I’ve remarked elsewhere that I’m not convinced of the value of discussing specific numeric values for these things, but because I’m a helpful chap here are mine.
Health insurance: if you’re in the US then unless you are extremely poor you should have some health insurance. How fancy a plan depends on your wealth, probably not in a fashion best described by a small number of discrete “triggers”. I suggest a plan with deductible roughly equal to 5% of your savings but I am not in the US myself and this may be an insanely bad suggestion; but I think it has the right sort of shape.
Cryonics: my own estimate of Pr(signing up for cryonics makes a big difference to my lifetime utility) is low enough that I don’t think I could justify it at any price in comparison with, e.g., charitable donations. However, I suspect that if I found myself with $20M or so in net worth I might sign up as a luxury.
10% donation to favourite cause: I already give a fraction of my income to charitable causes every year (on the order of 10%, but maybe you meant 10% of wealth rather than of income?). If I become much richer, this figure should probably increase. I propose the following extremely rough approximation: if your post-tax income is $X/year then give away about (2+X/$10k) percent of it. Obviously this gives unreasonable results for very large incomes and doesn’t depend on assets; it’s only a crude estimate.
Virtual assistant: I haven’t looked into how much these cost or what they do. It doesn’t currently seem to me as if it’s a service I would find very useful at any level of wealth.
Personal assistant: I don’t know how much you’d pay someone to do this. Let’s suppose it’s $30k/year. I can’t see it being worth more than 3% of my income, suggesting that it becomes worth thinking of at about $1M/year. (You can convert that to wealth by assuming some plausible rate of conversion; I use about 3%; so income of $1M/year is comparable to assets of $30M but no income other than what comes from those assets.)
Car: I didn’t have one until about age 35 when I moved out of the small city I’d previously lived in into a nearby village. Which is to say, the value of having a car depends hugely on circumstances. I am not at all interested in fancy cars myself, and don’t anticipate spending much on cars even if I become very rich.
House cleaner: starts being plausible at approximately “$100k/year and really busy”. Depends a lot on family circumstances (e.g., two parents working full-time with two children versus childless couple one of whom doesn’t have a paid job).
Masseuse: if this means “employing your own masseuse” then it’s somewhere north of the figure for a PA above. If it means “getting a massage from time to time” then I don’t see that there’s any threshold here: you’ll do it more often if you enjoy massage more and if you’re richer. For me it isn’t something that particularly interests me and I have never paid anyone to give me a massage.
Quitting your job: varies a lot with how expensive your tastes are, where you live, how much you enjoy your job, etc. I expect to stop working full time when my reasonably-liquid assets reach somewhere around $2.5M. I may well continue to do much-more-part-time paid work after I stop working full time. I may decide to stop earlier or later depending on all kinds of factors that I’m sure you can think of.
Driver: Comparable to PA, above. I drive rather little, don’t mind driving, and would not take a job that required a very long commute, so I think the chance that I’d ever want to employ a driver is very low. I take taxis sometimes, though.
Boat: Not interested at all.
Airplane: Not interested at all.
House: Already have a nice one. General strategy to date has been: buy rather than rent; get whatever I can with a mortgage no more than about 3x salary and preferably more like 2x; trade up when mortgage fully paid off until we have a house that meets all our reasonable needs. We now have such a house and have no intention to move again in the near future.
Personal clinician: Comparable to PA, above. (More expensive but maybe also more valuable.) If I were in the market for such services, I would first of all investigate whether it’s possible to have a doctor “on call”—still working for others in the usual way, but paid a retainer to be available for consultations at short notice any time I want them. This seems like it might bring almost all the same benefits at much lower cost. Obviously this one depends a lot on health and level of paranoia.
Lawyer: I can’t see why I’d want to employ one myself at any plausible level of wealth.
Bodyguard: See lawyer, above. But obviously particular circumstances might change this—e.g., if I got very rich in a controversial and publicly visible way. (I do not anticipate doing so.)
