In American society, talking about money is a taboo. It is ok to talk about how much money someone else made when they sold their company, or how much money you would like to earn yearly if you got a raise, but in many different ways, talking about money is likely to trigger some embarrassment in the brain, and generate social discomfort. As one random example: no one dares suggest that bills should be paid according to wealth, for instance, instead people quietly assume that fair is each paying ~1/n, which of course completely fails utilitarian standards.
One more interesting thing people don't talk about, but would probably be useful to know, are money trigger action patterns. That would be a trigger action pattern that should trigger whenever you have more money than X, for varying Xs.
A trivial example is when should you stop caring about pennies, or quarters? When should you start taking cabs or Ubers everywhere? These are minor examples, but there are more interesting questions that would benefit from a money trigger action pattern.
An argument can be made for instance that one should invest in health insurance prior to cryonics, cryonics prior to painting a house and recommended charities before expensive soundsystems. But people never put numbers on those things.
When should you buy cryonics and life insurance for it? When you own $1,000? $10,000? $1,000,000? Yes of course those vary from person to person, currency to currency, environment, age group and family size. This is no reason to remain silent about them. Money is the unit of caring, but some people can care about many more things than others in virtue of having more money. Some things are worth caring about if and only if you have that many caring units to spare.
I'd like to see people talking about what one should care about after surpassing specific numeric thresholds of money, and that seems to be an extremely taboo topic. Seems that would be particularly revealing when someone who does not have a certain amount suggests a trigger action pattern and someone who does have that amount realizes that, indeed, they should purchase that thing. Some people would also calibrate better over whether they need more or less money, if they had thought about these thresholds beforehand.
Some suggested items for those who want to try numeric triggers: health insurance, cryonics, 10% donation to favorite cause, virtual assistant, personal assistant, car, house cleaner, masseuse, quitting your job, driver, boat, airplane, house, personal clinician, lawyer, body guard, etc...
...notice also that some of these are resource satisfiable, but some may not. It may always be more worth financing your anti-aging helper than your costume designer, so you'd hire the 10 millionth scientist to find out how to keep you young before considering hiring someone to design clothes specifically for you, perhaps because you don't like unique clothes. This is my feeling about boats, it feels like there are always other things that can be done with money that precede having a boat, though outside view is that a lot of people who own a lot of money buy boats.
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.