Spending for maximum return [1 ed.]

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Wall Street Playboys, LLC

Disclosure The Product None of the content provided within this book are to be deemed legal or financial advice in any shape or form. If you are looking for legal or financial advice please consult a professional. All decisions are yours alone and we are not responsible for your actions. The content provided in this product represent our opinions and should not be considered facts. Before making a decision we suggest doing your own thoughtful research (not to be deemed as legal or financial advice). By uncovering information yourself, the decisions made are entirely yours. Illegal Distribution Use, distribution or disclosure by others is prohibited, this product is not to be re-sold at any time. If you are in possession of this product without a paid purchase, you’re committing a crime: Theft. Rights Reserved The materials contained in this product are protected by applicable copyright and trademark law. Wall Street Playboys, LLC is a limited liability company held by a separate holding Company.

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Wall Street Playboys, LLC

Introduction We were hesitant on creating a book on this topic but decided to do so (popular demand). The funny thing about this book is that we can’t think of many products like it. If you’re rich it is actually quite easy to go broke (look at *most* professional athletes and lottery winners – emphasis on most to avoid the nit pickers). Maybe this is one of the reasons why no books are written on it. People simply assume that once they have the money, they will be “set”…. and of course… this ends in tears. The only competing products we can think of are related to frugality where people talk about maximizing every single cent. A terrible strategy for anyone who gets rich as they lose valuable amounts of time to save a few dollars (waiting in line for 30 minutes to save $20 should never be worth it)… Also. If you weren’t smart enough to order online for your latest iPhone you probably shouldn’t be wasting a day in-line to buy one. (Yes we realize there may be re-sale value… in that case you use bots and buy a bunch to re-sell, you don’t sleep in front of a store). We’ll happily admit that this was a painful book to write. We couldn’t think of a single way to organize it and there are no real viable competing products out there. Our three ideas were as follows: 1) organize by spending type – housing, food, entertainment etc. 2) organize by economic cycles and 3) organize by after tax income. All three would work but all three have repercussions (could miss the bigger picture). So what did we do? We decided to do all three and attempted to tie it all together. This is the only valid way to do it (so we think!). If your business collapses or you lose your career, you have to adjust to a different lifestyle. If you end up getting a good chunk of money and suddenly have $35M to your name, your ability to spend goes up (essentially forever). Either way…. the point is clear… your ability to spend is entirely driven by cash flow visibility (which could change dramatically over a decade). Cash flow visibility is knowing how much money you’ll receive per month. That’s not all. It also depends on how likely the cash flow will hit your account. By rank order the safest to riskiest is as follows *in our opinion*: 1) risk free yields, 2) career or business income, 3) real estate and 4) equities/dividends. We’re almost certain no one will agree with the rank order we just provided. That’s a good thing as no one reading this book is interested in “normal” opinions. So that’s how we’ll rank the cash flow items. If you’re looking for a trend, we value “forced” value creation the most – I.E if there are ways to use your own time and skills to generate money, it’s the safer one in the group (only exception there is the risk free yield that starts the list). Hypothetically, you should create your own “rating” like Moody’s or Standard & Poor’s as it relates to your current cash flows. Rank them from AAA to C/D and adjust your “true cash flow” in your excel sheets. No different that junk bonds, AAA bonds and everything in-between.

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Wall Street Playboys, LLC Discount Rate on Earnings Risk Free Bonds

Internet Site Real Estate Stocks

1 Year < 3 Years

0.0%

16.0%

35.0%

40.0% 45.0%

>3 Year < 5 Years

0.0%

12.0%

30.0%

35.0% 40.0%

>5 Year < 9 Years

0.0%

8.0%

25.0%

30.0% 35.0%

>9 Year < 15 Years

0.0%

4.0%

20.0%

25.0% 30.0%

> 15 Years

0.0%

0.0%

15.0%

20.0% 25.0%

While the above is pretty self-explanatory, think about it like this... Take how long you’ve had the income stream and multiply the annual income stream by 1-the discount rate. So if you just now got a full year of dividends worth $10,000, we would argue it’s worth $5,000 a year (potential for 50% decline). Now if you’ve had the same dividend of $10,000 and it has grown to $20,000 the chances of it going to $5,000 is much lower so you multiply it in your head by 75% (not 50%). This is not a science it’s an Art and a way to depict your real income. Unless you’re able to generate a living income off of risk free yields alone, there is always a discount applied to your earnings as things could go sour in a day, week, month or year. You never know. What you do know is that your principal should never be touched. Bonds, equities, real estate etc. The goal is to never sell to spend. You can sell to rebalance your book… But… You cannot sell to spend. That’s essentially the punch line before we jump into the details. Three Segments for the Book: This was the only reasonable way to organize the product. The reader gets to choose how they view spending. If you view spending in terms of net income, the third section will be better for you. If you view spending based on product category, the first chapter will be better for you. The key here is to maximize utility. While utility is a boring economic term it is the most useful as it encapsulates cycles as well. Utility gained by spending on luxury items in a booming economy is *lower* than utility gained by spending on luxury items in a recession. Utility gained on housing decreases rapidly unless you’re building a different lifestyle (house parties, family gatherings etc.). Utility gained on dining and produce actually changes based on your age and cash flow as well. So on and so forth. (See Appendix 1 for the post on Utility Maximization) General Life Framework: Before jumping in, this is probably a good time to remind the readers of our life framework. In general, we do not think you need to be worth $100M or even $20M to live an amazing life. We think the risk reward to get there is becoming difficult to justify. That said, we do believe that anyone can get into the $5-15M range without taking on significant “life risk”… I.E. missing out on many years of fun and potentially getting nothing out of it. Keeping it simple at $5-15M this means you’re generating $250-$750K a year forever *regardless* of location

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Wall Street Playboys, LLC at a 5% rate of return. Even if you decide to have kids, this is not going to lead to a stressful life as the location independence part kills the cost of living argument. How You Get There in General Bullets (No Particular Order)  When you’re young you focus on making money as we assume you start with $0 to your name  To avoid developing poor social skills you go out once/twice a week in cheaper venues (if you’re broke and young, being in shape and going to dive bars is completely fine)  You kill off the biggest cash drain item (excluding taxes) which is housing. If you need to live with roommates to save serious money… You live with roommates, no exceptions  You kill off taxes by building any sort of small side income while at work, if you don’t have two streams of income you don’t get to have much fun  Rough math is you should focus on income generation until you’re able to save/invest half of everything you make (everything is calculated after taxes). Until then you’re not earning enough or you’re spending too much due to lifestyle inflation  Take the amount you spend per year, multiply this by 25. If you’re happy with the amount you’re spending per year… Working harder and killing yourself for more money is a fools game  When you get to $1M+ in net worth within 10 years… you’re going to be able to make the decision “Do I want to be worth $20M+ or $10M”… Rich people problems. We have no view on the choice, people have different life objectives  Health is the only thing that is more important than money when you’re young. That said, working 60-80 hours a week between ages 21-27… Really doesn’t do anything to your health despite what unsuccessful people tell you. Working 80 hours a week past age 30 is something you want to avoid  As a framework, you want to utilize your “competitive advantage” by age band. Not having much money is fine in your 20s, not so much in your 40s. Making a lot of mistakes in your 20s is fine (you’re young) but making wild mistakes in your 40s, not so much. Think about what the world’s “perception” and you is and you can find areas to exploit the biases  Avoid comparative analysis. There is no point in being jealous of people who go up the stack faster than you. Also avoid all *unnecessary* conflict. I.E. no point in participating in gossip/drama as it just leads to negative attention and a large time drain. You should have better things to do. The standard “What do I gain from this?” should be asked before doing anything. If it’s nothing positive and just an ego boost, better to skip. This is similar to quitting a career/job, you don’t get anything by throwing a tantrum when you leave. By staying quiet and polite you may save a few relationships you thought you would lose  You have to live an “extreme life” by definition. If you’re going to get into the top 1% you’re by definition an extreme outlier. It is not possible to get there by following the crowd  To wrap it up, we avoid all family/life decision type conversations as those are personal in nature. As long as you’re not risking everything you’ve worked for, there is no point in the debate. A Quick Warning: We’ll also talk about performance enhancing products. Under no circumstances are these comments meant to be recommendations, the entire product is opinion based. Your average person has limited will power and self-control which makes addiction higher.

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Wall Street Playboys, LLC There is no such thing as a magic substance that makes you “better than average” in a single day. Instead, performance boosters are for people who want to remain in top shape. Two extreme examples will help: 1) if you take a wide variety of steroids, the chances of competing with proathletes is less than 0.01%... the only people who could take them and potentially get close are people who were “on the line” before taking PEDs – typically D1 athletes who were extremely close and 2) if you take a bunch of psychedelics, you’re unlikely going to become the next Steve Jobs. The typical person who takes psychedelics doesn’t use them properly (notice the trend here, there is no magic potion) With the warning out of the way, our opinion is that you can use a lot of substances to make your life better. Yes. We’ve used a ton of them over a long period of time. It doesn’t “change you as a person” if you use them correctly. It simply allows you to run at full speed for longer durations when you need to. Final Note on Money: One last item of importance. While the phrase “you can’t take it with you when you die” is true, that phrase is usually an excuse to spend everything… putting your health and well-being at risk later down the line. We take a different stance. You should earn aggressively which will cause you to save aggressively by default until you hit the “cross over point”. If you can easily live off of ~$5,000 a month (this is just an example and would include shelter, food and utilities), there is no real point in saving massive amounts of money beyond this level. At that point you can ratchet up the spending as you’ll never touch the principal in the first place. For those that think the above is risky, there is yet another catch. After being intelligent and saving for almost a decade, you won’t spend all of the money you make anyway. Our guess is that you will still save around 30% of what you’re bringing in and the principal will actually grow significantly over time. In short, once you are completely free, your stress levels will likely come down and your spending will go up without any issues.

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Wall Street Playboys, LLC

Table of Contents Segment on Spending Type……………………………………………………………… 7 Chapter 1 – Housing, the Highest Expense Item After Taxes………………………………... 7 Chapter 2 – Food and Dining, the Third Highest Expense Item…………………………

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Chapter 3 – Clothing, Shoes, Suits, Watches and More….………………………………….. 21 Chapter 4 – Travel and Vacations, Hint No Need for the Standard Europe Trip …………… 26 Chapter 5 – Services, Focus on Improving Your Health and Performance………………….. 30 Chapter 6 – Events: Dating, Concerts and Parties…………………………………………... 34 Chapter 7 – Improving Utility Overview……………………………………………………. 38 Segment on Economic Cycles……………………………………………………………. 41 Chapter 1 – Peak of Market Cycle…………………………………………………………... 42 Chapter 2 – Bottom of Market Cycle …….………………………………………………… 47 Chapter 3 – Middle of Market Cycle……………………………………………………..

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Segment on Ages…………………………………………………………………………. 62 Chapter 1 – Completely Broke and Starting from Zero (Early 20s)…………………………. 63 Chapter 2 – Able to Save 30-50% of Income Without Feeling Uncomfortable (Late 20s)…… 71 Chapter 3 – Millionaire Club with High Quality Cash Flow (30+)………………………….. 86 Chapter 4 – Set It and Forget It (40s)………………………………………………………. 98 Chapter 5 – Some Basic After Tax Income Brackets………………………………………. 101 Sub-Section on Social Life Spending……………………………………………………. 104 Conclusion…………………………………………………………………………………. 109 Thank You Note and the Future…………………………………………………………… 110 Appendix………………………………………………………………………………….. 112

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Wall Street Playboys, LLC

Segment on Spending Type This section is for people who view their spending in categories: Housing, Food & Dining, Clothing, Travel, Services, Events and Parties. These are the six major categories for spending and no one will agree with our utility maximization framework. That said, you’re reading this since you find our views interesting and likely want to think differently when it comes to spending (otherwise you wouldn’t be here!). Each segment will give you an idea of how to maximize each dollar spent. In the end, we put it all together and provide a quick snapshot of where we think the big utility gains are made. This will never be perfect and many people will break the rules (for better or worse). The main concept here is leverage and “use”. If you’re not going to get much incremental use or leverage from the purchase then the item should be avoided. Note: when we mention savings rates with wide ranges from 10-65%, these numbers *include* business investments that have a high chance of paying off. If you drop $10,000 on your second internet asset but know that it’ll return at least $30,000 that $10,000 is considered saving/investing not spending. This distinction seems to separate the rich from the poor as poor people do not realize that starting a new venture is typically ROI positive otherwise you wouldn’t have done it!

