By Josh Katzowitz, WCI Content DirectorIf you’re like some of us in the WCI community, you might be thinking about retirement every day of your working life. Although it’s not necessary (or probably even healthy) to check your Empower account every day to see how your investments are performing, maybe you’re the kind of person who constantly thinks about the best way to grow your nest egg. Or maybe you worry that you won’t have enough when you finish working. Or maybe you just fantasize about not waking up to an alarm anymore and then going about your work-free day without a care in the world.
We spend plenty of time on this site talking about the accumulation phase and then the decumulation phase. We talk about whether annuities are the right move for somebody entering retirement. We talk about how to shine in your post-work existence.
But we also talk about how you have to live a good life along the way to retirement. As Dr. Jim Dahle once wrote in an article called Intentional Spending, “Be generally frugal and selectively extravagant. Figure out what you really value, and spend your money on that, guilt-free.”
And sometimes, even if you spend much of your time thinking about your future, it’s necessary to splurge in the present.
At WCICON25 (which you can watch in our Continuing Financial Education 2025 course), I talked to a number of attendees and speakers about what they had splurged on recently and how/why they could justify it to themselves. I’ve kept them anonymous so they could be as honest as possible.
Here’s what they said.
Your Biggest Splurge Recently and How You’ve Justified It
- An unlimited gym membership, where it’s a smaller family-owned gym. It’s very specialized. It’s not a huge splurge, but it’s $1,300 a year where I had to rearrange the budget quite a bit to do it. I also do personal training, which is $120 per month. So, we’re looking at $250 a month. I justify it because one of the very top priorities of my life is physical fitness. I love it. I’m not stressed by it. I work hard in the gym, and that’s what I love to do.
- I took my wife, kids, and her family out for dinner to celebrate an upcoming holiday. The bill ended up being close to $500. It was a nice restaurant, but it wasn’t that fancy. We didn’t even have any drinks—just a couple of appetizers, some nice entrees, and a couple of desserts. It was basically just a run-of-the-mill Friday night. But when I paid the bill, I felt so filled with gratitude that we could pay this much money and take out our family with hardly a worry in the world. Spending $500 on dinner isn’t something we normally do, but it’s nice to know we can when we want.
- It was a trip to Paris. It was the experience of traveling with family. It’s just really cool to see different cultures during the holidays. It was about $10,000-$15,000 with me and my family. We used a lot of credit card points and didn’t really have to pay anything for the hotel room. We could splurge on guided tours, and we got a lot more out of seeing the sites with our guide as opposed to just winging it.
- My oldest son is our challenge. He drives us crazy. He has ADHD, and he’s 13 with Oppositional Defiant Disorder. He’s a handful. We basically decided to pay to send him to an overnight camp for the entire summer. It was extremely painful to pay that much, more than what we’d pay for school. It was good for him and good for us. It was money well spent.
- We paid for a vacation going business class, paying for extended family, and splurging on the hotel as well. It was tens of thousands of dollars. But all of our financial goals are being met. This is my guilt-free money.
- Premium select tickets to fly to Africa. I didn’t buy it. My wife did. I didn’t know the price until afterward.
- I just bought a new car, a Lexus plug-in hybrid. With the trade-in, it cost a little over $60,000. I knew five or six years ago that I was going to want a new car. I’ve been saving for the last six years in a high-yield savings account. I had the money to pay for it in cash.
- We went to Vegas over New Year's and stayed at the new Fontainebleau hotel and had the $400-per-person Omakase dinner. We spent a couple thousand at the spa. We got a suite. We just had two nights of total luxury. The whole thing was like $8,000. We value new and unique experiences with each other. It was in alignment with our values. With back-to-back years of 25% returns in our brokerage account, it had spit off more than that in dividends. I didn’t realize it wasn’t set up to reinvest.
