How can I spend money to improve my life?

I think money prevents certain types misery more than it buys happiness.

For example, flights with stopovers and shitty public transportation make me miserable and usually sick. By spending money on direct flights and taxis, I save myself many days of life that would otherwise be lost (I have to travel a lot).

Similarly, knowing I can afford good medical care if I get sick, or find a new apartment if mine becomes unpleasant, or send my kids to a private school if public schools are too useless... these things don't make me deeply happy, but if they were not true, that would make me constantly anxious.

Money is a cushion against disaster. If something goes awry, you can use it to buy medical or legal or technical assistance. However, for me personally it does not cause an actually happy or joyful affect, nor does it seem to buy the things that do (except very indirectly).

If you spend more than 20 minutes on your commute (one way), consider moving to somewhere closer to where you work. Walking distance is ideal, biking distance a good second-best. Commutes literally kill; you will not only get more time daily, but also your expected lifetime will increase.

Improve the ergonomics of your computer situation:

• Better chair
• Better desk
• Keyboard without a numpad so that the mouse doesn't need to be so far out
• Bigger monitors/multiple monitors
• If your computer is at all slow or annoying-to-use, consider whether better hardware could help that (and thus reduce the stress of using it). E.g. getting an SSD could decrease load times if you find those problematic

Buy nice clothes

Other people in this thread have gone down the obvious "spend money to pay people to do things you don't like doing but want done" route. My suggestion is to get hobbies. Awesome, awesome hobbies. Sure, there's a time commitment to continue with a hobby, but they can be put down with little ill effect.Here's what I'd start with:

Archery. Buy a bow and some lessons and perhaps a range membership.

Sailing. Sunscreen, clothing, and a Sunfish or other small dinghy. Maybe get lessons as well. I'd start at a lake.

Blacksmithing or welding. Take some fun classes along those lines at a community college or trade school or the like. Alternatively, you can get pliers and some metal wire and make chain mail (this, however, is much more time intensive, but cheap in terms of money alone).

Racing. You'd probably want to start with go-karts and the like.

Sports. Generally cheap and enjoyable.

As far as programming, writing, and people skills go, a big part of improving is spending time on it. Getting paid feedback can probably help as well.

For life-optimization in general, moving to a place closer to work and cutting down on your commute is worthwhile in general. You'd have to do the math to see how much you'd wind up paying for your time.

Getting rid of stuff to maintain is a freebie. Things are option-priced: owning something gives you the right to use it later. It also forces you to either maintain it or lose it. Keep track of the time and money costs as well as how often you use your car, and compare to the costs of renting a car instead.

I'd also recommend laser eye surgery, particularly if you have any amount of astigmatism or are clumsy. Financed over two years, my cost is something like $5/day. And as for clumsiness, well, a significant amount of that sort of thing goes away when things are the same shape across your field of vision. It's anecdotes, sure, but all four people (myself included) that I know that got lasik have better hand-eye coordination and significantly reduced clumsiness. It's hard for me to overstate how valuable laser eye surgery has been. My sister rates it as the third best decision she's ever made, behind marrying her husband and buying a house she loves the daylights out of.

If you wake up before the sun rises (or have blackout shades), would recommendI this gradual-wakeup light alarm clock. I bought it after seeing someone link it on LessWrong. If your morning wakeups are abrupt, I highly recommend this. For the 30 minutes before your set alarm time, it gradually brightens the light. Then if you're not awake yet by the time the sound comes on, it's birds chirping VERY softly that slowly gets louder. I usually actually mistake them for real birds in my half-asleep state. Its a much more pleasant way to get up in the morning and personally, I feel a lot better when I do.

I also have a Vitamix that I use usually twice a day and I absolutely love it. Great quality and really easy to clean.

Time is probably the best thing you can buy for the long term. You could consider investing that money and at 5% you'd have almost a million dollars in 25 years - that may sound like a long time, but it would mean you could be financially independent in your early forties and would allow you spend an additional 8-10 hours a day on things you enjoy if you didn't have to earn a salary.

