5 Things I Will Never Spend Money On as a Multimillionaire (And 5 That Are Worth Every Penny)

0:00You spent your whole life making sure you wouldn't run out of money, but nobody warned you that you might just run out of time first with the money still sitting there. unspent, unenjoyed, waiting for a version of the future that guess what is right in front of you. The money was not the finish line. The money is just the tool to buy what you already value. And at some point, I want you to use it. Hello, friends. This is Tyler Gardner welcoming you to another episode of your money guide on the side, where it is my job to simplify what seems complex, add nuance to what seems simple, and learn from and alongside some of the brightest minds in money, finance, and investing.

0:47So let's get started and get you one step closer to where you need to be. Quick note before we start, September's pre-order bonus for my book, Real Wealth, is something I've wanted myself for years and never been able to find. So I created it. It's called the Real Wealth Money Calendar. 12 months, five action items per month, all on one page. Because most people I know already know what to do. They just don't necessarily know when, and they don't have accountability. So this is your 2027 on one page. 60 moves in the month you actually need to make them. Pre-order Real Wealth at tylergardner.com book.

1:28Let me know you did. and your money calendar will be in your inbox in early October. Welcome back, my friends, to another episode, and I'm going to start with a question that almost nobody in the financial industry will ever ask you that I know of. Not your advisor, not your 401k provider, and certainly not the guy selling you an annuity at your free steak dinner this evening. What is the money actually for? I know, I talk about this a lot. not how you get the money, not how to grow the money, not how to protect it from taxes, inflation, and your brother-in-law's business idea, but what is it for?

2:10What at the end of all of the compounding is the money supposed to do for me, my family, my well-being, my sense of purpose and fulfillment? Today we're doing something a little bit different. I'm not going to go into the data. I'm not going to go into historical trends. Mostly, this is a very personal episode. And I'm going to tell you exactly what I spend money on, exactly what I refuse to spend money on, and why I think the second half of your financial life is a completely different skill than the first half. A skill, by the way, that the data says most of us are not doing too well at. And fair warning, one of my answers for what I spend money on is absolute financial heresy.

2:57And I'll stand by it forever. And familiar ask, as always, if you have found this show helpful in any way, if you've ever found it made your commute just a little less hectic, or you've shared it with a friend who could use some quick guidance, please consider leaving a review on Apple or Spotify as it helps more people find the show, and it helps me know that this entire endeavor in free financial literacy is getting through to some folks, and we're all getting a little bit closer to where we need to be. Let's start with the skill nobody taught you. The most devastating retirement statistic that I will read you all year is from the Employee Benefit Research Institute, and it's about as sober and unglamorous an organization as exists in America, but they published new research this spring tracking real retirees over decades.

3:51And they found that among people who retired with$500 ,000 or more, six in 10 still had at least 80 % of their money a full decade into retirement. 45 % had more money than they started with. And even after 22 years of retirement, 42 % still had most, all, or more than all of their original savings. Nearly half of well-funded retirees are 10 years into retirement and richer than they were the day they quit. Now, some of that has been good markets, but EBRI's own Director of Wealth Research looked at the number of people in their mid-80s still sitting at a hundred percent of their savings and his conclusion was blunt these people are being too conservative now obviously that's subjective and as always do what works for you and your family but here's the part about that that really does get me when researchers asked thousands of Americans between 45 and 79 which outcome they'd regret more.

5:0256 % said running out of money while still alive, but only 6 % said dying with money left over. Only 6 % of people fear the thing that is actually happening to almost everybody. Now, I'm sure much of that has to do with legacy planning and knowing that money can continue to serve a very important purpose for future generations. But for sake of this thought process and this particular episode, I'm going to put that aside just for a moment, but knowing that it's there. We spend 40 years terrified of the wrong ending. We armor ourselves against a famine that for most diligent savers never comes. And meanwhile, 38 % of retirees admit they're spending less than they want to, not because they're broke, but because they can't give themselves permission.

5:58I've talked before on this show about the Trinity study, and I'll give you just one number today. In the original research, a retiree with a stock-heavy portfolio who followed the famous 4 % rule didn't typically run out of money after 30 years. That's the stat that everybody knows. But what most people don't pay attention to, or what most people have never even heard is that the median outcome of those portfolios was ending with more than nine to 10 times what they started with. So the 4 % rule was never really protecting somebody. It was protecting your heirs from ever needing jobs again. So here's my thesis for today.