Chapter 1 – Housing, the Highest Expense Item After Taxes If you grew up in the United States you know the typical strategy. Save your money and buy a home sooner than later since you’re wasting your money on rent. The standard “expert advice” is to lever up big. This is why you see common search terms such as “how much home can I afford”. It’s practically a cult in our society. Luckily, you can avoid this pitfall, get rich and also become a home owner in the future (without the stress!). The answer is quite simple and obvious… You want to

reduce housing as a percentage of your spending every single year until you can easily afford a home/condo/apartment. Also. We really doubt you want to buy a home before you’re

35 or so since you should value your freedom. Being able to move from city to city is incredibly important if you want to keep your career options open (we assume most will have careers despite pushing people into having a business and secondarily a career). With the back drop out of the way… we don’t know where you are in life. This is going to encompass a wide range of economic situations from the absolute worst (in debt or zero net worth) and scale all the way up to a life of luxury. As a disclaimer, we were lucky enough to have a high paying career out of college so we started in Step 2. Step 1 is for people who are really starting from scratch and want to live in the United States. As usual, all of our advice assumes you live in the USA and should be treated as such. Step 1 – Completely Broke with No Real Income: This small section is going to be an opinion based on *no* experience. We put that disclaimer up front since we don’t like to give advice without any relevant experience. That said, we can easily explain how we would build out of this hole (and it’s a common request). So. Take a look at your housing options: 1) live at home and 2) work any possible gig to live in the cheapest place possible. Our definition is quite simple, if you’re unable to save ~15% of your after tax income, you’re in this category. This is probably shocking to most as the average person is told to save just 10% of their income. This is not worth it in our opinion. If you’re unable to save about 15% of what you 7

Wall Street Playboys, LLC make, mathematically, it just isn’t possible to get rich (you need some money to start basic low income internet businesses). You’re better off living in the cheapest possible place (at home for free or with multiple roommates). While we have never been in this position, we are dead serious when we say this is the strategy. Get any position that will help keep the lights on, live in the cheapest place possible and simply have a high quality internet connection. This is the shortest section since the answer is extremely clear (cheapest possible). But. We will address some of the most important notes. 1) Fun… Not A Good Decision for Now: The reality is that this situation is terrible. Also. It means the person unlikely made wise decisions. We’ll skip the part about “why” and simply focus on the reality of the situation. If you’ve somehow managed to end up in this spot, there is no point in having any fun. You’re going to grind it out all day and night instead. It isn’t relevant if the person grew up well off, poor or middle class (or anywhere in-between). The only thing that is relevant is the situation. Having fun just isn’t on the table since you’re economically set up in a spot where it isn’t worth it to have fun in the first place! Tough paragraph to write but also in-line with what we would do. 2) Dating: Sure it won’t be easy on the dating market. The question is… would you actually want to use your valuable time to try and date people if you’re broke? Time is all you have as a lever to catch up… so there is no real point in looking for a significant other. If you’re realistic about the situation you’re also making a terrible choice by dating period. After you build out of the hole and have your life moving in the right direction, the options you have will be better anyway. 3) Health: Your health won’t take a hit if you’re living at home or with a bunch of roommates. This is because you don’t have to sacrifice basic items like water or vegetables. So you’re not going to have any issues here. Just don’t live in a place where there is an actual health issue. Not sure why people believe this would be impacted by living in a cheap place but we’ve seen some insane arguments that suggest your health will take a step back (it won’t). Yes. We are mentioning health since we’re dead serious about living in the cheapest place possible without health issues. There is no other way to dig yourself out of this major hole (low income at a young age). 4) Generate or Don’t Move: Unsurprisingly, we’re keeping the line firm. Unless you’re able to save a minimum of 15% after taxes (excluding 401K) you’re basically trapped. Not allowed to move. The only way you’re able to move is if you can save a higher dollar amount by moving. For example if you’re able to save 10% today (say 10% of $40,000 = $4,000) and can move to another location and save 9% after taxes (say 9% of $50,000 = $4,500)… then you can move. But. In that situation you’re still living in the cheapest place possible. 5) Earn or Don’t Spend: While the focus was on housing we have to leave this as the punch line. If you’re not able to save 15% of your post tax income, you’re only allowed to spend on future earnings. This means anything you’re buying is essentially going to help you make money, will make you more money or could potentially make you more money. Other than that your only expenses should be living expenses. You’ll probably spend more time in the library than anyone else in your current age group. Step 2 – Out of the Disaster Scenario: The prior section was awful to write. It’s the entire reason why we wrote our first book Efficiency in the first place. We needed to prove that you could get

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Wall Street Playboys, LLC rich even if you only have an internet connection. The good news? Most people will probably be around this level. If you found our website it means you were already looking for the highest paying positions. This implies that you have above average intelligence. In Step 2 you have a good paying Career/Job and you’re able to save around 20-30% or better. This is a healthy starting point as you’re in square one. Similar to the prior section we’ll offer two solutions: 1) continuing to live with one roommate and 2) living in a basic studio apartment. From a housing point of view you’re going to choose the location that lowers your cost the most. When we refer to cost we are including the cost of your commute time. It is unlikely that you’ll work from home starting day one, so we assume you’ll have a minimum commute time of around 20 minutes (a reasonable amount of time). Anything beyond this will be worth $100/hour in after tax money. So if your commute time is say 40 minutes, this is $50/day you must add to your “rental” cost. Multiply this by the number of days you must show up to work. Many of you will say this number is too high. We will happily disagree since your time should be *more* valuable when you are trying to build something. Every hour is lost recurring revenue for the rest of your life. So the value of your youth should be much higher than $100 an hour. We suggest floating this concept to a rich person (business owner) and see what they say. We’ll bet they say the number is *too low*. We have used a $100 number in this example since we think it is high enough for people to pause and think about it. After all, if you’re unable to do anything with your time… that’s essentially equivalent to being in a jail cell. (okay, okay an exaggeration but driving the point home) Now we can jump into the highlights. Remember. We assume you’re able to invest at least 2030% of your after tax income (excluding any retirement contributions). 1) I Want to Save Even More! So here is the yin and yang part of life. If you’re willing to live in the cheapest place possible or live at home… we commend you for your willpower. That said… There is a line where you start to fall back in terms of social skills. For what it is worth, people who never go out and live a hermit type life end up developing odd social mannerisms that actually make them *poorer* over time. If you’re unable to go to a bar and interact with normal people it’s quite difficult to become a people manager in the first place. Surprise, surprise, there are real repercussions to being a miser. So. That’s why we suggest you live in either a normal 2bedroom apartment with a roommate or you live in a studio apartment. This allows you to live a basic social life. The extra savings doesn’t make a difference at this point since you’re “on the right track” so to speak at 25-30%. Note: if for some reason you are forced to live at home or must do so due to some other circumstance, you should go out at least 3x a week to offset the living situation and increase social skills in an exponential manner. 2) Studio vs. Roommate: There is a slight difference between the two. In step two we assume you’re barely able to save/invest 20-30% so we lumped the two items together. If you’re able to choose always go with the Studio (equal commute time). This is because you’re still not “there” financially and you’re still going to save additional time. This will sound sociopathic but true. If you have a roommate they will likely eat up part of your time (gossip/complaining etc.). If you’re just now in the green and on the right path, you should still have a high value tied to

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Wall Street Playboys, LLC your time as you work to scale up a biz or spend extra time winning clients in your career. By living alone you naturally have 100% control over how your time is spent. 3) Shouldn’t You Buy? The answer is clear here: no. While you may have the money to purchase a place, you certainly want to have mobility. Without mobility you may lose out on a huge opportunity. You might get a new career opportunity and that should not be weighed down by the purchase of a home. There is no guarantee that any side business a person has will succeed so you want to keep your options open (yet another reason we recommend online sales – mobility). The one exception here is if you decide that real estate is going to be your second form of income, then we’re talking about an entirely different strategy. Other than that we can’t think of a good reason to lock yourself into a single location when you’re young. 4) Dating and Health: In this area you’re in great shape. You’re probably in your 20s if you’re in this range anyway so you won’t be “hurt” by having a roommate or a basic studio apartment. In fact, you should avoid the people who complain about your living situation. They should be smart enough to realize you’re making a good decision with your life and on top of that… expecting you to blow all of your money is another negative sign (avoid people who encourage high spending at a young age). 5) Minimal Fun: At this point you’re allowed to go out. This is just below the tier we recommended in Efficiency. Essentially you can probably go out 1x a week or so. Why? Well the math says that if you’re only able to invest about 20-30% of your income then you’re still trying to make one extra jump to get ahead. If you’re in a rough patch and need a break, go ahead and go with 1x a week and try to find low cost activities you enjoy to break up the routine (an active sport, house parties instead of going out etc.). This general region is painful as you can see the opportunity but it’s just out of reach. This is why you’re going to live below your means to “force motivate” yourself to get out of your situation. Step 3 – Finally into the World of Positivity: This is where we enter the world of momentum. Essentially once you’re able to invest/save ~35-40% of your income, you’re now allowed to live alone. This will likely be a one-bedroom or something around that range. The interesting part about making it into this realm is that you can stay here for a good amount of time (the younger you are the better, as no one will expect you to have a mansion). You can essentially “upgrade” to a place with more amenities. But. You really don’t have a *need* to live it up. Besides, you’re probably single and hanging out so having a big place would be counter-productive in most cases. The options here are essentially that: a nice place to yourself. One bedroom is good enough or anything you deem comfortable for yourself. The other interesting thing about this range is if you’re still young… there is no reason to buy a place. You’re saving a good amount of money and are likely juggling multiple projects to get your cash flow up. This is a good thing as you won’t have the time or energy to pack up everything and move into your first home. This is also the zone where you can go out twice a week without any worries. It’s not an unbearable amount of partying and you’ll likely get to this “zone” in less than a few years (ideally mid 20s). Since we’re in the green now the highlights of this range are almost entirely positive.