Think about the things you use very often and/or for extended amounts of time. Buy the highest quality version of that that you can afford. For example shoes, chairs, beds, at any one time you will be in one of the three, so buy the best you can afford. Donating to a feel-good charity might also improve your happiness. The exact amount seems to be irrelevant.

Edit: Another possibility is to buy more than you actually need of items you use, like having multiple nail clippers at multiple locations for convenience instead of having to carry out one specific nailclipper.

Your last line is a good hint to the direction you should be thinking. Find ways to spend money to save time, or improve your experience where you spend a lot of time.

Paying a housecleaner or gardener can free up some time if you don't get value from those activities but do get value from the results. TaskRabbit can get you out of some other errands that fall into the same category (you want done, but don't want to do).

Paying a personal trainer can make your health-improving activities a lot more efficient. Paying for classes is a mixed bag, but can give structure and motivation for learning that you don't get with self-scheduled time.

As a programmer, you may be able to have a more enjoyable and perhaps more effective time at your job if you spend money on equipment rather than limiting yourself to what your employer provides.

Depending on if you have them already, invest in a few tailored pieces clothing that go with a lot and you can wear regularly.

Offer to pay for your friends to come with you to do what you like (for instance if you like ice-skating and you all usually end up at bars, offer to pay for them to come ice-skating with you - they'll be happy to go for free, and you'll get better quality out of your time with them).

Give small amounts to charities you see along the street, if you identify with them (for the warm fuzzies).

Make a habit of buying something nice at a bakery or similar outside work once a week and bringing it in for your colleagues. Chat with them over it.

If you don't have dietary restrictions and are easy about what you eat, get one of those packages where they deliver you recipes and ingredients every week (cut down the time planning, buying and cooking and you can find one that's healthy and balanced - most are by design anyway).

Get a massage every couple of weeks.

Go to some place to get some serious neuromuscula body work that focuses on posture, alignment, balanced muscular strength and tone. Feldenkrais, Hanna, Pilates, Alexander.

Have regular blood work done. Get basic dna testing, if not a full genome (yet).

Hire a cook to stock your fridge with tasty, nutritious meals for the week.

If you wear glasses, try switching to night&day contact lenses. I don't know about others, but it's one of the things I most gladly spend extra money on. They're much, much more comfortable than glasses -- you just put them on and forget about your vision problems until you have to change them. There have been days when I had run out of contacts and had to wear glasses, and the experience was horrible compared to what I was used to.

I brainstormed about this for a while and reflected on what past purchases I had made that I liked and hadn't liked. YMMV but here's what I concluded:

• Incremental upgrades to existing items is rarely worth it unless the existing option is terrible; a nice mouse is only slightly nicer than whatever you're currently using, most of the time you don't really use the extra speed from a faster computer, etc.
• Conversely, get things that open up new options for you; e.g. a smartphone lets you do computer things in places where you wouldn't before so is better than a new laptop in many case
• "buy experiences" seems to work; buy a musical instrument and take lessons or other things, learn to bake (and then give away your baked goods to friends)
• Weather-specific clothes can make some situations much easier: if you're cold, buy something warm. It's not actually hard to stay warm and being prepared means you don't have to worry about what going out and doing things based on the weather.
• Spending money to remove minor inconveniences can be worth it; if it bothers you every day then change it
• I buy way more video games than I finish anymore, but still value completing them so I prefer to buy short indie games now
• I consistently over-estimate fancy new electronics and should correspondingly reduce my expectations for things like, say, the Oculus Rift

If you want to gain personal skills, a good avenue for spending money is removing distractions that decrease the time you have to devote to these skills. For example, hire cleaners or gardeners to free up the time spent on necessary chores.

If money doesn't make you happy, then you probably aren't spending it right

The best ratio of happiness per Euro spent I ever got was from a shower with a rain shower head for about 120€. I imagine a full fledged shower panel with massage showers could give even more happiness but maybe with a smaller ratio.

Another example was spending about 400€ on a Saitek pro flight control and X-Plane 10.

Also vacations probably count. There was this seafood plate I once had on Mallorca ...

The thing is, a lot of the advantages you get from money can be had on the cheap if you are reasonably resourceful. For example, it may be awesome to go out with your family to a fancy restaurant for dinner. But it's almost as awesome (and in some ways more awesome) to plan and cook your own nice meal for your family. At far less expense.

