On ChrisHallquist's post extolling the virtues of money, the top comment is Eliezer pointing out the lack of concrete examples. Can anyone think of any? This is not just hypothetical: if I think your suggestion is good, I will try it (and report back on how it went)
I care about health, improving personal skills (particularly: programming, writing, people skills), gaining respect (particularly at work), and entertainment (these days: primarily books and computer games). If you think I should care about something else, feel free to suggest it.
I am early-twenties programmer living in San Francisco. In the interest of getting advice useful to more than one person, I'll omit further personal details.
Budget: $50/day
If your idea requires significant ongoing time commitment, that is a major negative.
I think money prevents certain types misery more than it buys happiness.
For example, flights with stopovers and shitty public transportation make me miserable and usually sick. By spending money on direct flights and taxis, I save myself many days of life that would otherwise be lost (I have to travel a lot).
Similarly, knowing I can afford good medical care if I get sick, or find a new apartment if mine becomes unpleasant, or send my kids to a private school if public schools are too useless... these things don't make me deeply happy, but if they were not true, that would make me constantly anxious.
Money is a cushion against disaster. If something goes awry, you can use it to buy medical or legal or technical assistance. However, for me personally it does not cause an actually happy or joyful affect, nor does it seem to buy the things that do (except very indirectly).
If you spend more than 20 minutes on your commute (one way), consider moving to somewhere closer to where you work. Walking distance is ideal, biking distance a good second-best. Commutes literally kill; you will not only get more time daily, but also your expected lifetime will increase.
Improve the ergonomics of your computer situation:
- Better chair
- Better desk
- Keyboard without a numpad so that the mouse doesn't need to be so far out
- Bigger monitors/multiple monitors
- If your computer is at all slow or annoying-to-use, consider whether better hardware could help that (and thus reduce the stress of using it). E.g. getting an SSD could decrease load times if you find those problematic
Strongly seconding the SSD recomendation. I can't think of anything else that's given so much enjoyment for the money. A SSD dramatically increases perceived performance of a computer beyond what you'd expect from benchmarks. Adding extra ram can hide the latency of a mechanical HD by caching, but it does nothing for worst case performance, and worst case performance is highly salient. I'd much rather use a low spec PC with a SSD than a high spec PC with a mechanical HD. Predictably mediocre performance feels faster than high average performance with high variance.
If you wake up before the sun rises (or have blackout shades), would recommendI this gradual-wakeup light alarm clock. I bought it after seeing someone link it on LessWrong. If your morning wakeups are abrupt, I highly recommend this. For the 30 minutes before your set alarm time, it gradually brightens the light. Then if you're not awake yet by the time the sound comes on, it's birds chirping VERY softly that slowly gets louder. I usually actually mistake them for real birds in my half-asleep state. Its a much more pleasant way to get up in the morning and personally, I feel a lot better when I do.
I also have a Vitamix that I use usually twice a day and I absolutely love it. Great quality and really easy to clean.
Other people in this thread have gone down the obvious "spend money to pay people to do things you don't like doing but want done" route. My suggestion is to get hobbies. Awesome, awesome hobbies. Sure, there's a time commitment to continue with a hobby, but they can be put down with little ill effect.Here's what I'd start with:
Archery. Buy a bow and some lessons and perhaps a range membership.
Sailing. Sunscreen, clothing, and a Sunfish or other small dinghy. Maybe get lessons as well. I'd start at a lake.
Blacksmithing or welding. Take some fun classes along those lines at a community college or trade school or the like. Alternatively, you can get pliers and some metal wire and make chain mail (this, however, is much more time intensive, but cheap in terms of money alone).
Racing. You'd probably want to start with go-karts and the like.
Sports. Generally cheap and enjoyable.
As far as programming, writing, and people skills go, a big part of improving is spending time on it. Getting paid feedback can probably help as well.
For life-optimization in general, moving to a place closer to work and cutting down on your commute is worthwhile in general. You'd have to do the math to see how much you'd wind up paying for your time.
Getting rid of stuff to maintain is a freebie. Things are option-priced: owning something gives you the right to use it later. It also forces you to either maintain it or lose it. Keep track of the time and money costs as well as how often you use your car, and compare to the costs of renting a car instead.
I'd also recommend laser eye surgery, particularly if you have any amount of astigmatism or are clumsy. Financed over two years, my cost is something like $5/day. And as for clumsiness, well, a significant amount of that sort of thing goes away when things are the same shape across your field of vision. It's anecdotes, sure, but all four people (myself included) that I know that got lasik have better hand-eye coordination and significantly reduced clumsiness. It's hard for me to overstate how valuable laser eye surgery has been. My sister rates it as the third best decision she's ever made, behind marrying her husband and buying a house she loves the daylights out of.
choose your hobbies wisely. take ecstatic dance in oakland, for instance. its not very expensive, it will make sure your body stays a little fit, there will be great cahances to socialize and flirt. and you wont die.
compare that with motorcicle racing. it is competitive, male oriented, hard to find time and a place to do it, way more expensive, there are no women, it pollutes the earth, and you have to keep a motorbike in good conditions. not to mention you'll live 15 minutes less per hour ran, according to tegmarks old website.
The advice above of getting hobbies is a good one, but choose activities that are physical, social, and will make you healthy and sexy, unless you really, really, really love playing magic the gathering, like i do, then just nerd your money around and leave the other things to another time.
I completely agree with dance lessons as a worthwhile hobby to consider. The point I was trying to get at is that if you have disposable disposable income and free time and your hobbies are "books and computer games", you've probably not done worthwhile exploration as to what hobbies you enjoy.