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Wall Street Playboys, LLC 1) Centrally Located: Under no circumstances should you be wasting valuable time commuting or moving long distances. If you’re at this point in life you likely value your time (otherwise you wouldn’t be able to generate a high income!). This is probably the biggest “life changer” you will have. By living centrally located to everything you need, you’re able to work longer hours if you need to, rest more (8 hours easily) and live a healthier life by freeing up valuable minutes and hours for exercise and healthier food. While we have talked about the financial snowball effect (around $3-5 million in net-worth), the release of time is probably more important. Without the significant reduction in time, generating income is a lot harder. 2) No More Roommates: There is just no point anymore, even if it would take your investing rate up by 10% or more, you’re going to grow tired of it extremely quickly. Generally speaking, as you get older you want to have less noise, more flexibility and more space. Living with someone else is just not going to fit into any of these three changes. We doubt this part is controversial yet… some people try to do the whole “buy a place and charge rent” living situation. It’s not a good move for your mental health. 3) Dating: You’ll have absolutely no issues at all here. The only dating options you might lose out on are the gold diggers. This isn’t really a market you should be interested in if you’re still in “wealth building mode” so it won’t even cross your mind to go down this route anyway. Essentially, you’ll be care-free living alone with a good amount of free time. Unsurprisingly… this results in a lot of dates coming your way as long as you have normal social skills. Very few guys have the ability to go drink and party on weekdays consistently and that’s generally when you’ll want to go out. 4) Why Not Ramp Up the Spend? This is certainly possible if you’ve already reached a point where you have 25x your annual spending in stocks/bonds/real estate. The problem is that we doubt this is the case. Why? Well if you’re officially done, you want to up your spending and upgrading the place you live in is one of the better moves you can make. There are always rare exceptions to the rule (no inventory in the area you want, no upgrade available that wouldn’t break the budget, etc.). But. This is generally how it works. 5) Logical Amenity Choices: Since you’re not rich (yet!) in this zone, you’ll have to do some quick calculations on what type of apartment you want to live in. As a general rule, you end up choosing places with minimal amenities. This is because a central location fixes almost all of your issues. There are instances where a specific item could actually be cash flow positive. The cleanest example is a real gym inside the building. If you live in a city that would require a car without a gym in the building, this is actually a cash flow positive item. You can now work out in your own personal gym and avoid a five-figure minimum car expense. You also avoid a near guaranteed run in with the police by avoiding a car (yes this is a joke… but almost everyone gets a speeding ticket/parking ticket or some other infraction). Step 4 – You’re Rich Time to Spend: Generally speaking, most people will spend a good amount of time in step 3. You’re living a good life but haven’t reached financial independence yet. As a rule of thumb, if you were saving ~65% of your income while living below your means in step 3… It takes about 10 years to be financially set for life. After this trigger is hit, you can now spend quite a bit of money since your downside is limited. In your worst case scenario, you go back to living a good life in any city around the world (One-percenter problems). This region is strange since there is no real “answer”. You can take a stab at a wide variety of lifestyles. From what we’ve seen the most common three routes are: 1) luxury apartment, 2) perpetual renter that enjoys living in various cities and 3) the house/private party person.

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Wall Street Playboys, LLC Remember, these routes all assume that you don’t have a family. If you do decide to have a family then you’re looking at the more common approach of simply buying a home and focusing more on the education/future of your children. Luxury Apartment: If you go this route, you’re looking at a high-end apartment with significant amenities. This would include: 1) security, 2) gym, 3) sauna, 4) pool and usually another local perk (such as a popular bar). This is probably the most common move for a single person who is well off. The second most common is the perpetual renter. And. When push comes to shove, most people know where they want to live by this time in their life. As a note, if you’re looking to move into a luxury apartment, you want to wait for a downturn. This is covered later but mentioning it now is important. The prices here move a lot more. This is similar to homes that are “Out of Range” for the area. This is highlighted by square footage costs suddenly going down. By way of example, if you look at the square footage and then look at the average in the area, it should price lower. This means you’re buying something that is a bit harder to sell. Naturally… If it is harder to sell there is less demand, more room for negotiation and lowers the likelihood that you’ll leave. Before moving on, do your market research in your area as each city has a specific “home type” that is in most demand. When you see the cost suddenly falling on a sq/foot basis you know you’re entering a market where most are priced out. Perpetual Renter: This is the most common situation for Affiliate Marketers and other people who work in a space similar to Affiliate Marketing. It is also common for people who make the majority of their income online. We’re not sure why as they can certainly afford to buy and there are hundreds of wonderful cities to live in for the majority of your life. Our best guess is that this is due to the personality/psychology of people who earn a living online. They are generally opposed to commitment and prefer flexibility. Generally, once a person has a high income or high net-worth, they get annoyed by taxes and begin looking for ways to lower their brackets. This leaves you with Wyoming, Washington, Texas, South Dakota, Nevada, Florida and Alaska. After this you’ll find that most people choose Nevada, Florida and Washington (rare exceptions for the other states). Combine this with the fact that most people do not live in these states (prior to getting rich) and you’re left with a group of people trying to “test out” each city. This then leads to a perpetual renter lifestyle where you begin to bounce around. With this lifestyle, the person is living in a nice apartment but not quite nice enough to justify buying a place. Psychologically, the perpetual renter philosophy is to live in a *slightly* nicer place than he *would* buy and pocket the difference into additional savings. There is nothing wrong with this strategy and if you’re interested in being a home hopper, this is a good way to do it. If you’re going to rent you have to make sure it’s lower than you would have paid on a mortgage for a similar place (otherwise rationalization will take place and you’ll dislike the apartment). The House Party Person: If you’re in this camp you already know it. In fact before getting to this section you already knew that you were going to be the “house party” type person and it was one of the items you listed on “what to do when rich”.

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Wall Street Playboys, LLC This personality type usually starts with a smaller but upscale (everything upscale) home near the most vibrant neighborhood. He’s able to go out frequently and the home typically accommodates around 12-20 people if needed for a basic party. The person in this camp is usually quite extroverted. If they have a laundry list of people they want to have over, it would line up with their natural personalities/inclinations. If you’re going to go down this path, we’ve essentially given out the initial step. The last thing you want to do is buy “too much house” since you’ll likely lever up too much and have cash flow issues on the initial investment. Naturally, you want to steer far away from the 3-bedroom and 2bathroom home out in the suburbs. By having a place that is closer it solves half of the battle and from what we’ve seen, quality over quantity certainly works when it comes to throwing house parties. You’re not in college anymore so the bigger place with lower quality items just isn’t appealing anymore. When you upgrade to the bigger place, you can expand the number of guests… Just don’t sacrifice quality. The highlights here are all positive.  No Real Answer: Unlike the other ideas we highlighted, there is no real answer. The other situations required lowering total fixed costs, reducing travel time and improving the “time value” of your location. At this point we’re certain there are *many* other exceptions… Such as a person living on a farm with a huge stream of income (we’ve seen this occur in rare occasions). That said, if you’re looking to stay in a major city with a more urban lifestyle, the three solutions that we outlined are the most common.  Cash Flows: Since you’re financially well off at this point, your focus is going to suddenly change to cash flows. Why? If you have a high net worth, the specific number fluctuates on a daily basis. What really matters to you is the consistency of cash flow to pay for fixed costs (prevents you from touching any principal). As they say “1% problems” or “rich people problems”. None of this is negative. It means your focus is going to shift a bit towards consistent checks since you want more income production. You likely invested in non-income producing assets before you were rich and a shift occurs in this time frame (more value to cash flow).  Reduction in Risk: The last thing you want to become is the rich person who blows his wealth. This is an easy trap to fall into. One over leveraged bet. One over confident investment. One business idea that requires significant up front cost. Too much generosity giving money to family and friends. The list is actually quite long. When we refer to a reduction in risk we are specifically referring to the assets that pay for all of your fixed costs and basic living expenses. To avoid cash flow issues we recommend significant reduction in risk related to anything tied to your “fixed principal”. The easiest way to do this? Take 10-20% of your savings and add this to your untouchable fixed principal every single year.  Try Various Lifestyles… Don’t Bet the House: Our best guess is that between the three options, most will start with the perpetual renter model. This means you live in a new city and hop around quite a bit. Our only item of note here… Don’t try to mix the three lifestyles. If you’re going to buy then buy. Trying to hop (while buying) and managing the ~5% selling costs (buy and sell) combined with volatility surrounding the price of a home is not easy to manage. Hopefully no one is foolish enough to try and do this

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Wall Street Playboys, LLC  Veer Towards Quality: This is a point of emphasis that we have to make. If you’re going to “live it up” (insert any phrase that resonates with you), then you don’t want to have conflicting items. You don’t want to have low quality materials of any kind. This means your house/apartment needs to be high quality, the places you go to should be high quality and the atmosphere in general should be high quality (this refers to the living space, furniture, lighting, cleanliness etc.) Bonus – You’re Ultra Rich: If you’re ultra-rich you’re free to do anything you like. You can continue living in basic luxury apartments, you can do the classic boat/home combo, so on and so forth. We’re only including a small sub-section here since we get a lot of questions about it. The answer is quite simple and for those who have around $5-10 million to their name and a good social circle… they know the answer here. Large home and private parties. When you become rich (not ultra-rich), you end up meeting people who are ultra-rich. In a situation where you’re ultra-rich (somewhere north of $30-50 million or so), you end up buying large properties and host private parties. We’re only including this as a bonus section since we only have observational information to share. You’ll end up going to parties where the majority of the guys are in the 40-50 range (average closer to the high end). Long story short, the majority of the women that show up are in their 20s. In this category, you’re essentially in “sugar baby supporter” territory. You’re living a life similar to Felix Dennis (having people live in your various apartments and buying cars like they are a pair of socks). Hopefully you’ll make it to this level of wealth. Back to the point. You’ll have a large home with a lot of alcohol flowing at all times for the guests that show up. This typically involves some sort of entertainment cost (hiring a DJ for the party, catering, etc.). From an “investment” perspective you don’t really have an interest in getting a large return on your parties and home. You’re too far up the pyramid. While you’re not going to go overboard and lose it all, the cost of these events (cars etc.) is a few percentage points of your annual income anyway. If you have $50 million dollars, 5% is $2.5 million dollars which gives you a lot of wiggle room to spend freely. This is why the ultra-rich do not worry about small things like cars. General Snapshot: As mentioned before, money has diminishing returns. No matter what there is always going to be someone who is richer than you. Even the richest man in the world does not stay at the top forever (always surpassed by someone else). Even when you reach the “upper middle”, you start to see diminishing returns on the items you can purchase. So for the housing section the real big jumps are 1) living by yourself, 2) upgrading to a full service place with 1-2 bedrooms and finally 3) if you reach the $5M+ net worth area – dual city living. Extreme housing is certainly better, we’re just emphasizing the increase in “utility” as you go up the stack.

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1-10 Ranking: Higher Number is Better Housing Living at Home Living with Roommates Living in a Studio Living in a One-Bedroom One-Bedroom with Amenities One/Two-Bedroom with All Chores Done Larger Place With All of the Above Dual City Living Extreme Housing

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Chapter 2 – Food and Dining, the Third Highest Expense Item This section is specific to your own personal consumption. We’ll go over typical going out expenses later and are focusing on your day to day life without what we’ll call “discretionary food spending”. Discretionary food spending is when you’re going out for fun or picking up someone else’s tab. This chapter is your habits only. The majority of the costs don’t change much even if you become wealthier. At the end of the day, you’re not going to dine out every single meal and you’re not going to methodically pick out every meal (unless you’re one of those food YouTube celebrities). Step 1 – Completely Broke with No Real Income: If you’re unable to put away 20%+ or so, you’re going to eat the most basic healthy foods you can find. This means you’re not allowed to go out and eat (spending $100 or $50 for a meal). Instead you will home cook all of your food and buy items in bulk. Places like Costco would be ideal as you’re able to stock up on basic goods. While most people will frown upon and laugh at frozen goods, you’re actually able to obtain a lot of nutritional value from bulk frozen vegetables, fruits and other quick food items. Besides. If saving money is currently tough, you need as much extra time to fix your situation… Bulk purchases allow for this. And. As a kicker… If eating the same food consistently doesn’t make you want to get rich? Nothing will. Naturally, this is another short section as we were fortunate enough to not be in this spot after graduation. As usual though we’ll provide the main highlights and action steps we’d do if forced to start over. 1) No Entertainment Food – Bulk Only: Essentially, if you’ve got nothing, there is no reason to go out spending money you don’t have. We’d clamp down. Spend all of our time and resources finding ways to maximize each cent. This means you’re looking at bulk purchases of items that last a long time: frozen foods, canned foods, rice, lentils, oats, corn and perhaps some dried foods. You can avoid pasta as it lasts a long time but generates next to no nutritional value. 2) Water and Coffee: If you’re serious about getting out of this situation, you’re likely consuming some sort of energy enhancer (caffeine) and we’d just stick with coffee as it is cheap. Besides this cost, the only thing you should really be drinking is water. This isn’t going to be feasible from an execution standpoint but the point is the same. There is no real reason to go out drinking beers, hard liquor, wine, sugary drinks or other products. It’s going to happen here and there but there is no reason to spend money on it if you’re already behind. 3) Going out Expense: The only going out expense should be related to earning money. It sounds cheesy but it is true. Unless you’re going out to spend money that will legitimately lead to income growth… it does not make sense to spend money. Generally speaking, when you’re looking for an entry level position to increase your income, you won’t have to spend anything. The silver lining (there isn’t much in this income bracket) is that you’re not going to have to spend a dime networking/looking for work.