(Note I am referring to your typical middle class American here.)

I do agree that saving on commuting time and inconvenience is worthwhile if you can afford it.

How are your savings for retirement?

If you have no retirement savings, you can set some up at an easy to use online brokerage: Your early twenties is a great time to start, managing your retirement account doesn't really have to take a large amount of time, and 50 dollars a day should cover initial expenditures.

Also, at 29, I personally enjoy fiddling around with my retirement account... although it took me a while to figure out the right settings for myself and I did have some initial panics when it was smaller, I wasn't as familiar with the pros and cons of various investment types, and one of my stocks had gone down quite a bit. Now that it is bigger and much more well diversified, it's more fun.

IIRC, the most actionable and strong effect in happiness research is to spend much more money on others - giving people things, buying your friends food/drink. The effect does not intensify with price, so buy others lots of little things!

Lukeprog's excellent post on happiness summarized a lot of this research, and although money itself does not correlate particularly strongly with happiness above a certain level, there are a few things there that money could certainly help with - trainers for various things, social life (better clothes, going to more events with people), moving to avoid commute or trying things (e.g various audiobooks) to improve it - so give it a skim and see if anything jumps out at you as suitable.

Random thought 2:

The next time you get a car, get one with a thermostat. It's an uncommon option and I don't know how much it costs, but the Ford Taurus my parents bought off the lot happened to have one. In other cars, the heat and air conditioning tend to overshoot, leaving me cold in the summer and hot in the winter on long trips.

One of the things that improved my life most after moving to SF was buying a good bike and using it for nearly all my transportation needs. More fun, less stressful, and much healthier than driving or public transit. You want a road bike, not a mountain bike, here, since extra weight makes a huge difference going up hills.

General information-getting (most of this is general "stuff I recommend to anyone", but some of it does require money):

• Get a Kindle. Easily worth its price, if you can afford it.
• Get books. Much easier to get buy them from Amazon than getting them from anywhere else.
• Make a subscription to Audible.com and start listening to Audiobooks. Incredible life improvement to be able to turn moments I'm otherwise not mentally occupied, with more time to read.
• Get stereo bluetooth headphones. These are headphones you can easily stick in a pocket, turn on quickly and start listening to your audiobook. Makes the experience of audiobooks MUCH better.

Some other obvious stuff:

• Turn money into time. Hire a cleaner/others to do chores you don't want (laundry service that picks stuff up form your house? etc.)
• Hell, you can probably hire a chef or equivalent to cook great and healthy meals.
• Use taxis/other expensive but time-saving choices for travel.

Oh, and in general, live closer to your job. Incredibly important, easier to achieve with money.

I've just scratched the surface for now, but that's off the top of my head.

Obvious, but: if you don't already, hire a cleaner.

(Not sure whether $50/day allows you to do this in San Francisco, but:) Live within walking/cycling distance of work, grocery stores, nightlife, museums, etc. so you won't have to drive a car every day.

Spend it on other people.

http://www.uvm.edu/~pdodds/teaching/courses/2009-08UVM-300/docs/others/everything/dunn2008a.pdf

Not sure about specific details, but I have a feeling that it is easy to make a mistake of thinking about "what is easy to buy & would be convenient". Sure, it is great to pay someone else to do your dishes, but is that really the best way to convert money into awesomeness?

Instead I would recommend making a specific plan about becoming more awesome, and only then to search for a specific point of the plan where extra money can give me the greatest bonus. For example, let's say I want to become a rock star. I can pay someone to do my dishes, which will give me more free time, which I can spend playing the guitar; and that is useful. But maybe it would be more useful to spend the money on the guitar lessons, on musical instruments, on someone to research what is the best way to play the music or where is the best opportunity on the market, or even on someone to regularly remind me to play the guitar.

In other words, if you have decided on a best way to use your money to improve your life before having a specific plan of what you are going to do, it is probably not the best way.

Random thought 4:

Do you have any pets? It can be very nice to live with a cat or a dog.

