I guess we just don’t have enough people telling us how to spend our money, so here’s another article🤪
In general, personal spend can similarly be classified into capex, opex with ROI across different time horizons. Good metrics that I personally use to measure the spend is to look at wellness and time saved. Investments are a different category altogether and is mostly a hedge against inflation (it hits the cashflow statement but does not really fit into the narrative of wellness or time savings. And there are enough tiktok investors that give timeless advice 😏)
The first salary
A lot of my peers bought a new branded leather wallet, expensive mechanical swiss watch. But these depreciate once you walk out the shop door (ok depending on the brand, the watch might still retain some value)
Looking back one of the things I think I did right was to spend an obscene amount of my first salary on a bed and pillow. Given how we spend 1/3 of our lives in bed, this made sense. Granted if the environment is crap, it’s still tough to get a good night’s sleep but assuming you do not live next to a construction site, railway tracks or sewage treatment plant, the bed and the pillow are an absolute necessity to be well rested. Or put a different way, cost savings from caffeine supplement is worthwhile.
So where I think I could have done better. The strategy of splurging on a bed was the right one. The execution of splurging on which bed was not. I think top of the line was Tempur back in the day. It is still surprisingly firm after more than a decade, but with D2C choices like Casper in the US or hipvan, sonno or haylee (with my increased family size I tried the different brands in Singapore). Overall the quality and bang for buck for D2C is worthwhile (I really want to try the purple mattress but it’s not possible to get it shipped to Singapore).
Pillows on the other hand, Tempur, hands on. Symphony. This has lasted me for more than a decade and still gives me sound sleep every night. Purple pillow is decent and slightly more cooling in Singapore’s humidity, but it is a tad heavy.
Second, third, nth salary
With 1/3 of my life planned for, the next few paychecks went by quite quickly. I think I have been lucky that I have worked for more progressive companies that allowed for remote work, so my…
