I value experiences over stuff more than most, but stuff in your master bath that pisses you off pisses you off every day, and stuff you love in your bath is stuff you use every day. Like, remodeling every 5 years is stupid, but if you’re going to love it for 30 or more, especially when the current one is frustrating, that can easily have the utility to meet or exceed 4 vacations. Obviously there has to be a reasonable budget and focus on things that you do actually use and love every day (the house we bought has a big fancy tub that we’ve never used. Maybe the previous owners used it regularly, but that is the sort of thing that is foolish to splurge on if you don’t use it regularly), but things you use and love every day are the sorts of things to spend money on.
There’s another addition to my people-I-hate list.
Yeah, I was going to post almost exactly this. The funny thing is that it my first experience with a remodel and I did a bunch of donkish things that I’m tilted by. Nevertheless, I think that it was worth the ridiculous price. I guess the silver lining on the ridiculous price is that we locked everything in before COVID and prices became even more ridiculous. So I have tricked myself into thinking it was a bargain.
Mme Melkerson did exactly this and had a ridiculous tub installed. It has been used two times. One time when I insisted that she test it to make sure everything worked properly (it didn’t). And then one time after they fixed it to test it again. Never used again even once.
Yeah, don’t do that. Don’t blow up walls to install shit you’ll never use at the expense of other things. But shit, if you have shit in your bathroom that actively pisses you off in features you use daily, that’s good shit to fix.
We valued the stupid bathtub we never have used at $0 when buying our house, and despite it we are incredibly lucky to have bought it when we did for the price we did. I’d never pay to install something like that, but I’d totally turn a shower I use and hate into a shower I like.
Random thought. There is probably an ideal age of death, for max capitalism. Like, my death and yours. Where you stop aiding it and start being a drag on the system.
Or maybe old people are better for max capitalism. I dunno. … if there is a pivot point tho, that seems important
I mean, “the system” is big and complex with lots of differing preferences. From a certain perspective, the moment you retire, you’ve stopped producing value and are therefore worthless. You could be taken out back and shot, and your estate distributed to either your kids or other people who are likely to spend it rather than save it so that it can end up in the hands of the rich. On the other hand, the medical industrial complex would rather you live as long as possible so that they can extract as much of that from you themselves instead of missing out on essentially all of it if you were to just take a euthanasia roller coaster. Similarly, the retirement community would be pretty pissed if people just worked until they died or couldn’t work and then were executed.
Jesus I read half of the first paragraph and couldn’t go on.
Learning how much marketing people can make was a shock to me after i met my wife, at least at tech companies not familiar with other industries.
Better than me, I was out after reading the topic heading.
And their salaries are half of what the tech side makes!
“Performance marketing”? WTF, where was that degree when my stupid ass was getting 2 science degrees and making 10 times less
He…should have more than $6 million?
Yeah but the thing that shocked me was there can be a lot less of a difference in pay than I ever thought. Obviously your average dev salary is pretty high but a senior marketing manager with only a 1 or 2 direct reports and fairly minimal experience (think mid, late 20s person if they’re moving up quickly) can make $150k-200k. Then going up from there to a director or VP roll you’re talking $300k+ and significant equity (7 figure opportunities based on the company).
Yup, and believe it or not, senior managers on the tech side are at around $400k - going up to 800k+ for director level. Tech salaries are insane right now.
I’m not saying you’re wrong, but how did you arrive at that?
Yea, might as well just learn to code at this point. College seems to be getting more and more worthless
The insanity derives from and is caused by the fact that at the point in life when everyone makes these decisions, we are incredibly ill-equipped to make them and are loaded up with horrendous advice.
“Do what you love, and you’ll never work a day in your life!”
Yeah well maybe I love broadcasting, but hate having a shitty boss who treats me like I’m worthless. Maybe I love what I do, but I also like having a roof over my head and food on the table and the jobs in my industry pay shit.
Or, big brain moment here, maybe it’s way smarter to bank massive amounts of money doing something I am meh on or hate for a decade, so I can retire in my fucking 30’s and spend the rest of my life doing whatever the fuck I want whenever the fuck I want and loving it.
“You can be anything you want to be!”
No you fucking can’t. There was a kid in my broadcasting class paying $42,000 a year in 2004-2008 money to the #1 broadcasting school in the country who couldn’t string together three sentences without stumbling all over his words, panicking, and melting down - and this on a broadcast airing to like 30 kids in our class. Over four years, one professor - senior year no less - had the stones to sit him down and say, “Hey, sorry, this isn’t going to work out for you.”
Kid or his parents flushed 168K down the drain so he could spend several years wallowing in unemployment before giving up and going into sales or something. Poor guy worked his ass off in school and trying to make it, too.
“Money isn’t everything, or the most important thing!”
Well, sure, I agree. But what is? Family? OK, what lets you spend more time with family? Help family members in need? Do fun/memorable things with family?
Love? Absolutely! Good luck in the dating process if you’re flat broke!
Freedom? Damn right! Throw a financial on the front of that, though, if you really want to be free.
And on and on. The fact that we make kids make those decisions at 17 or 18, and the opportunity to change course without significant penalties ends around 20 is a travesty.
A ridiculously high percentage of kids would be better off having someone throw the entire tuition amount in the S&P for them, screwing around for a few years, then figuring it out. Obviously most people don’t have it in cash up front to do that with, though, and scholarships make a difference.
But it’s also stupid that the financial information on different career paths tends to be laid out in terms of entry level salary. We should be telling kids what the average net worth is of someone in that career path at 30, 40, 50, 60 years old, along with the 25th and 75th percentiles, what the average work week really is, what the average retirement age is, and where the jobs are.
As a civil engineer grad, I never would have made it codeing. I would routinely hand in assignments 20% done because that’s what I could figure out. I had no talent for it.