Random thought 1:

Get a 3-channel or 5-channel sound system for your TV and/or computer. My father didn't know what he was missing until he did, and now he thinks it's great. Cost: $1000-2000.

(The reason we got one in the first place is kind of weird: my father likes to watch Blu-Ray movies, but many of them had sound that was totally out of balance: the sound effects were blasting but the spoken dialogue was barely audible. Online research indicated that this was partially a result of converting from 5.1 surround sound to stereo sound; in 5.1 sound, the sound effects come out of the side speakers but the dialogue would come out of the center speaker. Our surround sound system lets us turn up the center speaker and turn down the side speakers, fixing the problem, but before we got it, our hardware's conversion algorithms controlled the balance for us - and did it poorly.)

For some years now I have had a Panasonic breadmaker, model SD-ZB2512. It takes less than five minutes in the evening, generating no mess and no washing up (if you use olive oil instead of butter, so as to avoid generating a fatty knife), and you can have hot fresh bread ready-baked as you wake up. The only downside to bread made this way is that you have to slice it. It tastes dramatically better than all but the most expensive shop-bought bread, and the ingredients store in a cupboard for literally months so it's even highly pandemic-proof. Bread that is still hot from the breadmaker is really one of the best foods I know. The breadmaker has literally no cost to upkeep: you don't even need to clean it, as it's basically an oven in a pot.

A more ergonomic computer setup. It's highly surprising how very much it can do for both comfort, health, and performance. Tons of low hanging fruit that people miss. If you spend as much time as it sound siting in the same spot every day it really should be a no expenses spare kind of deal. For most applications I'd even consider it more important than the actual hardware in the box.

You really should look it up more in depth and/or ask someone who knows this stuff at a semi-professional level, but I'll summarize roughly some points.

The most important part is how you sit. Get a really good professional quality chair, a large surface for input devices, and mount your screen(s) on arm(s) or other device that make them easily repositioned. Adjustability is key in all of these, everything should be independently movable and the purpose is to enable you to sit right without discomfort or effort, but you member that you still have to actually do so.

There are advantages to standing instead of siting, but since you cant do that ALL the time in order to enable it you need motorized table legs. Or at least thats how I did it.

The other stuff is more posible to just go on what feels and look right; big screens but more importantly high colour quality, and the purpose is not to cover you entire visual feild but rather enabling having them further away and so straining your eyes less. I've personaly found using an extremely hgih precision mouse and cranking the acceleration up to crazy levels matter more than shape or weight; I rarely have to more it more than a centimeter. Making your enviroment nice looking and uncluttered can have a concrete impact and of corse light levels and avoiding both glare and eyestrain from to much contrast helps. Oh, and for bayes sake use headphones not speakers; you probably know some audiophile that can give better instructions then me on the specifics of that.

My current setup: Ergotron dual arms, big IKEA glass table with motorized legs to raise or lower. Wireless keyboard. Wacom Intuos tablet double as my main mouse. 2x identical screens, forgot the exact specs but they're good. Entire room designed carefully around the computer with bed thrown in as an afterthought. Bunch of electrical supply stuff and lights. High quality voice chat and music headset. Bunch of stuff I forgot or is to minor to bother listing.

Turn your money into time; that is, purchase modafinil.

fish oil supplements do not have the same efficacy as actually eating fish regularly. You can get sashimi grade salmon surprisingly cheaply delivered to your house.

Some ideas:

• Nice clothing (http://www.makeyourownjeans.com/ to get custom-designed jeans that fit really well; http://www.threadless.com/ for graphic t-shirts, etc. Or hire someone to help you design your wardrobe.) Hairstyling products can be fun (if you don't want to do a lot of reading, maybe just get these two: 1 2). Also, consider getting a salon haircut; I look way better getting monthly $30 haircuts from a top-rated "men's haircuts" person on Yelp than I do getting irregular $10 budget haircuts.

• Good for loosening/relaxing back muscles

• LW Product & Service Recommendations

• Solved the problem where I had to keep sipping water to avoid getting thirsty while falling asleep

• Nootropics

• Pepper spray so you can explore sketchy parts of SF with impunity

• Mobile internet to browse the internet with impunity

However, it seems worth noting that at a certain point you will have purchased all of the low-hanging fruit and it will be harder to improve your quality of life, etc. through additional purchases. I'm also an early 20s computer programmer in SF; most of the items listed above are purchases I made in the past year, and I still had a lot of money left over.