6:40Getting money is a skill. It's an important one. Spending money is a different skill. And most of us spent so long mastering that first one that we never learned the second, or at least we've never learned to spend the money on things that really matter to us individually. Worse, we spent decades telling ourselves a certain story. And I've been over this before too. When I have enough, then I'll be happy. Then I'll buy the boat. Then I'll get the first class seat. Then whatever. And then the money arrives as we went over in the Ithaca episode months ago, and that strange thing happens that half to most of the stuff on our old fantasy list turns out to really do nothing for you.

7:30If anything, it kind of depresses you because it was supposed to do something for you. And a lot of the stuff that actually makes life turn out to be worth living really and truly is the stuff that costs almost nothing. The folks at MIT's Age Lab like to point out that the average retirement is about 8 ,000 days long. 8 ,000 mornings. That's roughly the same length as your entire childhood. The question isn't whether you can afford those days, because the data shows you probably can. The question is what you're going to do to fill them. So today, with total honesty, some mild embarrassment, I've produced the two lists that I have come up with.

8:17Five things I will happily overpay for, and five things I will never buy again, no matter how large the portfolio grows. Your lists are absolutely going to be different. That's the entire point. But if nothing else, I thought this list would at least get the gears turning. This episode is brought to you by Momentus. For about a decade, I was what you might call a cardio bunny. I loved swimming, running, and daily walks with the hounds. I felt virtuous. I also continued to look exactly the same, like a man in a before photo who never got in after. Then I finally started lifting heavy. Not a few curls between podcast episodes heavy, but actually heavy.

9:01And for the first time in years, things changed. My strength, my recovery, how I feel getting out of a chair, and at this age, that last one counts. Which is how I ended up starting to take creatine, one of the most researched supplements there is for strength, power, lean muscle, recovery, even cognitive performance. And where most brands spent the boom chasing flavors instead of making the creatine better, Momentus went the other way with signature-spec creatine. It's made in a pharmaceutical facility and verified through a six-stage testing process with four independent agencies, 10 times fewer impurities, two to five times tighter heavy metal limits, screening for PFAS and microplastics.

9:41Now, that's not just clever marketing. It's just the standard I'm looking for, and it happens to be the Momentus standard. And bonus, the ultra-fine powder actually dissolves, which I appreciate every morning. Head to livemomentus.com and use code TYLER for up to 35 % off your entire first order. That's livemomentous.com, promo code TYLER. This episode is brought to you by Gelt. When was the last time anyone checked your CPA's work? Because we get second opinions on everything. A hip replacement, a boiler estimate, a used Subaru. But the person who's done our taxes since the Bush administration, the first one just carries on unreviewed.

10:26I include myself here. My old CPA could have been using crayon and I'd have signed and said, carry on. But my bigger concern is the relationship. Most business owners I know have a CPA who files in the spring and then disappears like a groundhog until next spring. That's compliance. It's not a strategy. Because the moves that change what you owe this year, how you pay yourself, your retirement plan, whether your nine-year-old can be legally employed as a professional paper shredder. Nearly all expire December 31st. And if your income bounces around like mine does, a Q4 projection shows where you stand while there's still time to act.

11:04That's why I keep talking about Gelt, a proactive year-round tax team for business owners and high net worth individuals. Start your year-end review at joingelt.com slash collaboration slash Tyler. That's joingelt.com slash collaboration slash Tyler. That's G-E-L-T. And the earlier you start, the more they have to work with. Part one, five things that are absolutely worth the money to me. Number one, tipping 30 % for genuinely great service. Hear me out, my friends, because I know I just triggered roughly 98 % of you. You have a lovely dinner out. The bill is$60. The standard tip, as we know, or at least what it was a couple years back, was 20%, so$12.

11:58I'm suggesting$18. The difference is$6. $6, for most people listening to this show, is a rounding error. It's what the parking meter costs nowadays. It's not going to change your withdrawal rate. It's not going to change your Monte Carlo simulation or your legacy by one visible pixel. But here's what's happening on the other side of that transaction. Right now, as all of you know, America is in the middle of a full blown tipping revolt. A 2026 Wallet Hub survey found that over 80 % of Americans say tipping culture has gotten wildly out of control. Square's payment data showed average tips at restaurants and cafes dipping below 15 % last year.

