displayed wealth territory. This means a 10,000 square foot mega mansion where you use a grand total of 2,000 square feet on a monthly basis. This doesn’t make a ton of sense unless you’ve got an enormously large family or a multi-generational living set up.
The 2,000 sq/ft number wasn’t a guess. It’s generally what happens
Benefits: We laid out a few but logic is as follows: 1) it generally goes up in value, 2) you spend the vast majority of your life there, 3) it can offer better quality of life outside as well - closer to the better restaurants, beach, etc, 4) you’re getting access to a better social network by design and 5) it’s likely safer by a wide margin.
Most of the real estate crash bros do not understand how hyper local real estate is. The luxury areas are incredibly hard to break into. Has nothing to do with cap rates. It has everything to do with hundreds of items that don’t show up in spread sheets: distance to health care, beaches, quality of people, walkability, opportunities etc.
Next Category - Beds
Once you’ve solved the house part, most people go to cars. To us this makes absolutely no sense. Cars depreciate in value and on top of that you don’t spend a ton of time in them. Who in the world goes out to party and drives back? Yeah no one. Uber is around for a reason.
Majority of any car usage is just going to be for basic tasks/point A to B type stuff. Call it a few hours a week. If you’re sharp and become an entrepreneur, you’re definitely not commuting.
Insert the next item with huge time value: beds.
This is not a sponsor or ref link or anything like that. In fact, Alaskan King beds may not make sense for your specific situation. If you’re tall or move around a lot when sleeping, this is going to do wonders for you. If you’ve got back problems or neck problems, we’re certain there is some sort of memory foam or new age technology that’ll improve your sleep quality by 10x.
Yes. 10x.
You’re going to spend at least 8+ hours a day in the bed. This is a baseline case since it doesn’t include reading or working on a laptop. Makes a ton of sense to invest money here because it also impacts your health. If you’re sleeping well, getting REM cycles and generally recovering better, that’s a 10x return without a doubt.
Next Category - Luxury Gym
Unless you plan on being out of shape and rich (defeating the point) we’ve got a completely different direction for your next purchase - high-end gym.
Lots of guys complain about meeting people. Based on that alone, we know that they are not trying. If you’re looking to meet “winners” in a general sense, they will be at high end gyms. We’re going to make it relatively broad since we don’t know your city. Could be a place like Equinox. Could be more niche (you’ll know what gym it is based solely on the category - Luxury).
As you get older you’ll expand this into “health clubs/country clubs” depending on where life takes you. Life Time is a good example. Goes up from there.
Think About the Hours: Generally speaking, at least five hours a week at the gym. Even as you get older this is going to be a minimum. Maybe 4 hours of real working out and another hour of sauna/steam rooms/stretching etc. Add in the benefits of a luxury gym (typically food, some working cubicles if needed, etc) and you’re going to be up to at least an hour per day on average (7 hours per week).
This doesn’t sound like a lot but it is. 4-5% of your life will be spent working out in some shape or form (that’s a low-end estimate). No point in doing that with broken equipment. Huge environment bonus as well. Everyone in the same facility is also successful!
Pause and Add It Up
9 hours in your bed per day (8 hours sleep, 1 hour other)
1 hour per day at least at the gym/sauna/tennis courts etc.
6 hours per day in your house for eating, showering, changing, watching a movie, cooking, working on WiFi money business and other basic activities
16/24 = 66.66% of your entire life is now accounted for in nice/high quality environments.
Perhaps now a lot of you are realizing you need a lot less money than you originally thought. If you have a paid off house in a nice area + a few million to cover food, a nice gym and some going out money… you’re going to approach 80% of life coverage in seconds.
Next Category - Your Main Hobby/Interest
Here it gets extremely personalized. Some people love golf. Some guys actually enjoy fixing cars. Some people collect comic books. Some people have a travel bucket list. Other people are religious fans of some sport, music type etc.
We’re not in the business of telling people what hobbies they should be interested in. We just hope that it’s something non-destructive. The destructive part of life (20s to early 30s) is when you should have already gone through the classic partying phase already. When you can’t play a fast twitch sport at a high level, you shouldn’t be in a night club anymore. For those that don’t have a barometer on that, just say “if you can’t sprint without warming up” best to move on.