- Flying business class with my family on a trip. The justification for it is if you feel confident that you have a plan in place and you’re saving well and know you're on a track—especially as a mid-career physician, if you realize the plan you have is actually working—you have the confidence to actually say I’ve allocated saving money and spending money so I can spend money on me and my family that makes us the most happy. We went to Switzerland on a red eye and took economy on the way back. Oh my God, it was completely worth it just for all of us to sleep on the plane on the way there.
- I took a trip with girlfriends to Cancun. It was a four-day concert on the beach. Luke Bryan was the headliner, and it was really expensive. It’s hard to justify it just for me when I spend that amount of money on a family of five going somewhere. But I loved it, and I don’t regret it. And I could pay for it.
- A big luxury vacation with my kids and husband to Alaska. It was Adventures By Disney. They do these luxury trips, and they do everything for you. They go to all the best and biggest places. It’s a land trip, and they go all over the world. My husband and I are coming to terms with this. We have justified some experiences because both of our dads died in their early 50s, and he had a brother who was diagnosed with a progressive neurological illness at 53 and died at 59. You could save every penny and die young and not enjoy any of it with your children. But there’s a balance to it, for sure.
- This year, my biggest splurge has been nice workout clothes. I buy more than I need, but it also helps motivate me to get to the gym. It’s Lulu and Alo, nothing too crazy.
- I have a Louis Vuitton purse. It was a gift to myself. It cost like $2,000. I like it because it’s my want. I do everything else for my kids, my husband, and our family. This was my one thing. I stayed in the store for a little bit. I looked at a bunch of them. I had been to the store a while before. I went to Hawaii for my grandmother’s funeral, so I just decided to get the purse.
- I hired a stylist last year and then bought a lot of clothes. I did the clothes and all of that because I was going to be speaking more and traveling. I wanted good quality clothes and not to feel like I’m not comfortable and not polished. There was a long-term goal. That’s how I reasoned it. It was an investment in me identifying this next path in my career. I expensed the stylist but not the clothes.
- We went to India. We were excited about it because we were going to get to see family we hadn’t seen in a long time. It had been about 10 years since we had been. It was a beautiful experience because it was the first time we got to go with our kids and show them the culture, the food, the love that is automatic with having family and showing them how the previous generations did it. It was expensive, but we also had some Chase points that helped cover the airfare. We got to travel when it was comfortable for us. We saved for it, and we didn’t feel guilty for using it.
- We’ve given each other permission to go to a lot of conferences and wellness activities. It doesn’t have to be as a duo. It can be an individual experience. That’s a splurge in and of itself.
- My friend was having a 40th birthday party in Paris, and my husband and I went. I wasn’t going for a conference; it wasn’t for education. It was just for my husband and me to have fun with friends. And there were like 50 friends there. We stayed at a different hotel because I wanted a hotel that would offer me free breakfast—and it was a 20-minute walk or we could take public transportation to them.
More information here:
What We Learned Financially from Our Parents and How We’re Passing It on to the Next Generation
Money Song of the Week
I’m so far out of the loop on some artists and musical genres that it hardly seems worth it to begin even trying to infiltrate their discography. Bob Dylan? That’d be too much work. Jazz? Eh, that’d be a whole thing, right? John Prine? Who’s got that kind of time and attention span?
I kind of feel the same way about an artist like Kendrick Lamar. People describe him as a “subversive genius.” They say he’s a “visionary whose music has consistently redefined the genre.” They say his “lyricism and flow [are] unparalleled.” My only exposure to him was at the Super Bowl LIX halftime show. I’m not a huge hip-hop guy in the first place (unless we’re talking about 1990s new jack swing), but I wanted to explore How Much a Dollar Cost because I love long stories in songs and because, frankly, I feel like I’m missing out on something.
So, let’s listen (beware of a few explicit words).
The song tells the story of a down-on-his-luck panhandling man in Africa asking Lamar for a handout. Lamar refuses, and then before he puts his luxury car into gear to drive away, he has a second thought. This passage gave me chills the first time I heard it:
“Somethin' told me to keep it in park until I could see/The reason why he was mad at a stranger/Like I was supposed to save him/Like I'm the reason he's homeless and askin' me for a favor . . .