For a lot of these, my actual answer is “Not interested until I have more money than I ever expect to have, not only because I don’t see how I’d get it but because if I did then I would regard it as indecent not to give most of it away”.
House cleaner: starts being plausible at approximately “$100k/year and really busy”. Depends a lot on family circumstances (e.g., two parents working full-time with two children versus childless couple one of whom doesn’t have a paid job).
Disagree with this one. Even at a low income I found that having someone come in once a month was definitely worth it. Depends how much you value having a neat house/how much you disvalue cleaning.
Health Insurance: Shouldn’t insurance go down as you get richer, since you’ll be more able to absorb risk? I suppose you might want more health coverage, but you’d also have a higher deductible so it’s not clear if it would be more expensive. Doesn’t your work usually pay for health insurance though? I was under the impression that they had to do stuff like that to avoid the problem of only high-risk people getting health insurance.
On personal assistant, I think the 3% of wealth value will not transfer to different people simply.
For many people, the value of a personal assistant is that they can accomplish so much more with their own time. I know a number of people who have taken this approach and report that it was an investment that paid off financially for them.
If you think of it as a pure cost, then yes, you would try to pay 30k ish and not be interested until you had a very large income.
For those people I know who actually use this, they employ people who are quite skilled and may command 50-60k/year or more, and who produce economic value in excess of their paycheck.
The key determinant seems to be the point at which your marginal ability to earn more money per hour from time saved is about 2-3 times what you have to pay your PA per hour. If you are in the right kind of job (sales, business owner), the threshold is probably somewhere around 150k/year. If you are in the wrong kind of job, it probably never makes sense until you are wildly rich.
Driver does work similarly, but again, the threshold is much lower if you need to drive around, but can profitably use time in the car to accomplish work that pays you more than you are paying your driver.
Yes, I agree that these are highly dependent on your circumstances.
My figures (so far as they were properly thought out at all) were based on my estimate of the most likely ways for me to reach the relevant level of wealth. I can think of four (none of them either very probable or spectacularly improbable) and none of them would make me benefit a lot from a PA, but for sure there are people who would benefit far more and might have good reason to employ a highly skilled PA.
I’ve remarked elsewhere that I’m not convinced of the value of discussing specific numeric values for these things, but because I’m a helpful chap here are mine.
Health insurance: if you’re in the US then unless you are extremely poor you should have some health insurance. How fancy a plan depends on your wealth, probably not in a fashion best described by a small number of discrete “triggers”. I suggest a plan with deductible roughly equal to 5% of your savings but I am not in the US myself and this may be an insanely bad suggestion; but I think it has the right sort of shape.
Cryonics: my own estimate of Pr(signing up for cryonics makes a big difference to my lifetime utility) is low enough that I don’t think I could justify it at any price in comparison with, e.g., charitable donations. However, I suspect that if I found myself with $20M or so in net worth I might sign up as a luxury.
10% donation to favourite cause: I already give a fraction of my income to charitable causes every year (on the order of 10%, but maybe you meant 10% of wealth rather than of income?). If I become much richer, this figure should probably increase. I propose the following extremely rough approximation: if your post-tax income is $X/year then give away about (2+X/$10k) percent of it. Obviously this gives unreasonable results for very large incomes and doesn’t depend on assets; it’s only a crude estimate.
Virtual assistant: I haven’t looked into how much these cost or what they do. It doesn’t currently seem to me as if it’s a service I would find very useful at any level of wealth.
Personal assistant: I don’t know how much you’d pay someone to do this. Let’s suppose it’s $30k/year. I can’t see it being worth more than 3% of my income, suggesting that it becomes worth thinking of at about $1M/year. (You can convert that to wealth by assuming some plausible rate of conversion; I use about 3%; so income of $1M/year is comparable to assets of $30M but no income other than what comes from those assets.)
Car: I didn’t have one until about age 35 when I moved out of the small city I’d previously lived in into a nearby village. Which is to say, the value of having a car depends hugely on circumstances. I am not at all interested in fancy cars myself, and don’t anticipate spending much on cars even if I become very rich.