12:44Bankrate found that only 65 % of people consistently tip their server at a sit-down restaurant anymore, down from 77 % before the pandemic. Servers are living through the stingiest tipping era in a generation. Now, I'll be completely fair that it's also on those businesses to stop flipping that dang iPad when I picked up a muffin and telling me I owe them 70 % as a tip. However, back to it, this means that your 30 % tip, the 30 % tip at a sit down restaurant with great service, that 30 % tip has actually never been louder. You're not just leaving money. You're the best table that server may have seen all week, possibly all month for$6.

13:30And the research on this is additionally lovely. Behavioral scientists have found over and over that spending money on other people reliably produces more lasting happiness than spending the same amount of money on ourselves. It's one of the most durable findings in the entire happiness literature. Generosity is the only purchase where both parties can leave richer. I call it the best exchange rate in finance,$6 in, a week of someone's improved faith in humanity out, show me an index fund that does that. Number two, a capsule wardrobe. I own several versions of the exact same outfit. Dark jeans, solid shirts, white t-shirts, one good jacket, and I have not made a meaningful clothing decision since roughly 2015, and I intend to keep that streak alive until they bury me, presumably, in dark jeans and a white tee.

14:33People think this is about money, and it's partly about money, but it's mostly about attention. Every morning, I know you've heard this, but it's just true. Millions of Americans stand in front of a closet performing this small, anxious negotiation with themselves before they've even had coffee or brushed their teeth. I outsource that negotiation to my former self one time a decade ago, and he has since handled it forever. It's the Steve Jobs Energy Vermont edition. Because here's the secret, this dirty secret of the American closet anyway. Estimates suggest, this is fascinating, the average American buys somewhere around 60 new pieces of clothing a year.

15:17And study after study finds we actually wear about three of the articles of those new 60 per year on a regular basis. So your closet is not your wardrobe. It turns into a museum of decisions that we ultimately regret. So for those of you in or near retirement, I'd argue this one matters even more. You just left a world that had a dress code. This is the moment to decide once what you actually like wearing. This is the single best part that I have found of working for myself. No dress code except for Tyler's dress code. So you're going to find what you actually like wearing, you're going to buy the best dang version of it that money can buy, and then you're never going to think about it again.

16:03And pro tip, my dad gave me this one and I love it and use it. If you find the style that fits and you love it, buy three of them because you never know when they're going to change the cut and you never know where it's going to be in a couple years and you've officially adopted a beautiful capsule wardrobe. So spend real money on that one decision. Great boots, phenomenal coat, then close the closet. Buy fewer things, buy better things, buy them once. Number three, books. Real ones, not electronic editions. I read them, then I put them on a shelf so that guests will think that I'm smart. I want to be clear that both of those functions are worth full price to me.

16:47But let me give you the data point that should make every person over 60 stop listening to this podcast and drive to a bookstore. Yale researchers followed more than 3 ,600 adults over age 50 for 12 years, and they found that people who read books, actual books, chapters and all, had a survival advantage of almost two years compared to people who didn't. Not magazines, not newspapers, books. Something about the deep, sustained cognitive engagement of following a long narrative appears to be protective in a way that skimming simply doesn't. Two extra years for the price of a hardcover. Meanwhile, we'll cheerfully spend thousands on supplements with the evidentiary backing of a fortune cookie and then hesitate over a$28 book because the library has it.

17:38Look, I love the library. Marry the library. But a book you own is a book you'll write in, argue with, lend out, reread. A$28 object that can rearrange the furniture in your head is the single most mispriced item in the American economy. Not to mention, that's$28 you just spent, and I know this from experience, on about 2 ,000 to 3 ,000 hours of someone's effort in putting that book together. It is the best bang for the buck you will ever get for intellectual thought process. And yes, the shelf matters too. A wall of red books is the only status symbol I endorse because it's the only one you have to actually earn one page at a time.

18:23Number four, and this one's new to me this year, a professional deep clean of the house every six weeks. And mostly, you can thank the bloodhound for that one. Every visit, the cleaning crew removes enough drool on the walls and hair from my house to assemble a second slightly less energetic bloodhound. Worth every penny. And I want to defend this one properly though aside from the joke, because a lot of you were raised to believe that paying someone to clean your house is somewhere between laziness and moral failure. Here's the research that changed my mind. A team of researchers publishing in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences studied thousands of people across several countries and found something remarkable.