I never understood someone beggin' for goods/Askin' for handouts, takin' it if they could/And this particular person just had it down pat/Starin' at me for the longest until he finally asked/’Have you ever opened up Exodus 14? A humble man is all that we ever need.’ Tell me, how much a dollar cost? . . .
And I'm insensitive, and I lack empathy/He looked at me and said, ‘Your potential is bittersweet’/I looked at him and said, ‘Every nickel is mines to keep’/He looked at me and said, ‘Know the truth, it'll set you free/You're lookin' at the Messiah, the son of Jehovah, the higher power/The choir that spoke the word, the Holy Spirit/The nerve of Nazareth, and I'll tell you just how much a dollar cost/The price of having a spot in Heaven, embrace your loss—I am God.’”
Oof, powerful stuff there.
According to Lamar, this is a true tale. As he told MTV, via Hip Hop DX, in 2015:
“These are moments in my life deeper than just handing somebody a dollar. These are actually moments of integrity, actually being able to talk to somebody. Me talking to him was simply a thank you from God. And I felt God speaking through him to get at me.”
Ultimately, I’m not sure this song will motivate me to seek out more of Lamar’s work (and I’m still definitely not going to get into Bob Dylan anytime soon). But I’ll definitely relisten to this song. When it gives you chills, it's imperative to hit play again.
More information here:
Every Money Song of the Week Ever Published
Reddit of the Week
An interesting look at a budget from 36 years ago.
Found my dad's household monthly expense budget from 1989
byu/Dorkus_Mallorkus inMiddleClassFinance
A couple of points:
- When my wife and I owned our first house in the mid-2000s, our mortgage payment was also about $1,500. But interest rates in 1989 were also about double what I was paying for my mortgage. And $1,500 back then equals $3,900 today.
- This was a family of five, but $600 in 1989 is $1,550 in today’s money. That’s a ton in groceries. As the OP said in a comment, “We almost never ate out, but my mom did the grocery shopping and never looked at prices.”
- Even at $30 a month, that timeshare payment is almost certainly a ripoff.
What’s been your biggest splurge recently? How important is it for you to spend intentionally? Or is spending still something you have to work on in your financial life?
[EDITOR'S NOTE: For comments, complaints, suggestions, or plaudits, email Josh Katzowitz at [email protected].]
Love this article, love the Kendrick discussion!
My splurge is a bit larger, literally! After 19years in the same house, we are buying a new house which costs quite a bit more, but comes with a bunch of nice features like a pool, bigger garage, acreage, etc. Intellectually, I know that we are in good shape financially and shouldn’t sweat it, but this still requires some redistribution of funds. It’s exciting, but also a little scary!
Bravo ! Wow ! I usually just lurk and never comment but I had to leave a comment complimenting the this post. I read most of the blog post, but this post today I read and reread. Too often we drill our discipline to save and accumulate, it is refreshing to see some fruit on the other side of everyone’s labor. Love the lyricism portion and Kendrick is a very special choice. I would love to see more of that of any artist !
My latest splurge was socks and honestly, I’m never going back. After years of just tossing whatever cheap multipack Target or Costco had into my cart, I finally caved and ordered those Bombas ankle socks everyone on podcasts keeps going on about. They were almost 80 bucks for a six-pack, and yeah, I definitely flinched when I hit “buy.” But seriously, worth every penny. I’m on my feet for crazy-long hospital shifts, and these socks have been amazing for cushioning and keeping my feet dry. Now I legit can’t imagine settling for cheap socks again—my feet (and sanity!) thank me every day.
You definitely can’t go wrong with either Bombas or Balega socks.
Nice post! Yep, I am the guy who wore his Danskos until the sole got a hole big enough I felt the blood on the OR floor soak through my socks. Splurged and bought a Ferrari. Not brand new, used. Still…the mixed emotions go away the moment I turn her on
A 10K Salvador Dali art work bought in Beverly Hills on rodeo drive changed my entire life. Prior to that, I had never given myself “permission” to spend. Making this purchase released these constraints not just in spending but in my whole life, including surgery and medical decision making. Doing something incredibly outrageous that makes very little financial sense (although I did negotiate hard to bring the price down, that was fun!) has freed me to make even more money on investments by not being afraid to spend money to make money, but this is also true in experiences and relationships which has paid me back 10 fold.