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Wall Street Playboys, LLC As you can see there isn’t really much to say here. You’re going to bulk buy items that last a long period of time and try to focus on eating as healthy as possible. There are many creative ways to get nutrition and we’ll name a few before moving on: 1) mild salsa in bulk that is drained through a strainer, 2) oats, 3) frozen spinach, 4) lentils/beans for protein, 5) bananas and 6) last but not least, plain old eggs. For what it is worth, the frozen items and 6 bullets are from real experience (living situation when absolutely broke before entering the workforce). Step 2 – Out of the Disaster Scenario: In similar fashion, you’re in a more stable position and can add some wiggle room to your diet. If you have a more normal savings rate in the mid 20s range, you’re likely able to pick up some discretionary items that will help you over the long-term. These are not going to be big ticket items. Instead they will be low-ticket items that are more of a “nice to have” versus a “need to have”. You’re now able to spend a little bit of money to either 1) improve your health or 2) save additional time for special occasions. This is where our blog’s approved products section comes in… you’ll see the basic items there: fish oil, high quality protein and chlorella to get nutrients while on the road or extremely busy. Beyond that, if you’re able to keep your savings rate reasonable, you can also begin buying food “on the go” here and there when you’re looking to save time. This would include a quick coffee, a sandwich/quick meal while on the run or a healthy juice if you were unable to eat a lot of vegetables due to time constraints in the day. Notice, we’re not including expensive dine out options here. The items listed above either help your health or save you time. Going to a sit down high-end restaurant when you’re still trying to “make it” is not a good formula for success. You’ll probably go out with friends once and a while anyway and get a few nights out that way. Generally, you should still be too busy trying to earn since the nights you’re “missing out on” won’t compare to the nights you’ll have in the future. Some basic highlights in this group as things become more positive: 1) Time Flexibility: If you’ve made it to this point, you likely have a career/small business that is somewhat demanding. This means you are going to use your additional money to buy time (for additional work) and no longer have to plan out every single item on the “chore list”. In the prior group, chores were organized to a point where you’re maximizing every single penny that came in. Absolutely no cent could be wasted. In this sub-section food is the place where you’ll get the most leverage off of the additional income. You can buy quick food when you need to finish a project… You don’t have to buy everything on sale and your budget is more flexible. 2) Testing Your Body’s Reaction: Another benefit of this group is you can now see what type of foods react positively to your body. Anyone who has tried to maximize their health will notice that they have different energy levels depending on what type of food they consume. This could be comparing kale and spinach, broccoli and asparagus, lemons and limes… so on and so forth. While you previously tried to maximize nutrition and nothing but nutrition, this new wiggle room in spending allows you to figure out the best foods for you. Naturally, this translates into your “to go” food items in emergencies as you’re able to buy the correct foods that mix well with your reactions. 3) Quick Shots and Boosts: One of the best ways to take advantage of some extra cash is the ability to buy quick boosts: double espressos, wheat grass shots, ginger shots, an energy drink

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Wall Street Playboys, LLC etc. This is probably the most important section here as it can help offset a stressful day, a night out drinking and a missed healthy meal for just a few bucks. Also the extra cash you have can help you push through an all-nighter or allow you to sleep in for an extra 15-30 minutes since you don’t have to worry about making anything in the morning (or afternoon). Step 3 – Into Positive Territory: At this point you’re extremely flexible. You’re saving quite a bit of money and you can now structure your life to maximize your physical fitness. If you’re earning enough to save 35-40% or so, it means your life is significantly more flexible than in the past. There is a wide range here as some people value eating out and other people value experiences like partying, traveling, outdoor activities, golf, boating… The list goes on and on. Either way, if you’re in this group you should be able to eat out at least 1-2x a week (outside of your dating routine). This will either be a restaurant for “recovery” meaning a nice steak restaurant to get protein after a heavy work out or it could be something more standard like a sushi place. Beyond the handful of restaurants you like to frequent (and will know the staff shortly) you’ll also have a flow of quick food places to save time (all items in the prior section). Everything in this sub-segment is positive. Difficult to live a bad life when you’re able to save time, eat better and not worry about the menu prices. 1) High-end or Mix of Restaurants: We gave away our own view in the paragraph above. We think it’s better to have 4-5 upper middle places to go to on a semi-frequent basis. Another strategy is to go to higher end places at a lower frequency. This is generally how most people will dine out. One of the problems with the extremely high-end restaurant option is you’re less likely to socialize. They are typically more closed off and meant for dates, groups or business meetings instead of socializing and drinking in a more open environment. It’s a lot easier to talk to the staff and people around you at a sushi bar than a closed off table with dark lighting and some candles. Either way, the choice is yours. 2) Heavily Stacked Fridge: Another benefit of having a higher income is being able to buy a large amount of various products for your home. Long gone are the days of having to buy everything in bulk *and* focus all extra spending on health related items only. Going forward, you can now stack up a variety of foods and drinks that are common for entertainment: champagne, vodka, tequila, wine…. sparkling water, juices, some unhealthy drinks such as sodas/energy drinks… higher quality foods to cook from seafood to oysters to tomahawk steaks and filet mignon. There is no need to go overboard and spoil food so we’re guessing you’ll likely spend more on the alcohol side (significantly longer shelf life). That said, you’re going to think more and more about the type of people you’ll have over to make sure you have all the right items for them as well. 3) Espresso Machines and Other Gadgets: Since you’re now squarely in the entertaining group, you’ll likely spring for a few products that you prefer (or your typical guests). This could be the standard espresso machine, juicers and blenders. Also. Since we’re in the food category… having gum and mints for the bathrooms and living room is a nice touch as well. If we were to summarize this, simply take the amenities of a high end hotel and try to add some of those features as they don’t cost much to maintain. If you’re in this category you’re living a life that most dream about on a daily basis. Be extra careful about who you bring over. People who were always in the upper echelon (grew up upper middle class and simply made it to the top) don’t have this issue. We’re emphasizing a bit of more caution

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Wall Street Playboys, LLC since we’re writing this product for everyone. If you bring over people who are still in the lowerend you’re going to run into jealousy problems. The masses care a lot about comparisons and you should be smarter about who enters your place. Realistically? You probably cut these people off a while ago but for all we know you got rich suddenly and didn’t upgrade your friend base on the way up. Step 4 – You’re Rich Time to Spend: Congratulations! The reality is that not much is going to change here as the extremely rich rarely change much from the above. But. We’ll go ahead and highlight some of the things that typically come up. It gets a bit blurry here since we separated out services in another section. We have to include it here as that is where a lot of the leverage around time and food comes into play. The upper echelon of rich people problems for sure. 1) Any Restaurant You Like: At this level you’re so rich that it doesn’t matter if you eat at high end places all of time. The problem with high-end places is the amount of time it takes to sit down and eat every single time (so we doubt anyone would do this). If it’s your thing… Then go for it. The only real difference here is that you are probably traveling more (see section later on that) which means you’ll actually know nice restaurants in multiple locations. While the person in the prior step would likely know the high-end places in his primary residence and “upper middle” slots outside of his hub. 2) Catering and a Chef: In the United States it is rare to have a chef. This is largely due to culture, prices and other services available in the Country. That said, some people go down this route and pay for it anyway. The more common route is consistent catering. If you recall from the previous section on housing, even if you live in a nice penthouse apartment, catering can be extremely valuable. In the more likely scenario (living in a home for most), catering can save you many hours of time. Unless you reach “staff level” wealth, then you’re able to rely on the people who work on your property (hint this is for the ultra-wealthy at the nine figure marker). 3) Ratchet Up the Quality: At this level, there is no reason to skimp on a single item. This could be the drink quality, silverware and appliances. While you may have had the “high quality standard items” in the prior section, at this level you even have the stuff you rarely use or are asked for. By way of example, if you don’t like Tequila, you’ll have one bottle of high quality Tequila in the house anyway (~10 year shelf life of high quality alcohol after being opened and in the freezer). Someone may like it and you won’t have to go out to get it (or send someone!). Final Note: There is no real “bonus” section here as the cost of food eventually hits a ceiling. Sure you could go for insanely expensive items that don’t make sense (collection of wine approaching 7 figures, rare foods that cost 10x more than high quality products) but it’s unlikely. The real change at the ultra-high end is the move to chefs/catering and the additional 20% cost of having high quality items across the full stack of choices. For a good “marker” you can get good quality champagne for $500 a bottle that would cost $10,000 in the clubs… So high quality alcohol doesn’t even move the needle for you anymore General Snapshot: Food and Drinks is one of the easiest categories to maximize since the chances of going out to eat at a Michelin Star restaurant everyday are slim (unless work related). So when you become rich (higher chance since you somehow found this blog), you’ll end up going out a few times a week and the rest of the food will probably be high quality items at your own

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Wall Street Playboys, LLC place. There are people who eat out 100% of the time, but as you get older this is less likely. As you can see the real big jumps are 1) when you can optimize your body for food/drinks, 2) when you can go out about 2x per week – referring to high quality dinners and 3) rare case when you can afford to have everything done for you. It is important to note that we don’t really include lunch or breakfast in here. The reasoning is as follows: 1) the cost of breakfast is always quite low and a lot of healthy people simply go with a coffee which is either a few cents at home or a meaningless $2.50-5.00 at a coffee shop and 2) lunches are also left off as the cost is not wide, you can get a decent lunch for $15-30 and making it yourself is probably around $7-12 or so. While we realize that $10/day is a good amount of money if you’re struggling, you wouldn’t be scaling your spending in that scenario. When you begin to make more money (say six figures or so), you’re definitely not going to move the needle by removing $10/day. That would be $3,650… or just 3.65% relative to your annual income. The $200-300 dinner expense is what can move the needle (dates etc.).

1-10 Ranking: Higher Number is Better Food Basics With No Wiggle Room Higher Quality Food Made Yourself Higher Quality Ability To Test Reactions Going Out At Least 1x Per Week Going Out 2x Per Week Maxed Out Amenities In Your Place Go Out Whenever You Like Catering/No Work For You Extreme Events For Parties

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Chapter 3 – Clothing, Shoes, Suits, Watches and More We’ve already covered the basics of style in prior products/posts so we’re going to focus on brands, longevity and other things to keep in mind as you scale your spending here. Lots of mistakes were made here in the past (quality over quantity is the most common) and hopefully people reading this won’t make the same mistake that we did. Step 1 – Completely Broke with No Real Income: At this level your expenses should be next to zero. Having grown up with little, most know the feeling of not having more than a couple of pairs of pants and a few shirts (vice versa, the point is clear). The only real item you need is one suit and one dress shirt for interviews… That’s about it. There are a hundred ways to minimize the cost from Thrift Shops to a slightly oversized suit followed by a tailor. Either way, this is really the only item you “need” to spend on since you don’t want to lose a potential career position by looking disheveled. Humans are making the decision and looking unattractive isn’t going to help you. Before moving on from this basic section, we’d add a decent pair of dress shoes as well. The name brand does not matter, it just needs to be clean and *appear* to have replaceable shoes. If the interviewer is a female, the chances she looks at your shoes are near 100% through numerous studies on this topic. 1) No Other Major Clothing Costs: At this level there is no real point in spending on your wardrobe. If you get a good paying position, you are forced to ramp it up a bit to look presentable on a day to day basis. But. If you’re currently stuck at the bottom you’ll be spending on nothing but one solid interview outfit (which you will only use for interviews/job fairs). Beyond this cost, you should simply replace what needs to be replaced and ideally focus on clothes that simply fit. If this means you’re wearing a lot of basic white or black t-shirts, then so be it. 2) Any Costs Focus on Professionalism: The majority of your costs here are going to be for basic items (t-shirts, socks etc.). If for some reason a friend/family member wants to give you clothing, make sure all of it is work-related clothing. The cost of work related clothing is an eventual cost no matter what you do. So. If you get the chance to get any sort of additional clothing, make sure it’s professional in nature. No need for nicer gym/work-out clothes since there is no real utility there. 3) No “Extras”: It goes without saying that there is no reason for any accessories or special items. If for some reason you’re given an accessory of decent value… the answer is to sell it. Sure there are social exceptions (you’re forced to keep it since it’s a relative who will ask about it), 99% of the time you’ll immediately sell any unnecessary item. The additional items are not justifiable and they could give you extra cash for an emergency or more serious opportunities. Accessories are a big waste in this bracket. Note: accessory refers to a watch or pocket square, not a tie that is required when you wear a suit to an interview. Step 2 – Out of the Disaster Scenario: Since you have decent income in this bracket, this is typically where the investment in clothing comes in. Why? Well there is truth to “looking the part” when it comes to any career or small business. If you finally got your foot in the door, cleaning up your appearance is probably one of the highest return investments you can make.