19:07People who spent money specifically to buy back their time on cleaning, on errands, on the tasks they dreaded reported meaningfully higher life satisfaction than people who spent the same money on stuff. They even ran an experiment by handing people$40 one weekend to spend on a material purchase and$40 another weekend to spend on saving themselves time, the time-saving weekend one, consistently. And yet, in the same research, most people, even millionaires, barely did this. We'll drop$200 on a gadget without blinking, then refuse to spend it, erasing the chore we've complained about for 30 years.

19:53So here's the reframe, especially for the 60-plus crowd. At this stage, you are not managing money anymore. You're managing days, roughly 8 ,000 of them if you remember. Every deep clean buys back an afternoon and more importantly deletes the low-grade hum of a house that needs doing. That's not a luxury purchase. That's a time machine with a mop. This episode is brought to you by Caldera Lab. Quick confession, in high school my AOL screen name might have been Pretty Boy Durden. And it wasn't ironic, because while other guys were collecting baseball cards and playing real sports, I was collecting his skincare products and taking my appearance embarrassingly seriously.

20:37The problem was that almost nothing was actually made for me. It was either borrowed from my mom's shelf or smelled like a department store had a mild panic attack. Which brings me to Caldera Lab, high-performance skincare engineered for men, science-backed and clinically tested. The regimen, which I love, is four steps. The eye serum, for when I look like I've been upwriting YouTube scripts until 3am, because most likely I have been. The base layer moisturizer, and the good, their best-selling serum with over 3.4 million antioxidant units per drop. And it's backed by real clinical testing, not marketing claims.

21:13100 % of participants, including myself, said their skin looked smoother and healthier, and 94 % said it made them look younger. I use it every night and these days the only sentient being judging me is my bloodhound. Pretty Boy Durden has been playing the long game since 1998 and consistency beats quick fixes in skincare and in investing. So if you've been meaning to take better care of your skin, this is an easy place to start. Head to calderalab.com slash Tyler and use code Tyler for 20 % off your first order. That's calderalab.com slash Tyler. Number five, here comes the financial heresy, leasing a car.

21:53I know. The math says buy the three-year-old Camry with cash and drive it until the wheels achieve independence. I've done the math on the show. I've endorsed the concept. The math is correct. I'm leasing anyway, and here's my accounting of why. The average new car in America now costs about$50 ,000, and the average monthly loan payment has crept up towards$750, with leases typically running meaningfully less per month. But the payment isn't really my argument. My argument is what the lease buys that never shows up in this math. A car that is permanently under warranty, which means I will never again receive a surprise$3 ,400 transmission invoice in the same week as a wedding statement.

22:43A fixed, known, boring cost, which if you've listened to the show for five minutes, you know is my love language. New car smell every three years, which I maintain is the scent of the gods. And the crown jewel, when it's all over, I hand back the keys and I walk away. No listing photos at golden hour. No strangers from Facebook marketplace named Brayden test driving my car and lowballing me in my own driveway. For a raging introvert, that alone is worth a hundred bucks a month. For retirees, I'd argue the case is even stronger than it is for me. Predictable costs instead of a lumpy repair surprises.

23:25Always current safety tech, the automatic braking and blind spot systems that genuinely matter more with every birthday, and a natural three-year checkpoint to reassess what you need instead of a 15-year relationship with a depreciating machine. Is it optimal? Not necessarily. Is it worth it? To me, absolutely. Optimize the little financial moves in life precisely so you can splurge on the things that matter most to you, like new car smell. Part two, Now, five things I will never spend money on no matter how wealthy I ever get. Number one, and yes, this contradicts the saving of the time, but I'll tell you exactly why, a lawn cutting service.

24:16There's a reason that every cartoon and sitcom over the past 50 years has depicted the American male in his natural habitat pushing or riding a mower. If you outsource your lawn, you genuinely don't know what you're missing. It's 90 minutes of legally sanctioned solitude. The machine is too loud for anyone to talk to me. There's a visible progress stripes even, which makes it the only chore in America with a before and after photo. It's honest, low-grade exercise. An hour of mowing burns a few hundred calories and is pretty good for the triceps. And it comes with total privacy. I can spend the entire time listening to the entire wicked soundtrack on my AirPods while my neighbors drive by assuming I'm listening to Kenny Chesney.

