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It's funny how quickly you get used to the mindset that it's a good decision to trade money for time. If I value my marginal time at $50/hr, and unconsciously a
by smanek 16y ago
It's funny how quickly you get used to the mindset that it's a good decision to trade money for time. If I value my marginal time at $50/hr, and unconsciously always choose to pay to save time, the mindset becomes ingrained and is hard to reverse.
Little things that you quickly grow accustomed to like taxis, dry cleaners, restaurants (plus a few big things like a mortgage or high rent from living alone in a decent apartment, car and all related expenses, etc) all add up very quickly.
I think that's one of the biggest advantages college students have when starting a company. They get a significantly longer runway for relatively less effort. It's much harder to adjust from making $200K to $20K.
- Joakal 16y agoWarren Buffet is one of the top 10 richest people in the world and he's pretty frugal.
- kooshball 16y agoI think frugal here is relative. He doesn't care about status symbols and living a super extravagant life with huge mansions and yachts that other billionaires do. But I'm sure he has a lot of expenses that most middle class would not have. If his car breaks down, do you really think he'll take it to the shop himself and start taking a bus to work?
- AngryParsley 16y agoBuffet is the exception that proves the rule.
- smanek 16y agoTo be fair, the money/time tradeoff breaks down pretty quickly - you've almost certainly used all the easy wins by the time you're even earning mid six-figures. Basically, there are only so many hours of outsourceable stuff in your day. Once you've made the trade for cooking (eating out/chef/stay-home-spouse), cleaning (maid/stay-home-spouse/etc), errands, scheduling, minor research, and other miscellany (secretary), local transport (owning a car) there isn't much more to do. If you really value your time, you can fly a private jet at the cost of maybe a few thousand dollars per hour saved, I guess. And Warren Buffet, even in his frugality, does all of these things.
- gjm11 16y agoYou say "by the time you're even earning mid six-figures", but "mid six-figures" is a whole lot of money. (Of course it's not much relative to Warren Buffett. but then what is?) ... Oh, wait, by "mid six-figures" do you mean $150k or $500k? Even $150k is a very nice salary by most people's standards, but I was assuming you meant $500k. (Six figures: 100k to 999k. Midpoint of that range is $550k. Perhaps the geometric mean is more natural; that's about $300k.)
- khafra 16y agoThe point he was supporting was "no matter how rich you are, there's only so much time you can get by trading money for it," in which context $500k/year isn't out of place--especially, as you noticed, with Warren Buffett as the example.
- smanek 16y agoI meant around $500K. I think that's the point where it's reasonably likely you have a secretary/personal-assistant to take care of those last little bits of outsourceable work.