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RomeoStevens comments on Money threshold Trigger Action Patterns - Less Wrong Discussion

17 Post author: Neotenic 20 February 2015 04:56AM

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Comment author: gjm 20 February 2015 10:54:28AM 2 points [-]

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".

Comment author: RomeoStevens 20 February 2015 08:30:44PM 3 points [-]

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.