25:02Everybody wins. Now, hold on, you say, didn't you just spend a couple minutes telling me to pay for house cleaning because buying back time makes people happier? I did. And here's the distinction. And honestly, it might be the most useful idea in this whole episode. The research says to outsource the tasks you dread. It says nothing about outsourcing the tasks that you like spending time on. Cleaning grout to me is a chore. Mowing is a hobby that is just dressed in chores clothing. Before you outsource anything in retirement, audit it honestly. Some of your chores are actually where some of you find peace.

25:46Some of your chores are where you might find some exercise or even purpose. Guard those with your life. You have 8 ,000 days to fill. Don't pay someone to take away the good ones. Number two, and I know I'm going to lose all of you on this one, but massages. A few years back, flush with the confidence of a man whose index funds had a good quarter, I splurged on my first real fancy full-body massage. 250 bucks. It was a Christmas. I paid that money to lie face down, unable to breathe through my right nostril for 90 % of the experience, in a dark room that smelled of lilac and previous clients' sweat, mildly injured, constant low-grade pain, doing frantic social math the entire time about whether I was even supposed to be talking to the person giving me a massage.

26:39and I left feeling as if I had been dunked gently but thoroughly in a vat of maple syrup. Never again. Now, I want to be fair. Massage is an enormous industry and clearly it works for millions of people. And if it's your thing, Godspeed and may your robe be ever fluffy. My point is bigger than massages. My point is that I spent$250 buying someone else's idea of luxury. I'd seen it in movies. Successful people get massages. So when I had some money, I bought the propped from someone else's script. This, I've come to believe, is one of the great money leaks of later life. We arrive at a form of wealth with a shopping list written by advertisers from when we were 35.

27:31Half of this stuff was never ours to begin with. Know thyself is not just a philosophy at this stage of life it's a budgeting strategy and this is exactly what i have talked about at length in previous episodes of how important it is to find your own path dividend if the massage is not right for you you have just spent 250 on a really important data point number three first class on short flights you're not buying luxury you're buying the right to board the plane first, which is to say the right to spend additional time on the plane and to sit in the same delay, drinking an espresso martini that you technically just bought for yourself.

28:14The plane lands in Boston at the exact same moment for row two and row 32. Here's my rule, and I think it's the right one for anyone doing more traveling and retirement, which I hope is all of you. Spend money where the hours are. A 90-minute hop? The upgrade does not buy you anything other than a nice feeling. 14 hours to Tokyo, where a flatbed means you arrive as a functioning human being instead of a haunted one, now we're talking. That's not status, that's sleep, and sleep is a health expenditure. The same logic applies everywhere in the travel budget, by the way. The room you barely see for one night, go cheap.

28:53The view you'll sit with for a week, go big. by duration, never by boarding order. Number four, brand new clothes. I purchased the entire wardrobe already. I've simply been reheating it ever since. Nobody's noticed. Nobody ever notices. And a solid white t-shirt with a pair of dark jeans will simply never go out of style. You'll notice this is the mirror image of my capsule wardrobe point. And that's exactly right. I spent real money once. The refusal to keep spending is what makes the first spend worth it. But I promised you some additional fun data, so here's my favorite study in all of psychology for recovering self-conscious people.

29:34Researchers at Cornell ran what's now called the Spotlight Effect Experiment. They made college students walk into a room full of peers wearing a spectacularly embarrassing Barry Manilow t-shirt, then asked them to estimate how many people noticed. The students guessed about half the room clocked the shirt. The real number was under 20%. Barely anyone noticed Barry. Let that sink in. If people don't notice a loud embarrassing shirt, I promise you with mathematical precision, they are not noticing that your sweater is from four autumns ago. The audience you're dressing for does not exist. They're all too busy worrying about their own sweaters.

30:2160 new garments a year, which is roughly what the average American buys, purchased for a crowd that isn't watching you. It's the most expensive theater in America, and it plays consistently to an empty house. Number five, if I haven't lost you yet, I might on this one. I will never spend more money on overly expensive wine. In blind tastings, and this is real research from the American Association of Wine Economists analyzing utilizing thousands of pours, regular people, you know, people like me, showed essentially no preference for expensive wine. If anything, when nobody could see the label, everyday drinkers slightly preferred the cheaper bottles.