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