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Wall Street Playboys, LLC It is an actual investment since good looking people are seen as more trustworthy and earn more money over the course of their working career (last study we checked was around $1 million dollars in difference over 25 years or so). The numbers are less important. What is more important is knowing that your investment in clean clothing and a clean look will give you a much larger return than the cost of the clothing if you do it right. Before jumping in, the *Main Premise* here is that you’re looking for classic looks that can be used at work. Classic looks never go out of style, are perfectly fine for the work place and you can even use them to go out from time to time. 1) Day to Day First: We’re assuming you recently made it into this category, so you’re going to focus on building out your day to day items first. Depending on your body type you should choose *any* brand where the cost of a standard long-sleeve t-shirt is around $15-20 and a pair of slacks at around $30. As long as there is no visible quality difference feel free to look for the same brands on sale during special promotions to get them even cheaper. Around 10-15 shirts and 7-8 pants should be more than enough. Most people in this category jump straight to “higher quality items” like Brooks Brothers or Ralph Lauren… unfortunately the quality actually isn’t much better and you’ll see that the common Brooks Brothers clothing line move just leads to broken buttons and more costs. Basic items from Banana Republic, J. Crew and Zara are likely better (you’re just getting basic items to look presentable at work and are not well off yet) 2) Three Solid Suits: Until you make it into the next group of spending, there is no need for more than three solid suits. We’ll leave you to choose between a mid-level brand tailored (practically all items found at a place like Nordstrom Rack on Sale – emphasis on sales) or a made to measure suit. We’re partial to the made to measure side but it’s really not that big of a difference when compared to a tailored suit (assumes the sizing already fits). Either way. The point stands. There is no reason for “going out suits” or breaking the bank on a whole rack of them. You just need a few to rotate until you make the next step up. 3) Minimal Accessories: At this point you’ll have a few, probably a couple of shirts that require cufflinks (only for meetings) some ties/pocket squares. That should be the end of the accessory section. Some people attempt to get into the watch game too early and all this does is increase the expectations of people around you and dismantle your savings rate. Running the math, even if you’re making $160,000 pre-tax… This is only $100K or so after taxes in a place like New York City. This means a single watch purchase is more than 5-10% of your total after tax income. That’s an insane number that would only be reasonable in the low single digit range 13%, particularly if your savings rate is low as well. Step 3 – Into Positive Territory: At this level you are expected to “make an impact” with your wardrobe. This means you should be getting complements every single week if you’re going out consistently and meeting new people. That’s the standard and it doesn’t require name brands (although we’ll give a few that work). Many people believe they dress well, but then never receive any complements. That’s a terrible sign and suggests the person is not well dressed relative to the person they are attempting to represent.

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Wall Street Playboys, LLC Before moving on, this section is difficult to triangulate as we don’t know “who” you’re trying to represent. If your style is loud vs. quiet… If you are thin or extremely wide… If you prefer going to the beach or wine bars etc. The key message we’re attempting to convey is that your overall wardrobe should move in that direction. There is no point in having flashy suits if you’re never going to wear them and there is no point in buying a bunch of jeans if you’re not going out during the day consistently. 1) Ramp Up the Whole Image: Remember. When you ramp up your image, you have to increase all of it. When looking at the sub-sections here, the place you live comes first followed by the clothing you have on followed by your choice in car. If you’re living with a roommate but have a $5,000 custom suit on with an Audemar Piguet on your wrist and drive a used Honda Civic… it just doesn’t look right. Make sure the entire image moves in the same direction. 2) Increase the Brand or Made-to-Measure/Bespoke: There is no “right” way to do it as described earlier. Depending on your style/image, you’re going to up the brands or move to more made-to-measure and bespoke products. Our guess is that it’ll be a brand increase or made-to-measure since Bespoke can get pricey if you’re still in the saving 35-40% range and are not officially rich yet. Brand increases are quite simple, once you start moving into Thomas Pink, Canali, Giorgio Armani (not Armani Exchange) etc. the quality of your nicer items are “leveled up”. You can save those Tom Ford/Gucci purchases for when you’re truly rich/set for life (the prior brands can be acquired at a discount if you wait and time the purchases out) 3) Acceptable to Get into the “Watch Game”: Although we would recommend waiting until you’re officially set, you can go ahead and enter the watch market if that’s your personality/style. While it makes no sense to wear them if you’re not trying to convey a “classic” look, if you’re generally in suits and prefer nice nightlife venues, it’ll help you connect with other rich people and naturally help with women as well. People who are against watches have typically never used them appropriately and people who obsess over them are usually overly insecure. You don’t need to be either. A standard Rolex is good enough and you’re not going to need to level up beyond this. If you become extremely well off, a Richard Millie/Patek will only be recognized by truly wealthy individuals. 4) Maintenance: As a final rule of thumb, once you’re in this territory, you should only be purchasing items that you want to take care of. That’s a good rule of thumb. Gym clothing and other items that will receive a lot of wear and tear are in a different category. If you’re buying shoes, suits, shirts etc. The quality should be good enough that you’re willing to maintain them. This could mean pressing the suit (not dry cleaning to make sure it sustains better), consistent polishing of the shoes and a watch winder if you go down that path Step 4 – You’re Rich Time to Spend: At this level you can go in a lot of directions. As a point of emphasis when you’re rich you don’t have to buy anything fancy. This means you don’t even have to buy suits, wear nice shoes etc. We’re simply outlining ways to spend your money that will actually lead to results. For example, buying a Rolex and upgrading to a slightly higher quality Rolex doesn’t do much. Similarly, going from $500 shoes to $800 shoes rarely does anything either. The content here is used as a guideline for “if” you want to do these things. That’s a big if since there are wealthy people who don’t even bother wearing nice watches, nice suits or driving nice cars. 1) High-end Brand: At this point you can buy anything you like (so we assume). If you’re doing this, the most recognized items are generally Gucci, Louis Vuitton and even Dior (yes we were

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Wall Street Playboys, LLC surprised by the last one as well but noticed it – this could change in the future and is based on January 2020 information). If you’re in a weird situation where you suddenly got rich (say sold a Company and cleared $10M), then we’d go ahead and say Gucci is your best bet. It’s the most recognized now and you can figure out your own style as you move forward from there. 2) Watches: For what it is worth, we haven’t seen much a difference from Rolex to the other competing brands such as Audemar Piguet for example. Instead, the only way to differentiate is by picking up something “outrageous”. We’d never do this but if it’s your thing the watch would need to be worth over $100,000 or so. Absolutely ludicrous in our opinion (you don’t even need a Rolex as a point of emphasis again) but it definitely attracts ultra-rich individuals or people that are aware of ultra-rich items. Richard Millie and Patek Philippe are starting points if you want to go down this route 3) Accessories: This one is a big deal. If you want to do everything wrong, you should buy normal clothing and then get an outrageous Gucci belt or accessory. This is a common tactic for people who are unable to understand style or congruency. If your clothing doesn’t fit, don’t bother with an expensive pair of cufflinks or belt. Once you see this mistake you can’t “unsee” it. Instead the cost of the accessories should “keep up” with the remainder of the outfit. A good rule of thumb is likely around 10% of the value of the outfit. If you’re wearing diamond cufflinks that run $10,000 and put on a $1,500 suit that doesn’t fit… you just look preposterous. Don’t even get us started on the Hermes tie trend with an ill-fitting suit and submariner watch. It just looks terrible. 4) Cash on Hand: Another interesting thing you’ll notice is that you need to have physical cash on hand. For some reason it just doesn’t look right when you pay for something and only have $150 in your pocket. People will notice. You’re already dressed up so you’re commanding more attention by default. Make sure you have a good amount of cash with you as waiting for stuff while dressing up just looks strange (should have the ability to skip lines and pay/leave quickly from venue to venue) General Snapshot: This one is a *lot* tougher to message. Some people don’t even wear suits and will be rich living on the beach wearing nothing but shorts and sandals. We really don’t know what you’ll do with your money so it’s hard to figure out where you’ll spend it (as it relates to clothing). So we would like to take a second and remind people that this information is from the lens of someone who wants to live in a major city like New York, Los Angeles or Miami. It is not for people who decide to say “I’m done” and move to a remote island in the Bahamas (nothing wrong with that of course). Clothing Basics Higher Quality Basics High Quality Shoes Tailored Made-to-Measure Custom Suit Custom All High Quality Expensive Watch Ulta-Expensive Watch

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Wall Street Playboys, LLC From the above, the real key items are 1) high quality shoes, 2) made-to-measure and 3) being able to upgrade to an official status symbol watch – as mentioned before going beyond the Rolex is hard on an international scale… you have to cross into extreme territories with a Richard Millie for example. Now we’re not sure why these are the jumps but they seem to line up with reactions and positive comments you’ll get. A tailor just isn’t good enough relative to made to measure and high quality shoes are the most noticeable for work and going out. If you jump to custom suits, it’s really the gold diggers who notice, around 99% of people don’t know the difference between made-tomeasure and custom. Finally, the watch simply makes it easier for you to get people to listen. For some reason they associate a nice watch with success even-though we have noticed that about 80% of people with an expensive watch aren’t even rich… Go figure… the real tell is always the $100K+ watch that screams “so rich I can afford this and not care”.