Hobbies/Interests: Generally they will take up another hour or two per day. As a rule of thumb, around 7-10 hours a week is probably the right amount of time someone will invest in a hobby. That’s around 5% of life. Oddly, lines up pretty closely to your expected time in a gym/physical fitness activity.
If your big plan is to have two vacations with the family to exotic places, don’t bother being cheap. If you can make the experience better, simply do it. As long as you’re not taking money from more important things (health, education, mortgage, etc.) it makes little sense to “penny pinch” when you’re attempting to create a unforgettable snapshot in time.
Similarly, if you’re really interested in fixing cars, it makes little sense to do small projects. Go bigger and you might even make money off it anyway!
Note: we’re not entirely sure if this is all legit since we just looked it up, however there is a huge market for this stuff.
The Rest of the Stuff
At this point, you’ve already covered 70-75% of your entire life. Now you can pick and choose some small stuff but it really won’t move the needle. Here are some basic ideas:
You will need at least a few nice outfits. People can say what they like but you’re not showing up to an important meeting or event looking like you walked out of the Nike Outlet. You can dress down and chill for the most part. However, there is a time where dressing to impress matters. Majority of you will be best off with a made to measure suit, some nice shoes and moving on
Speaking of outfits, you do want to start with shoes. High quality shoes end up improving your health since they are made of better materials. Rough math is that $300 shoes is the cut off. At around that level you are in “good quality” arena. Also. They wear out a lot slower so the cost difference doesn’t even show up
Watches are a complete waste of money. If you have one, you can keep it for the whole “just in case i need to flee the country and need $10,000 on my wrist to pawn off”. Basically a item you never wear unless you’re going to those important events (weddings, business meeting where people are judgemental etc.)
Cars enter the equation if and only if you’re a car person. We’re not big on them since working in E-com doesn’t require any real commuting. If you had to work an industry where you drive a lot and impression matter, then sure, we get it
Luxury travel - lay flats. As you get older, these seats matter a lot. Your recovery time goes through the roof and it does add value (despite being expensive). Don’t bother with business class tickets for some 1.5 hour flight.
“But What About Food/Healthcare etc”
We didn’t bother with this as a category because it is painfully obvious. When you realize you’re going to make it with your first $500K or $1M E-com sale, the last thing you’re going to do is drink Bud Light for the next 20 years.
This post is about luxury spending beyond the obvious. The budget on food isn’t going to move a ton on a percentage basis. If you were on the come up spending as little as possible, the 20-30% increase on the food line item isn’t moving the P&L. It mattered when you were broke and grinding. Doesn’t matter when its a low single digit percentage of your monthly spending.
Healthcare is also a non-topic. If you can figure out how to make good money, you’re going to find the right healthcare plan as well. This would be similar to saying “get umbrella insurance after you make it”. Of course you will and the few hundred dollars in difference is not going to register as a real “needle moving” decision. Country clubs and a bigger house have a larger impact
Quick Note on Services
We held off on adding this one. Since the topic is on life style vs. time saving.
Generally speaking if you want a rank order of importance.
Bi weekly cleaning of house/apartment
Laundry Services
Once a month massage/deep tissue
Those are the three highest return items. You spend hours cleaning a house/apartment. You spend hours washing/folding clothes. If you can remove these two headaches, you’ll get a huge amount of your life back. Even two hours a week for a decade is 1,040 hours. A month and a half of your life was going to go to a couple of chores.
Summary
With just four items: 1) house, 2) bed, 3) gym and 4) your main hobby, at least 75% of your life is now covered with luxury/high quality. The other items in your life will look like rounding errors.
As long as you don’t sacrifice obvious items (health, kids education fund, food quality etc.)… it’s a no brainer.
Then you wake up and realize, the quality of life change after a paid off home and $4-5M liquid is basically nothing.
Doesn’t matter though. You will overshoot the bold italics section, ignore everything we just wrote then realize the same thing 5 year later (after blowing past all your “quit” numbers")
Happens to everyone!
Disclaimer: None of this is to be deemed legal or financial advice of any kind. These are *opinions* written by an anonymous group of Ex-Wall Street Tech Bankers and software engineers who moved into affiliate marketing and e-commerce.
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