Something extravagant you bought just because

I don’t sex traffic and tell…

What do you do with the rest of your money?

Usually spend a lot on traveling to visit friends and family. They live all over so there are lots of flights, car rentals, and hotels. We invest a lot.

Oh yeah we did spend a lot on our wedding, maybe that counts

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I paid somehting like $200 for this print a long time ago, still my favourite, hangs over my desk. It’s not the artwork necessarily, it just reminds me of the 80’s.
https://cloud10.todocoleccion.online/postales-america/tc/2011/06/06/27299205.webp

Starbucks. :face_with_monocle: :dolphin:

@Mathman

As a rule, I fly no class, but one time, I sprung for the business class upgrade. It was only a 2-3 hour flight, but I needed to spoil myself.

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I bought a decent backpack leafblower, that felt extravagant at the time. SO worth it.

A book called The Millionaire Next Door made a big impression on me when I first read it in the 1990s. It’s premise, not unlike FIRE and Mr Money Mustache, is to extol the virtues of living well within your means so that you can divert a big portion of your income to savings. A couple of the lessons are that real millionaires wear Timex watches. Most Rolex owners will never accumulate wealth. Also, the best way to buy a car is to minimize the price paid per pound.

I know it is cliche to say this, but I grew up poor. The lifestyle I lead living off a small-ish portion of my income is way more comfortable than my parents lifestyle. But I don’t accumulate many (or any) extravagant possessions. I am content with extravagances that I didn’t have growing up: not paying credit card debt, affording home repairs without borrowing money, decent groceries, reliable cars, a vacation now and again, being able to afford clothing when I need it, affording kids activities like sports and music, knowing I have the mortgage payment covered, not being late on bills, and being able to fund eventual retirement.

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Ya, I did 22 trips in 2019. Sometime in December I was in Houston and just beat. So I paid like $100 out of pocket to fly back to Denver in first class.

The two recent outrageous (“outrageous”?) purchases I’ve made:

  1. I like to browse Kickstarter. I came across sequence of projects to sell sets of 6-sided dice made out of or plated with certain elements. I don’t play dice-based or tabletop RPGs, but they are pretty and given the nature of my job, I had to get a set as a home office desk decoration. They make me smile; expensive dice, but not horribly expensive if thought of as art.

  2. Last fall, after having spent a week in a hospital for some health issues, and then subsequently spending 3 weeks in isolation due to a suspected case of COVID, I went a little stir-crazy in my room. There were a couple of simulation/games that I would kill time and distract myself with, but I had to make compromises. So, I ended up getting an excessive custom-built PC, which I jokingly refer to as my “mid-life crisis” toy. I didn’t quite return to the standard I had prior to my current assignment of having a better machine at home than at work…but I think I did achieve an “almost no compromises” level of gadget.

(I do economic capital modeling. While my new personal machine may have the same RAM and better graphics than my work machine, attempting to match or improve upon my work machine’s processors would have been excessively excessive.)

Generally my wife and I limit frivolous purchases, although a chunk of our disposable income goes towards more-than-average travel for family reasons. But with travel having been on-hold for the pandemic…

I spent more on the fireworks than I did my own wedding dress.

Maybe there is no method to my madness :thinking:.

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Did it end with you marrying her?

Again, I don’t traffic and tell.

Is that opinion or fact?

I’ve been buying a shit ton of fountain pens, anything ranging from $5 to $1000. Maybe bought like 50 of them in the last few months. Don’t need them, but they provide value for me. I just bought a 1943 Vacumatic which is a fascinating WW2 era pen.

I’m not into pens, but I googled that and it’s a pretty neat gadget.

Millionaires buy Bic pens, not fountain pens. You’ll never accumulate wealth.

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The book presents it as a fact that underlies their main thesis.

The theme of the book is that there are two kinds of people
Under Accumulators of Wealth (UAW)
Prodigious Accumulators of Wealth (PAW)

Most people, even high earners like doctors and lawyers, are UAWs that consume too much of their income with high priced non-necessities. In fact, the book cites a real world negative correlation between income and wealth.

Real millionaires (PAW) have become so because they live within their means and save regularly, and would never splurge on an ostentatious trinket like a $5000 Rolex that gives no more real tangible usefulness than a $50 Timex gives. The item in question, watches, might be a little dated as millenials do not wear watches of any kind, but the concept is still valid. Luxury goods are bad for your economic health.

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My dad had some super old fountain pens. Mebbe I’ll go look for them later. :fountain_pen:

Ball point pens are for suckers. I stopped using them years ago because they gave me wicked writer’s cramp!!! :-1:

I’m thinking that buying a $5,000 Rolex would not put a dent in a millionaire’s finances.

Do all “real” millionaires also drive Toyota Corolla’s as they afford the same utility as a high-end BMW?

Do they buy their furniture at Bob’s Discount, because the dressers have the same utility as the good stuff from Renovation Hardware?