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Wall Street Playboys, LLC

Chapter 4 - Travel and Vacations, Hint No Need for the Standard Europe Trip Traveling and vacations can easily break the bank if done incorrectly. There are people who immediately spend five figures on vacations when they are not even well off yet. We’re not sure why someone would do this but they do. We think it’s due to propaganda and group think. There is a reason why everyone goes to the same old Western Europe vacation and the same old Cabo/Cancun Mexico vacation. Either way, you don’t need to follow the herd as it is rarely the right decision. Step 1 – Completely Broke with No Real Income: You can probably guess how this one shakes out. There is no real list… You don’t get to go on vacations. At best if your body is absolutely shot and you need a break, you get to stay at home and have a “staycation”. Spend some time going to see free museums or hiking/going to the beach for the day. Thinking about this further, even with a high paying career/job out of college, vacations were already off the table. In high-finance positions most people take at maximum a week off (not even two weeks) as they are busy trying to be a top performer and battling it out with other competitive individuals. Back to the point. If you don’t have any real income, you should continue to work until you eventually live a life you enjoy. This is not a fun period of life (no one said it would be easy) and will likely cause mental and physical stress. As we’ve mentioned on our blog in the past, real stress (worried about livelihood) is not good. You want to continue grinding it out until that situation is solved. Step 2 – Out of the Disaster Scenario: At this level you’re going to have to take what we call “creative” vacations. If you want a rule of thumb for this scenario, you should only spend about 2x what you normally would in a regular week during your week off (we assume you’ll be taking 9 days off – two weekends and one normal work week). This number likely sounds small and it should. The way you make your vacations possible is by finding creative ways to reduce the overall cost for now. Easy ways to do this include: 1) credit cards for miles, 2) using AirBnB to rent a place with your close friend(s) and 3) reducing the cost of the trip by hitting the local super market for food – breakfast and lunch items. This doesn’t take a lot of planning and if you were smart enough to land a good career and increase income over time, it will only require a few hours of work. A second rule of thumb for this category is to avoid high cost cities while you’re young. It just doesn’t make economical sense for you to visit an expensive place like Switzerland, staying in nice hotels and draining your bank account. You’re better off finding cheaper areas a tier down where you can actually enjoy your time there without stepping back financially. As of this writing, South East Asia, South America, Eastern Europe and even Canada are good options. A running joke out in Canada is that it is now called the “Canadian Peso” since the currency devalued so much

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Wall Street Playboys, LLC (2019/2020 comment). General places to avoid are easy, don’t go to Western Europe, Australia, New Zealand and expensive US based cities (you’ll spend a lot more than you think). Quick Bullet Recommendations  South East Asia: While we didn’t’ do this if we did it again we would start in South East Asia, it’s the cheapest by far in terms of cost of living and you can get more value out of your money.  Eastern Europe: This is where we started and would recommend going to places like the Ukraine, Romania and Poland. It is possible that it could be just as cheap as South East Asia (due to miles/points game) but we’ve run the math and South East Asia is usually cheaper  South America: While you have a lot of places to go to in Eastern Europe, if you’re looking to change sceneries you can go to South America – Brazil, Argentina, Colombia for example. Depending on the exchange rate adjust your choices  Russia/Canada: For some reason we group these two together, they are pretty similar in cost and not at all similar in experience. Montreal (summer) and Moscow are different experiences that you should have at least once in your life  Any Others: If you’re in NYC and are looking to party, Iceland is by far the easiest choice even though it is pricy relative to the other locations  Quick Math: South East Asia and Eastern Europe will cost you about 40% of what you normally spend in the USA, South America is around 60%, Russia/Canada is around 70% and anything beyond this is going to be similar to the USA in many cases. For other countries, simply take a look at Numbeo to get a quick snapshot If you’re on the younger side of the spectrum (early-mid 20s)... If you have a good career, chances are you know a few people who moved to other major cities. In this case if you have a place to crash, you can spend a lot more for a week hanging out with your friends. This way you pay it forward (pay for some nice dinners/partying at the clubs) in exchange for a place to stay. We’ve observed this as a common occurrence between New York and Los Angeles over the past couple of years. Our guess is that this will continue. Step 3 – Into Positive Territory: Ah yes, if you’ve done everything right you’ll notice an incredible “lucky break”. If you’re well off financially, chances are you run some sort of small internet business (readers of our blog). If you run a small business, it means you can take time off whenever you like as long as you organize ahead of time. Why is this important? It is important because the cost of going to any city in the world goes down dramatically. One of the main reasons why vacations are more expensive for people is the timing. Booking flights around the holidays always leads to insane price premiums. Even if you’re still playing the “miles/points game”, you will get more value by being able to take vacations off calendar. Oh and by the way… By going off calendar you’re a lot more interesting to the locals who are typically annoyed by the swarm of tourists showing up at a particular time of year. At this point we assume that you’re able to spend about 3x your normal income without having a meaningful impact on your savings/investing rate. As you make more money and your spending

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Wall Street Playboys, LLC increases at a slower rate… this is usually how it works out. If you’re in this camp, you can now open the map to any location in the world. The only caveat here (since you’re not officially rich yet) is you want to avoid one expensive item on the trip. Typically, this means you have a few items during the week that are free (sight-seeing etc.) instead of jam packing the week with activities. If you’re still interested in going on vacation to the cheaper locations, you can probably go to the high-end for every single item. To make the examples clearer, instead of cutting some corners you can stay at 5-star hotels. Instead of drinking “cheap stuff” you can go ahead and drink high-end alcohol and champagne any time you go out. You can also hit the nice restaurants for every meal. It really doesn’t make a difference since the spending won’t move the needle in general. To wrap this section up, you can also dedicate a good section of time to buying some nice items from the country. It’s always good to have some nice clothing from a completely different location as the style will be different. Going to Moscow and picking up a high quality tie, suit or accessory of some sort will almost always stand out when you’re in another country. This applies to every country you visit, styles are simply different. Step 4 – You’re Rich Time to Spend: This is where money flies around. And. There is no real answer here. Generally speaking, this is a “Catch 22” as anyone who is rich doesn’t need to “take vacation”. They can simply leave. This is why we’ve noted that the best nights to go out are typically weekdays (Tuesday for example) since your typical worker is not going to be able to do this while they are on the clock. With that said, there are many common ways to spend up for events: 1) yachts/boat parties are quite common, 2) throwing extensive house parties, 3) bringing large groups of people to any special venue from renting out a mansion for a ski trip to buying front row seats for basketball games, 4) staying at 5-star resorts and 5) extensive outdoor type experiences such as Safaris – some of these are quite pricey. If you’re good at reading between the lines (and you probably are if you’ve been reading our blog enough), there is no real need for vacations when you live in a high quality place in a city you love. Simply ask yourself… If you had $10 million… would you live in a place you hate? Probably not. Some other clear ways to make your vacations better: 1) all travel is first class, 2) hotels are certainly 5-star, 3) you can hire a driver to save time and improve your mobility, 4) ensure the hotel takes care of all your laundry/dry cleaning right before you leave so you have no chores to do when you get back and 5) you can always rent a luxury car to drive as well. As you can see, the list is quite egregious. There is no need for any of it. The biggest item that helps is the first class/business class flight at all times. Any flight that is over 5 hours or so is quite painful when you compare a lay flat seat to a standard seat. For what it’s worth, there is a significant decline in utility/value between the lay-flat seat and a lay-flat seat that is slightly larger. The key is being able to stay horizontal while you sleep (that’s the biggest value).

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Wall Street Playboys, LLC General Snapshot: Since your travel schedule is going to vary, we focus on ranking the travel experiences based on where you’re able to go. The big game changers are really 1) low cost international travel, 2) being able to travel frequently and 3) the ultra-high end where you can do major experience based trips. While we’re emphasizing that lay flat seats are going to be important it’s hard to figure out when you’ll upgrade to these seats. If you’re only doing 1-2 hour flights you’ll rarely need them and if your work requires coast to coast travel you’ll probably upgrade to those before ramping up your travel expenses for pleasure. Flying is terrible for your health. As you get wealthier you’ll realize this and quickly prioritize comfortable flying to prevent blood clots and other negative aspects of being trapped in a compressed airplane.

1-10 Ranking: Higher Number is Better Travel Only Your Area Some Domestic Travel International - Low Cost Frequent Travel Domestic and International Frequently Any Location You Like Any Location You Like With a Group High-End Experience Based Trips Frequent High-End Experience Based Trips

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Chapter 5 – Services, Focus on Improving Your Health and Performance This is where a lot of our stronger opinions shine through. We’re of the belief that you’re better off with higher quality services than you are with larger amounts of “space”. In essence, we’d rather live in a one bedroom high rise with tons of amenities that save time versus a larger home with no bells and whistles. As usual feel free to make adjustments as you see fit and our list at the end will differentiate the lifestyle approaches. Step 1 – Completely Broke with No Real Income: Another short section since all services should be done by yourself. Since you don’t have an ability to save, you shouldn’t be spending money on anything that will set you back. In fact, you should provide said services and if you really need to… find a way to get a gas efficient car (Prius for example) and just drive an Uber during peak hours. Having services rarely makes sense unless there is significant downside to doing it yourself. If you have a job interview, definitely don’t try to tailor your own suit or shine your own shoes (better to just make sure you look good) As a note, you don’t even need a gym membership at this low level of income. You can go to a park and stick with pull-ups, sprints, push-ups and other body weight exercises. When you get your first decent paying career or begin generating meaningful cash flow from your business venture… then you can consider a basic gym with the standard equipment. If you think you really need some sort of weights, then we would buy one heavy set of dumb bells (could be 40 pounds or 80 pounds depending on your size and frame) to be used for a large range of exercises from bench presses to lungees to shoulder press exercises. As you can imagine, if you’re struggling to afford a pair of dumbbells, it’s probably not the right time to waste money on fitness equipment. Step 2 – Out of the Disaster Scenario: The two real services you’ll need are a nearby gym and a small amount of flex spending for dry cleaning and Ubers. These two items will provide real value as neglecting your health is out of the question (you’ll have shorter duration workouts during heavy work days which will require gym equipment). Also. The budget for taking Ubers prevents you from doing something foolish like buying a car and living extremely far away from where you need to be for work. Things that are “off” the list include: massages, a maid, laundry services (dry cleaning is for high quality items), tax preparation services, salons/spas and club memberships While we’ve mentioned that joining a high-end gym is of immense value and is noticeably off this list… it is because you’re not earning enough yet. High-end gyms attract higher quality people. And. They will only interact with you consistently if you’re on the same playing field. The one exception is if you’re an attractive female attempting to find a rich male partner. But. The chances are slim that this is you. Step 3 – Into Positive Territory: This is where the magic begins to happen. If you can make it into positive territory you’ll find that using money as a tool to buy yourself time and energy repays

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Wall Street Playboys, LLC itself 100x. If you think this is an exaggeration, simply make it to this level and report back after making services adjustments. This is a rank order of value from best to worst changes from what we’ve seen. 1) Apartment Complex: This is by far the fastest way to improve your quality of life. If you can find a way to place next to all of your daily items into your living space, you will save several hours a week. If you don’t believe this just add it all up: 1) time to get to the gym goes from 30 minutes per day to one minute – assumes 15 mins back and forth from the gym, 2) dry cleaning and laundry services are usually available at the complex – around 1 hour per week at minimum, 3) many also have spa/massage type services, no need to leave, 4) you save hours of “planning” any quick get together as you can simply rent the room provided by the hotel/complex for special events and 5) basic entertainment options such as pool tables and entertainment centers. While those last two do not sound like much they add up quickly as a simple form of entertainment can be used frequently to reduce your time spent moving around. 2) Hormone Replacement/Supplements: At this point, the truth is out there. If you hire a high quality doctor to measure your blood every six months or so you’ll see substantial gains in your productivity and quality of life. The days of aging “naturally” are over. While we think stress is by far the biggest killer (hence why we put a high quality apartment first that reduces all commute times), having a private doctor to monitor you and provide the right mix of supplements will be life changing. Don’t think we say life changing much but it certainly applies here and to re-emphasize, it is only something you should look at when you’re in your mid-30s or so (others argue early 30s so we’re playing it safe) 3) Massages: This is a big one. Many of our readers are in their 20s and will laugh at this saying “stretching and massages are a waste”. To this we say “talk to us in a decade”. There is a reason why professional athletes slow-down in their 30s and the chances of someone reading this being more genetically gifted than a pro-athlete is essentially 0%. When you have a chance at slowing the hands of time, you take it. Massages and what we call “pre-habilitation”, is something you should take seriously if you want to look and feel good at 40+ 4) Dysport and Botox: Depending on your ethnicity this will help you look younger for a longer period of time. Generally speaking, the lighter your skin is, the more it will show blemishes (this is simply a fact, i.e. wrinkles show more clearly on white skin). Similar to the point on hormone replacement therapy and supplements, you want to look into this in your 30s. If you have good skin it could be your late 30s and even 40s and if you have poor skin it could be as early as 30 5) Facials and Cleansers: Similar to the above, you also want to budget in time to have your face cleaned. You could have oily skin or you could have dry skin… We don’t know your situation. We do know that your skin is one of the first things people see and is a major determinant to appearing youthful vs. old 6) Basic Cleaning Services: For some reason we have this last, probably because we suggest living in smaller places with lower total HOA/taxes/recurring expenses than a large place to throw parties. This means the time it takes to keep the place looking nice is relatively low. Once every two weeks, even once a month, is typically enough if you simply have a nice one bedroom with a view. Step 4 – You’re Rich Time to Spend: This is where it can really get out of control (in a fun way). It can also create a lot of good experiences for you over time. Since you are rich, you can use spa treatments as “dates”, you can consistently throw house parties since you’ll have someone to clean