House cleaner: starts being plausible at approximately “$100k/year and really busy”. Depends a lot on family circumstances (e.g., two parents working full-time with two children versus childless couple one of whom doesn’t have a paid job).
Masseuse: if this means “employing your own masseuse” then it’s somewhere north of the figure for a PA above. If it means “getting a massage from time to time” then I don’t see that there’s any threshold here: you’ll do it more often if you enjoy massage more and if you’re richer. For me it isn’t something that particularly interests me and I have never paid anyone to give me a massage.
Quitting your job: varies a lot with how expensive your tastes are, where you live, how much you enjoy your job, etc. I expect to stop working full time when my reasonably-liquid assets reach somewhere around $2.5M. I may well continue to do much-more-part-time paid work after I stop working full time. I may decide to stop earlier or later depending on all kinds of factors that I’m sure you can think of.
Driver: Comparable to PA, above. I drive rather little, don’t mind driving, and would not take a job that required a very long commute, so I think the chance that I’d ever want to employ a driver is very low. I take taxis sometimes, though.
Boat: Not interested at all.
Airplane: Not interested at all.
House: Already have a nice one. General strategy to date has been: buy rather than rent; get whatever I can with a mortgage no more than about 3x salary and preferably more like 2x; trade up when mortgage fully paid off until we have a house that meets all our reasonable needs. We now have such a house and have no intention to move again in the near future.
Personal clinician: Comparable to PA, above. (More expensive but maybe also more valuable.) If I were in the market for such services, I would first of all investigate whether it’s possible to have a doctor “on call”—still working for others in the usual way, but paid a retainer to be available for consultations at short notice any time I want them. This seems like it might bring almost all the same benefits at much lower cost. Obviously this one depends a lot on health and level of paranoia.
Lawyer: I can’t see why I’d want to employ one myself at any plausible level of wealth.
Bodyguard: See lawyer, above. But obviously particular circumstances might change this—e.g., if I got very rich in a controversial and publicly visible way. (I do not anticipate doing so.)
For a lot of these, my actual answer is “Not interested until I have more money than I ever expect to have, not only because I don’t see how I’d get it but because if I did then I would regard it as indecent not to give most of it away”.
Disagree with this one. Even at a low income I found that having someone come in once a month was definitely worth it. Depends how much you value having a neat house/how much you disvalue cleaning.
Health Insurance: Shouldn’t insurance go down as you get richer, since you’ll be more able to absorb risk? I suppose you might want more health coverage, but you’d also have a higher deductible so it’s not clear if it would be more expensive. Doesn’t your work usually pay for health insurance though? I was under the impression that they had to do stuff like that to avoid the problem of only high-risk people getting health insurance.
Virtual Assistant: From what I can gather, that’s a voice with an internet connection (Warning: TV Tropes). Want!
On personal assistant, I think the 3% of wealth value will not transfer to different people simply.
For many people, the value of a personal assistant is that they can accomplish so much more with their own time. I know a number of people who have taken this approach and report that it was an investment that paid off financially for them.
If you think of it as a pure cost, then yes, you would try to pay 30k ish and not be interested until you had a very large income.
For those people I know who actually use this, they employ people who are quite skilled and may command 50-60k/year or more, and who produce economic value in excess of their paycheck.
The key determinant seems to be the point at which your marginal ability to earn more money per hour from time saved is about 2-3 times what you have to pay your PA per hour. If you are in the right kind of job (sales, business owner), the threshold is probably somewhere around 150k/year. If you are in the wrong kind of job, it probably never makes sense until you are wildly rich.
Driver does work similarly, but again, the threshold is much lower if you need to drive around, but can profitably use time in the car to accomplish work that pays you more than you are paying your driver.
Yes, I agree that these are highly dependent on your circumstances.
My figures (so far as they were properly thought out at all) were based on my estimate of the most likely ways for me to reach the relevant level of wealth. I can think of four (none of them either very probable or spectacularly improbable) and none of them would make me benefit a lot from a PA, but for sure there are people who would benefit far more and might have good reason to employ a highly skilled PA.