I think a more compelling selfish case for making more money is that you can use it to buy vacations. I'm too unselfish to do this but it sounds like fun.

ETA: I think the approach taken in this thread is a bad one if you're actually trying to optimize your life. You're better off starting with goals (e.g. be happy or live long) and work backward from how to achieve them rather than starting with the question of how to get rid of all the money you're earning. If the best way to achieve your goal seems to require willpower maybe use your money to hire a life coach.

If you save up a fair amount of money, you can take a substantial amount of time off from work (say 6-12 months), and use it to do something awesome like travel around the world or read the great books or both.

I find it's well worth spending money on reliability and low maintenance for things you use regularly. I cycle as my main form of transport, and I spent extra money on a good set of internal hub gears. The only maintenance required is a yearly oil change. The time needed to clean and adjust derailuer gears probably isn't much, but the subjective feeling of reliability is valuable for me. Likewise, I use tires with strong puncture protection. I'm confident that I can set out to cycle at short notice and arrive at my destination at a predictable time.

The same principle applies to computers, eg. reducing the number of moving parts, having good filters at air intakes, buying reputable brands for parts even with no direct performance benefit (eg. power supplies). I have less computer problems than people I know who buy purely on cost:performance ratio.

My favored option is buying durable goods, especially labor-saving devices. $50/day surplus is enough to make one significant purchase (say, a laundry machine or a good-quality item of furniture) each month, for a noticeable long-term improvement in comfort. I don't like spending money in ways that will have to be repeated regularly.

That's my own plan for the next year, anyway; until recently, I spent my surplus paying down debts. (which, incidentally, you should do first if you have any, but I assume since you're asking that you do not.)

The obvious thing is to hire a therapist. They're the experts, right?

Since I don't have $50/day type money, I would do these things if I had it:

• Buy healthy food.
• Buy exercise equipment, or a gym membership.
• Put enough away until I could hire an accountant/start a business and/or nonprofit / etc, or at least hire people for the parts of my various projects I cannot handle alone or with too low charisma to amass an army of reliable volunteers.
• Due to my disability, the amount of independence I have and the amount of money under my control are likely to correlate. I can't know for sure without being rich, but money would let me travel more freely, hire people who know what they're doing if ever I need assistance, pay Meta Med to point me toward the most likely cure, and in the meantime, buy all the accessibility gadgets I can't currently afford/justify asking the government to pay for.
• Healthcare! Life insurance! I'm still not completely convinced regarding cryonics, but it's not like I could afford it even if I was.
• Books. Books are orders of magnitude more expensive for me than you, but the same principal applies. I have a good decade worth of books I haven't been able to read, and if I suddenly had the money to get them...
• There's probably useful training I could buy, I dunno. My communication and charisma need work. Purchasing power means I can shop until I succeed.

And that's just the list I could make without stopping to draw breath (If I stuck to the identifiers rather than descriptions). I suspect I could come up with more, given a little effort. Even if I don't move, my trailer could use some serious work, not to mention a security system.

While some of those are luxury type things, most of them are serious health / quality of life-related, and boons to rationality besides (good health and books and access to more people seem like they'd help on that front, at least).

Eat well, and go out often. Books and games are better as low-cost entertainment, but my experience is one comes to appreciate social entertainment more.

I don't know whether there a good way to purchase training for people skills in San Francisco for $50/day. I would guess that most seminars are over that price point. What you could buy for that budget might be improv comedy classes.

• hire a tutor to teach you programming.

• hire someone to search/ check out entertainment stuff that you might like. ( works best if the person likes the same stuff you do.)

Have you given at least $5,000 to any effective altruist cause? If you have, I will commit to spend at least 5 minutes thinking about your situation and composing my reply.

Random thought 3:

Take up Magic: the Gathering. It's an amazing game but playing Constructed formats competitively can cost a thousand or so dollars a year on new cards.