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.
Owning a car can have a large advantage over leasing, if you are likely to keep the car a long time. An owned car can also become a second backup car, that it's no big deal if it breaks down) if you get a newer one. Leasing two cars at once is a big waste of money.
Owning versus renting a home is not clear cut at all. Renting a house is a huge money pit unless you are frequently moving, and renting an apartment vs. owning a house is often not comparable in lifestyle. Owning a house gives you the property and flexibility, and can result in longer-term wealth building.
There is a lot of debate in America about whether or not we are still in a housing bubble, but it seems to be the general consensus that in at least some areas of the country, buying a house is probably not a good long term investment.