To get away from the anecdote level and bring in an empirical source, LASIK satisfaction rates are at 95.4%. [non-paywall pdf]
Time is probably the best thing you can buy for the long term. You could consider investing that money and at 5% you'd have almost a million dollars in 25 years - that may sound like a long time, but it would mean you could be financially independent in your early forties and would allow you spend an additional 8-10 hours a day on things you enjoy if you didn't have to earn a salary.
Depending on if you have them already, invest in a few tailored pieces clothing that go with a lot and you can wear regularly.
Offer to pay for your friends to come with you to do what you like (for instance if you like ice-skating and you all usually end up at bars, offer to pay for them to come ice-skating with you - they'll be happy to go for free, and you'll get better quality out of your time with them).
Give small amounts to charities you see along the street, if you identify with them (for the warm fuzzies).
Make a habit of buying something nice at a bakery or similar outside work once a week and bringing it in for your colleagues. Chat with them over it.
If you don't have dietary restrictions and are easy about what you eat, get one of those packages where they deliver you recipes and ingredients every week (cut down the time planning, buying and cooking and you can find one that's healthy and balanced - most are by design anyway).
Think about the things you use very often and/or for extended amounts of time. Buy the highest quality version of that that you can afford. For example shoes, chairs, beds, at any one time you will be in one of the three, so buy the best you can afford. Donating to a feel-good charity might also improve your happiness. The exact amount seems to be irrelevant.
Edit: Another possibility is to buy more than you actually need of items you use, like having multiple nail clippers at multiple locations for convenience instead of having to carry out one specific nailclipper.
Your last line is a good hint to the direction you should be thinking. Find ways to spend money to save time, or improve your experience where you spend a lot of time.
Paying a housecleaner or gardener can free up some time if you don't get value from those activities but do get value from the results. TaskRabbit can get you out of some other errands that fall into the same category (you want done, but don't want to do).
Paying a personal trainer can make your health-improving activities a lot more efficient. Paying for classes is a mixed bag, but can give structure and motivation for learning that you don't get with self-scheduled time.
As a programmer, you may be able to have a more enjoyable and perhaps more effective time at your job if you spend money on equipment rather than limiting yourself to what your employer provides.
I brainstormed about this for a while and reflected on what past purchases I had made that I liked and hadn't liked. YMMV but here's what I concluded:
- Incremental upgrades to existing items is rarely worth it unless the existing option is terrible; a nice mouse is only slightly nicer than whatever you're currently using, most of the time you don't really use the extra speed from a faster computer, etc.
- Conversely, get things that open up new options for you; e.g. a smartphone lets you do computer things in places where you wouldn't before so is better than a new laptop in many case
- "buy experiences" seems to work; buy a musical instrument and take lessons or other things, learn to bake (and then give away your baked goods to friends)
- Weather-specific clothes can make some situations much easier: if you're cold, buy something warm. It's not actually hard to stay warm and being prepared means you don't have to worry about what going out and doing things based on the weather.
- Spending money to remove minor inconveniences can be worth it; if it bothers you every day then change it
- I buy way more video games than I finish anymore, but still value completing them so I prefer to buy short indie games now
- I consistently over-estimate fancy new electronics and should correspondingly reduce my expectations for things like, say, the Oculus Rift
Get a massage every couple of weeks.
Go to some place to get some serious neuromuscula body work that focuses on posture, alignment, balanced muscular strength and tone. Feldenkrais, Hanna, Pilates, Alexander.
Have regular blood work done. Get basic dna testing, if not a full genome (yet).
Hire a cook to stock your fridge with tasty, nutritious meals for the week.
If you wear glasses, try switching to night&day contact lenses. I don't know about others, but it's one of the things I most gladly spend extra money on. They're much, much more comfortable than glasses -- you just put them on and forget about your vision problems until you have to change them. There have been days when I had run out of contacts and had to wear glasses, and the experience was horrible compared to what I was used to.
The best ratio of happiness per Euro spent I ever got was from a shower with a rain shower head for about 120€. I imagine a full fledged shower panel with massage showers could give even more happiness but maybe with a smaller ratio.
Another example was spending about 400€ on a Saitek pro flight control and X-Plane 10.
Also vacations probably count. There was this seafood plate I once had on Mallorca ...
Seconding shower things.
Also consider sex toys and sex-shop items.
I carry thermic starbucks glasses around to keep my tea hot in winter and cold in the brazilian summer. Worth it.
Depending on your age, big 5 personality traits, group of friends etc... psychedelic drugs (but not opiates or amphetamines) may be worth their price and time.
General information-getting (most of this is general "stuff I recommend to anyone", but some of it does require money):
- Get a Kindle. Easily worth its price, if you can afford it.
- Get books. Much easier to get buy them from Amazon than getting them from anywhere else.
- Make a subscription to Audible.com and start listening to Audiobooks. Incredible life improvement to be able to turn moments I'm otherwise not mentally occupied, with more time to read.
- Get stereo bluetooth headphones. These are headphones you can easily stick in a pocket, turn on quickly and start listening to your audiobook. Makes the experience of audiobooks MUCH better.
Some other obvious stuff:
- Turn money into time. Hire a cleaner/others to do chores you don't want (laundry service that picks stuff up form your house? etc.)
- Hell, you can probably hire a chef or equivalent to cook great and healthy meals.
- Use taxis/other expensive but time-saving choices for travel.
Oh, and in general, live closer to your job. Incredibly important, easier to achieve with money.
I've just scratched the surface for now, but that's off the top of my head.
The thing is, a lot of the advantages you get from money can be had on the cheap if you are reasonably resourceful. For example, it may be awesome to go out with your family to a fancy restaurant for dinner. But it's almost as awesome (and in some ways more awesome) to plan and cook your own nice meal for your family. At far less expense.
(Note I am referring to your typical middle class American here.)
I do agree that saving on commuting time and inconvenience is worthwhile if you can afford it.