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Wall Street Playboys, LLC it all up and you might even have a chef! The options are pretty endless at this point as you’ll hire event planners, DJs and spend quite a bit of money throwing entertaining events. 1) Cleaning and Cooking: We’ll lump these together as they are typically done at the same time if you become wealthy (many of you will become rich enough to afford this in the future!). You end up having a private cook and a person to take care of the house on a weekly basis (at minimum). If you go down the large house path, this could mean a full time employee (or two). For what it’s worth, when you become extremely well off, you’re not going to skip on one and only do the cleaning or the cooking. You end up doing both to outsource all tasks. As a final note, if you’re well off enough the employee is going to do all of the laundry and maintenance tasks as well 2) Private Schooling/Nanny: As stated, this is not a real world experience note, just an observation from real world events. The rich and ultra-rich typically have some sort of Nanny/Child care cost in addition to all of the other items we listed before. It’s always fun to hear about the complaints, spending $60-100K a year (post tax money) on taking care of their own kid. That said when you see the pattern you cannot “un-see” it. We have no comment on this matter as it is none of our business. That said it’s an area where a lot of people spend if they decide to have kids. Final note, we realize many upper middle class people do this as well, we’re referring to extreme levels of additional care (separate help for piano lessons, sports, a dog walker and more) 3) Salons, Spas, Massages etc.: Anything in this catch all bucket is now similar to picking up something at a convenient store for you. You can get them when you feel even slightly tight/tense and you can use these services for dates as well (unsurprisingly you’ll rarely… more likely never… find an attractive women who declines them). 4) Cryotherapy and Tanning: While we’re against tanning (unnaturally), some people enjoy them and this can be added onto the list of services. Another one is really the icing on the “antiaging cake” and is called cryotherapy. We were going to include crypto therapy sessions into the prior section but the research on the topic is minimal relative to hormone replacement therapy. We’re personally dabbling in it now and we can say that it seems to work although the impact is a lot harder to measure. One interesting benefit seems to be improved skin and reduction in brain fog. We’ll likely do a post on this for free on our blog in the future. 5) Country Clubs and Other Exclusive Groups: To avoid getting criticism about all the different groups you can join (country clubs, yacht clubs etc.) we’re just grouping this all together. No one needs to join any particular group. And. If you do, you’re going to certainly be around other wealthy people. High-end gyms already do this to an extent and the higher ticker price (well over $50,000 a year in many cases) is going to be a filtering system on steroids. You won’t find any poor people in a yacht club or an expensive country club due to severe barriers to entry General Snapshot: The general snapshot here is only an issue based on your current age. If you’re under 30, the chances that you care about hormone replacement therapy and country clubs should be next to zero (all of your levels are high and hanging out with older guys if you’re rich doesn’t make a lot of sense from a socializing perspective but feel free to do so when you’re not out on numerous dates). Either way we will try. The big three jumps are really as follows: 1) no longer needing to do laundry or clean, 2) being able to take care of all physical needs which is usually around the gym upgrade and the massage

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Wall Street Playboys, LLC upgrade and finally 3) when you get older ramping up your blood metric optimization – Hormone Replacement Therapy or if you’re younger, this would be optimizing all of your vitamins and diet to become a well-oiled machine.

1-10 Ranking: Higher Number is Better Services No Services At All Laundry Services Laundry and Cleaning Services High-End Gym Ability To Afford Consistent Massages Skin Cleaning Addition "Optimization" Of All Metrics Cooking Services All Services At Any Time

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0 1.5 4 5 6.5 7 8.5 9 10

Wall Street Playboys, LLC

Chapter 6: Events: Dating, Concerts and Parties

Here is where you can get a lot of leverage out of your age. Your entertainment options are incredibly age dependent in terms of what you’re going to enjoy. While people will say “you can do whatever you want and age is just a number”, the reality is that you’re not going to enjoy the same things you did 10 years ago. In fact, as we write this, we’re officially old enough to appreciate quiet areas. When you’re in your 20s, going to loud clubs, bars, concerts etc. is pretty much the ideal situation. Eventually you transition into a different environment: house parties, relaxing vacations and fancy high quality restaurants. The young guys who are reading this believe that when you go into this environment the women are suddenly old and to that… we can’t help but laugh. There are tons of attractive women who are between 18-23 years old that have no interest in hanging out with 25-29 year old guys who were previously popular frat guys. If you know, you know. If you don’t, then you don’t. All we can say is that your options won’t change if you’re successful, so no need to worry about “missing out”. It’s always there. Step 1 – Completely Broke with No Real Income: Ah yes we actually have something to say here. While many of your options are essentially zero, even if you have no real income and are broke there are ways to go on dates (assuming you’re young). No one respects the broke 45 year old since he had 25 years to fix his life. If you’re in your 20s and don’t have much money, it’s still quite easy. All you really need is a small amount of alcohol and a nice location. Seriously, that’s it. In fact, if you’re making money, you can still do this as it’s not seen as “unacceptable”. It works incredibly well. A basic real life example: Grab some food and throw it into a bag, grab a couple of cheap bottles of wine (Moscato – a sweet wine that has grown in popularity with the young crowd)… and head over to Central Park. Seriously, it is that simple. The exact items you take are not of importance, you can use White Claw or some other type of alcohol. What is the cost here? Practically nothing. While the no income people shouldn’t be doing this much (since they’re too busy figuring out their money issues), it’s always on the table if you really need a break after working 60-80 hours a week for several weeks in a row. Also. By doing this… you’re forcing yourself to become more interesting as you can’t hide behind loud music to mask weaker social skills. Funny enough, this sub-section is clear evidence that getting your money straight when young is the most important (besides health). If it’s possible to still go on dates with practically no money, it means that hooking up is relatively easy as long as you have normal social skills and are not a 3/10 on the looks scale. Step 2 – Out of the Disaster Scenario: Funny enough, even when you’re out of the disaster scenario we would still recommend the cheaper dates. Why? Well you get a lot of benefits from the more relaxed environment. You’re forced to talk more and you’re avoiding late nights at the club/bar until 2-4am the next day. 34

Wall Street Playboys, LLC Now that said, when you’re out of the disaster scenario, the best way to get faster interactions is by going to bars/lounges. We’d actually avoid clubs until you’re able to spend more and jump around. Anyone who has a lot of experience with nightlife knows that they typically hop around to 3-5 bars/clubs in a single night. If you’re not quite there from a cash flow perspective, you should find the louder busier bar areas. While we stick with SoHo, Tribeca and Meatpacking in Manhattan these days, if you’re still ramping, it’s better to go to a place like the Lower East side. In places like Miami you can go to all of the rooftop bars/lounges in Brickell and simply avoid going to places like Liv. You can avoid the entire bottle service experience for quite some time. When you’re older you’ll get bottles and bring all of the people to the club. When you’re young, you’re simply meeting strangers by showing up. So rolling this all up, we’d recommend sticking with day type events when you can. For your nightlife venues, stick with “party areas” that are not expensive until you’ve ramped up your income. Don’t do anything foolish such as trips to Vegas. Remember that splitting bottles at the club when you could have gone out 10-20 times (solid bars/lounges) is a horrible return on your time. Step 3 – Into Positive Territory: This is where your personality, culture and rolodex impact your options. As usual we have to make a few generalizations. If you’re Caucasian or African American, you usually end up going to tons of bars/clubs jumping around to many places in a single night. If you’re Asian/Hispanic you’re more likely to go to clubs in groups and buy bottles. We’re not sure why this is, but we’ve noticed it over the years. 1) Most Common: Typically, when you get your first pile of gold, you’re not going to know a lot of people. This is just how it works. So you go out with a few close friends and hit several bars/clubs in a single night. You also start the night by going to dinner with some girlfriends before heading out as well. This is extremely standard. Light dinner some drinks, clubs/bars/lounges – around 3-4 of them or so, head back to your place. Your Uber rating will go down with the quickness (4 stars if you’re lucky) 2) A Group: Another common one that stands out is the “one spot bottles” set up. What happens here is you start out in a similar group. A bunch of people go out to dinner 12-15 usually, you drink until you’re officially in party mode. Then you go to the most popular spot for the day and pick up a table. After about two hours in the club, people have dispersed in some form and everyone somehow makes it home. 3) Dates: At this point you already know the main places you like. So you go out on dates to nicer areas and the staff will typically laugh/joke with you when you walk in. This is also incredibly common. At this point, we assume you’re older and the whole “cheap date” idea won’t really work. For two reasons: first you should be too busy during the day and second your personality is going to prefer the faster action of nightlife. Step 4 – You’re Rich Time to Spend: Ah yes. The most out of control part of the entire party section. You’re now rich so your events are going to be insane to say the least. You’ll be throwing house parties near the beach, taking groups of people to ski trips (Aspen is common of course),

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Wall Street Playboys, LLC renting out rooms for dinner instead of getting a normal table and even renting out expensive events such as boxes for the NBA finals or the Super Bowl. As you can tell it really gets out of a hand as you’re combining both events with alcohol and potentially travel as well. 1) Every Guy Brings “Something”: At this point in the “stratosphere” where the air is thin, you find that every single person at the party has some sort of value. Either they are younger and brought a bunch of good looking girls. They are older and run large businesses. They might even have connections to a bunch of famous people (bring in a famous DJ/singer for the event). It really gets out of control. 2) No Stress: The people in the room are not stressed out at all and practically no one talks about work while the party is going on. The next day you can ask about their current plans/issues and that’s where a lot of the money is made. But. During the actual event… everyone is simply drinking/eating and having fun. You can pretty much guarantee some sort of damage will be done (either the restaurant will get annoyed or something will break, this should probably be added to Newton’s laws) 3) Lots of Gold Diggers/Escorts/Strippers: Think you won’t go down this path? You’ll be wrong. There will be escorts/strippers at the party. The wives that are there (always some) won’t even care because they know there is nothing they can do about it. Instead of going to the clubs and wasting a bunch of money at a Strip Club in a crazy bender, they will be brought to the house as entertainment. Any time you’re around people who have a lot of money someone in the room will always be on the drugs/alcohol/sex/escorts bender. It is not avoidable and you become desensitized to it. 4) All of the Materialism Comes Back: Showing up in a helicopter, rocking a $100,000 watch, $2,000 shoes Tom Ford shoes and tons of Gucci (since that’s the new rich brand of choice – they never have sales unlike lower level brands like Ferragamo). You will also become desensitized to this. If you’re in a house party scenario, we’ve found the materialism doesn’t make a difference. Why? Well if you’re a guy and somehow got invited everyone knows you are at least well off. Just isn’t possible to be broke. Also. If you’re in a more open space (such as a high-end club with bottles) then the materialism *does* attract attention. More on this later 5) Some sort of Illegal Activity: Since we already mentioned drugs and escorts at these events… you can imagine that there is always at least one “black sheep” or seven at these larger events. A high-end drug dealer or some sort of person with a criminal background. You’d think that the ultra-rich would be insulated but that’s simply not the case. Successful criminals blend in just like everyone else. You don’t find out till later when they are in jail for something. If you don’t believe this all we’ll say is “wait for it…” General Snapshot: This one is fun as you can easily see where someone is socio-economically… By how they think about their social lives. No one who is actually rich worries about Gold Diggers and Escorts and none of them really care. If you bring three of them to a party you will only get negative attention from regular people. Rich people are already used to it and don’t have any fear of Gold Diggers. They don’t mind having some fun with a bunch of strippers in the house or “Friends for Hire”. In terms of the real inflections, you really get big benefits from three big moves again: 1) being able to go out weekly without killing your savings/reinvesting rate, 2) being able to go out 2x or more per week without looking at what you’re spending and 3) ramping up to a point where you

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Wall Street Playboys, LLC don’t even mind if the girl is a gold digger since the extra cost doesn’t matter and you’re just there to have fun anyway. In the final category you get to have a ton of fun as a few hundred bucks (even a thousand or more) is quite literally nothing. It’s a lot of fun for the attractive girl you’re with… who doesn’t want to end up with a broke guy for the rest of her life. As usual, when you get here, you’ll see it… Once you see it, you’ll understand why no one rich cares about escorts/gold diggers/strippers and other people with low levels of morality. Attempt to limit your hard drug consumption please!

