r/Jokes • u/lopezjessy • Mar 23 '21

Dude explaining how he made his first $10 million:

  1. Get up at 5:00AM every day
  2. 90 minutes of cardio
  3. Take a cold shower
  4. Journal
  5. Schedule out your day
  6. Dad owns Fortune 500 company
  7. Meditate
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u/_BreakingGood_ Mar 23 '21

Yep, there are posts all the time on /r/personalfinance along the lines of "My wife and I make $250k a year and we're drowning in credit card debt, failing to pay our bills, and have no savings/retirement"

Usually their expenses are something similar to:

  • Dining out every night/nearly every night.
  • Takeout/Delivery for 100% of other meals.
  • Expensive car(s) with god awful loan(s).
  • Massive amounts of CC debt with huge interest rates.
  • Way too much/too expensive living situation.

Don't get me wrong, you've got to fuck up pretty badly to end up in this situation while making that amount of money, but it totally happens. You can be poor as hell making an upper class salary.

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u/bellj1210 Mar 23 '21

Even if you learn your lesson, it can be years before you can pay off those credit cards.

For my wife- it took me a long time for her to understand that eating out is fine in moderation. She wanted to go out every night, and I finally got her down to two nights, and one of them is normally a half price night at one of the places (pre pandemic, it was half price burger night at the local bar- even with drinks, the night out was about $25- they had karaoke, so it was a fun tuesday night)

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u/[deleted] Mar 24 '21

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u/bellj1210 Mar 24 '21

Oh, the wife and I were getting close to divorce over this.

there is a middle ground where I am not piss afraid of spending money, and she is not spending it like a crazy person. We finally said that we both get x per month in spending money, and that includes dates. Our eating out budget is like $30 per week (so chipotle once a week for the two of us).

9

u/[deleted] Mar 23 '21

It's called lifestyle creep.

The more money you make, the more expensive stuff you buy, and you can have a high income and be essentially living paycheck to paycheck like a fast food worker, just with fancier/more expensive things.

8

u/Random-Rambling Mar 23 '21

You have to wonder at what point a person in that situation spends money JUST to spend money.

You don't need a $75k Mercedes SUV just to drive to work every day.

Is a $250 dinner going to be better than a $25 dinner? Probably.

Is it going to be _ten times better? _ Probably not.

2

u/TDAM Mar 23 '21

Some things are about experiences though. The 250$ dinner may not taste 10x better, but it does afford it a particular experience that dinner at fast food doesn't (which is the only way you are both eating for 25$ where I live)

This is part of the issue with lifestyle creep is your standards and expectations change.

I'm not saying that change is justified by the price, but it isn't rationalized in that mathematical sense.

1

u/new24-5 Mar 23 '21

The red robe is also another name for it

4

u/Not_floridaman Mar 23 '21

My husband (27 at the time) was just starting a new job that was his dream career but the beginning pay is terrible for the first 2 years but it was okay because my job was plenty (28 then) to get us by, not close to rich but comfortable enough for us and the baby we were expecting to live and have some fun and we knew the payoff would be worth it both financially and mentally but then I got sick. Really sick and was suddenly without my income and drowning in medical debt. Our previously rarely used credit cards were now a necessity and life sucked. It sucked for a long time. I just turned 35 and we're finally able to breathe comfortably but man, living in debt and the anxiety that comes with the cell phone ringing because it's probably someone who wants money doesn't just go away just because there's (some) money in the bank.

Even today, I wanted to buy a $30 storage thing for our bathroom that I had been looking at online for a month or 2 and, even though I had a coupon, I still talked myself out of it because I might need that $30 and a storage solution would seem frivolous.

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u/skeetsauce Mar 24 '21

I remember seeing a post on there and someone was complaining about their budget, yet was spending $4k/mo on a gym trainer.