After this, my “splurges” have become real estate investments (going for both equity/cash flow and inherent beauty -something I actually want)!
Developing “spending muscles” can be just as hard as developing “saving muscles” huh?
Your post about learning how to spend and developing those spending muscles changed my life. Sometimes you have to do it slowly and work into it and sometimes you just have to take the plunge
Oh! I’d like to add one more thing! I splurged on a $2000 massage chair from Costco (on sale of course about $800 off) as what I considered both an investment and expense/comfort. I had recently decided that I needed to do everything possible to preserve my body to be able to continue working at a very high level as a surgeon. The longer I work the more I make! (In truth, though I would just love to work for the rest of my life, period, because my job is so awesome). So I set aside some money as what I consider “work preservation self investment” and used it for that chair.
I use that massage chair every single day, and sometimes multiple times a day after long OR days. It also functions as an “attractor of friends” who come to visit our house because then I can offer them the use of the chair and it makes me happy to see my investment returning so much in the form of relationships! I have since “splurged” on preventative back and neck braces (like $10 on Amazon, but I went and bought multiple to leave at each OR/ASC site-something I wouldn’t have done in the past and dealt with just the inconvenience of bringing it home with me each day) and that has changed my OR days completely as I now go home feeling so much better. Worth every penny.
$2,000 is a steal for a massage chair. Katie wanted to get one a while back and I told her “Don’t cheap out, we’re only going to buy this once and I don’t want a crappy one.” Ours cost way more than $2,000. Maybe we should have looked at Costco too.
Costco-$1899. Osaki. It goes on sale like every six months (it might be on sale right now). They have the cheap ones for like 1000 and the crazy ones for like 10 K, but this one was absolutely perfect for me. And I’m in Utah too.
You’re going to have to come over and try a crazy one some time and let me know if it’s any better than the Costco one.
Jim,
I was just thinking about this comment and noted that it really illustrates a point you had made in your book. That there’s a point of diminishing returns when it comes to spending. So for instance, your massage chair may be far more expensive than mine, maybe 3-4x but I doubt that it brings 3-4x value simply because I feel my massage chair is so good I can barely feel like one could be much better. In the same way you made a point about if you had a choice between a medical school that cost 3x as much as your state school then just go with the state school because the small difference a name would probably not pay off in the long run or not 3x better at least.
And if people could find this inflection point, where they get near maximum satisfaction/experience/function for their money and not continue along the line that’s flattening for the value they get in exchange for the money spent, then there would be far less “waste” and this could then be utilized for investing or another item or experience of value. And I’ll bet this one change would end in far more returns than many investing strategies.
The problem with this is it takes a lot of time and mental energy to be able to know just what that is for yourself. The “shopping” may lead to frustration. And that’s where I’ve made the mistake of doing this a little too much for things financially I didn’t have to (like spending hours on choosing the right hotel that doesn’t cost too much but finding out you should’ve just quickly booked the Legoland hotel without thinking because you could afford it and it had the maximum best experience and convenience).
It’s definitely hard to get exactly right.
And I also have no definite idea of what our massage chair cost. I just told Katie “don’t cheap out, we’re not buying this twice” when she bought it.
I have found that the best splurges were the ones that had massive, priceless ROIs. The Legoland trip that produced a 10/10 “worth every cent” look on my kids’ faces when they arrived. The new pair of expensive socks I wash and wear every week. The $2 monopoly I bought at the thrift store that I played with my son every weeknight for a month. These gave me the most joy as opposed to a $80K RV that would sit in my driveway unused except for 2x/yr (I haven’t actually done this one but I realized it wouldn’t be worth it for me. But maybe for others!)
Ok I’m done talking about this now!