1-10 Ranking: Higher Number is Better Events No Real Events at All Basic Social Interactions Able to Go Out 1x Per Week Able to Go Out 2x Per Week Going Out Minimal Spending Caps Nicer Venues Similar As Above No Fear of "Gold Diggers" Extreme Events (Materialsm is Back!) Extreme Events Frequently

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0 1 3 4 6 7 8.5 9 10

Wall Street Playboys, LLC

Chapter 7 – Improving Utility Overview

Congrats! The foundation is finally built. After a pretty lengthy overview you should have a good idea of the themes. We have to build the foundation of the house before we go through clear examples of what to do and what not to do. You’re going to save a lot of time and headache by reading the first ~30 pages of this book. Now that we’ve given the main step functions, highlighting when you get a large boost in utility, below is a rough timeline of what we would upgrade. As a reminder, we assume that you’ll be in a good financial situation by 30. We laid out a clear path to a million dollars within 10 years and several readers have already beat that expectation (we’re closing in on triple digits in terms of success stories as of this writing). Also. If we could go back in time, we wouldn’t bother with the miniature jumps in utility. Knowing what we know now, we’d only upgrade to the highlighted items in yellow otherwise we would just wait and accumulate more income streams. We realize at the low-end this may be harder. As you move up, it doesn’t make much sense to get custom suits until you can afford a nice watch. It also doesn’t make a lot of sense to upgrade your high-end apartment when you could wait and afford to live in two cities over the course of a year. 1. Health/Food: The very first thing you should focus on is making sure your diet is straight. Even if you’re forced to live at home before making money, you shouldn’t skip on health related items. You can always do body weight exercises in the meantime (while playing a free sport outside). Skipping on decent food is a non-negotiable and is the first thing you spend money on 2. Basic Clothing: After that, assuming you’re going to start in a Career, you want to make sure you’ve got decent clothing for work. This is going to increase your chances of getting the offer in the first place so it is yet another non-negotiable 3. Moving Out to Central Location: After the first two are done you’re going to try and move to a central location. You don’t need to jump to living by yourself (you’re young anyway) but you want to kill off your commute time as much as possible. Given that starting income levels are low, you’re simply trying to reduce the time to 15-20 minutes instead of making the big mistake of having a 2 hour commute or more (one hour each way) 4. Laundry Services: Surprisingly, it is actually better to reduce your time spent doing laundry vs. being able to go out once a week. Why? Well if you’re forced to choose between the two, you’re not making enough money to enjoy going out anyway. We can still remember trying to go out the first six months after work and it was awful. In the back of your head you realize you’re not getting ahead and don’t really enjoy the night 5. Go Out 1x Per Week: Once you’re established in your career, either politically playing the game right or have a clear path to a second stream of income you’re going to feel fine going out at least 1x per week. To be seen as a good worker, it only takes about six months anyway. It is also quite difficult to reverse unless you make major mistakes 6. International Vacation: Instead of ramping up to 2x per week, we’d stick with 1x per week and make sure you can go to a cheap international location for your week (or two) off. This one is close as you’re going to get a lot of value from going out 2x a week. That said, we’d prefer the vacation as you’ll realize why you’re working hard. You go to a Third World country and find out you’re rich (relative to them). If you’re smart you’ll realize you have a golden opportunity in front of you. Don’t sell yourself short and take the trip to mean “quit and move to Thailand” 38

Wall Street Playboys, LLC 7. Upgrade to Living By Yourself: This is the next big step up in your life. When you can live alone your productivity will go up and you’ll be able to sleep a lot better at night. We’re not sure why this is but it could be something psychological. Only do this when you can still save a large amount (30-50% net income) and remain within a reasonable commute time if you’re still going back and forth from work 8. Go Out 2x a Week with Minimal Spending Caps: Since you’re living alone, it improves your social life dramatically. No need to rely on those international trips to get your fun and “status appreciation” in. By living alone in a major city and going out 2x a week you’re in an arena that stands out already. As long as you have decent social skills you’ll have a great time. And. If your social skills are currently terrible, they will be solid within a year. There is no way to screw this up (we hope) Taking a pause here. At this point your life is already good. People who complain about this level of living are either: 1) spoiled and born rich or 2) generally unhappy all the time. If you’re able to live alone, have your health in check and can go out a couple of times a week without looking at the bills… You’re in great shape. You don’t even need to go to a bunch of restaurants as this combination alone allows you to live a fun life. The next section below moves to a point where people will become a bit jealous of your life. Or. They won’t even believe you since you’re having too much success/fun. 1. Upgrade Services: At this point your next step up is actually better services, massages/better gym/skin care/apartment cleaning. Some sort of mixture. While many believe that upgrading to a nicer apartment has more upside, they haven’t really seen how much time is saved when your chores go to zero or near zero. It’s an enormous increase in profitability for you as you can work longer on your projects and those hours are *more valuable*. What we mean by this is that hours put into work are not created equal. Working when you’re exhausted is worth 50% as much as hours worked when amped up and energized. It’s reality. By the time you turn 30 or so, you’ll notice it in your own work 2. Upgrade Wardrobe: After this you ramp up the wardrobe… some nicer brands and madeto-measure suits with higher quality shoes. This will help your sales… which you’ll be doing for work or when you’re convincing someone to spend time with you 3. Gold Diggers etc. At this point you’re going to attract them. Laugh if you like, but it will happen unless you’re socially strange. Women can tell when someone is doing well and you’ll have to learn to deal with the situation intelligently. You will be treated better and instead of letting it fill your ego remember that it’s due to your status and nothing more. The faster you can learn to enjoy hanging out with Gold Diggers the better your life will be. As long as you don’t do something foolish that gets you into legal trouble there is really nothing wrong with hanging out with attractive women hoping to find a man with means At this point you will 100% attract some hate. There is just no way around it. If you are in great shape, living a relaxed life and dating good looking women, this seems to break the back of 99% of Americans. You will lose old friends – unsuccessful ones. You will see your phone contacts change. You will look at your old life and laugh. It was all a bad dream and you will even have nightmares about your prior life. *Most* people get to this point and are either 1) out of shape or 2) trapped in a relationship with an overbearing partner. We continue to be shocked by the number of financially successful men

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Wall Street Playboys, LLC who have zero control over their lives. We are less shocked by the number of out of shape men given the food that they consume on a daily basis. The one downside (that you won’t notice until later) is that you really need to make big jumps to see substantial improvements. What does this mean? It means your next jump to say a “high-end experienced based trips” (Safari’s, expensive Ski trips etc.) doesn’t really give you a big jolt. While it is an improvement, if you were already traveling the world without worries… You experienced a ton already. That said the next major moves to improve your lifestyle is as follows: 1. Dual City Living: The chances of jumping straight to this? Quite slim. That said, if we could do it all over again we would skip the fancy watch and fancy apartment for now and try to build up a dual living situation first. It is *much* more likely that you’ll upgrade your apartment/home in your city before you go down the dual city living path. Why? We actually have a good answer for this. When you become successful you have more emotional attachment to the city that “made you”. You want to scale up and stay there. In the end, dual cities can help you in several ways. They help lower your tax bills, actually decrease your travel expenses and on top of that it typically expands your network 2. Throwing Bigger Events: By having the money to throw bigger events (inviting people to expensive golf outings, house parties, international vacations etc.), you simultaneously expand your group of contacts and dating pool. If you’ve gotten this far in life the chances of failing in this environment is as close to zero as you can get. The only downside is that it is naturally a lot more expensive. The second downside? You will deal with lots of big egos in many situations… so get used to it 3. Custom Suit and Watch: The reality is that you’ll probably buy these two items well before you do dual city living or the expensive events. This is just how the math works. That said, the increase in reactions/benefits are relatively small if you have the rest of your life together already. The only area where it is noticed more is within the dating category. Men certainly cannot tell the difference (around 95% of them) and they don’t change their behavior. This is more for attention and flash than anything else. If you see a well off person recommending the custom suit and watch consistently, it means his focus is more on dating at this point in time. Before finalizing here, we’d like to add that the health optimization part of this game was not included. It is probably the most important part… Unless someone is foolish enough to believe that celebrities and billionaires are “natural”. If you become financially successful later in life (well before age 30), health optimization should be the *very first upgrade* (before services such as massage treatments). We left it out of this summary for two reasons: 1) most people don’t read products so they won’t find it later in the book – too lazy to read and 2) we assume you’ll be able to afford a custom suit and nice watch well before you turn 30 – I.E. we really do believe anyone can get to $1M+ by age 30 or so since we’ve seen it happen so many times.

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Wall Street Playboys, LLC

Segment on Economic Cycles One of our smarter readers emailed us when we launched Triangle Investing. Asking, “Is this the peak of crypto” to which we responded “Probably”. Why? Well you sell products at the top not at the bottom. So. If we’re selling a book on maximizing disposable spending… what does that mean? It means we’re probably at the top of consumer sentiment. Broadly speaking it takes around 2-3 years to build a decent cash balance to take advantage of a downturn and we’re done with one year (2019). Of course we could be wrong. We’ve been wrong about a lot of things before. That said, we’ve already stated that we think we’ll be seeing declines in the 2021 time frame. A statement we have made for a couple of years now (need to be consistent). The clear message here is that your spending patterns should change at peak cycle, mid-cycle and in a full blown recession. If you’re not able to take advantage of the crisis scenarios (2001 tech crash, 2009 real estate crash etc.) you miss out on enormous wealth building opportunities. If you believe that every year will be better from an economic perspective, you’re setting yourself up for severe disappointment. Even billionaires have ups and downs so the chances of seeing a straight line graph up and to the right for 20 years straight is practically zero. You have to recognize when you’ve had a good run and get ready for a downturn. As a rule of thumb, you can simply remember two things. Number 1: A bull market is usually around 10 years. Yes we realize the current bull market is longer and some bull markets have been shorter. Number 2: The stock market will unlikely go down by more than 40-50%. We’re referring to the S&P 500 in this case. So when you combine the two items, you can come up with a basic framework without doing much work. If you’ve been fully invested in the stock market for a decade… spend a year or two stacking cash and de-leveraging your balance sheet. Also. If you see that the stock market is down around 30-35% from the highs you can begin “blind buying” the market. It could go down another 10% but the percentage move for you would be easy to swallow. While 100 going to 60 is painful… starting at 70 and watching it go to 60 isn’t that hard to swallow. You’re only down 14%. If you don’t panic sell at a -14% paper loss, you’ll be in the green after a single good year (economic recovery). With the overview out of the way, since we believe we’re closer to the top of the cycle than the bottom we’ll go ahead and start there. This is an important section since we highlight some key signals of a peak (services, employment, consumer sentiment etc). As always, you buy when there is blood in the streets and you stop buying when your unskilled acquaintances are somehow clearing 6-figures and driving BMWs. At this point there are a lot of $100,000 a year millionaires driving BMWs with personal loans ramping up.

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Peak of Market Cycle At the top of the market, unemployment is at or near record lows. Consumer confidence is usually quite high with blow outspending numbers. Stock market analysts also call for the following year to be *up*, when they call for the market to be *down* then you’re not at the peak yet. Also. You’ll see people who have made a lot of money (over the past 5-10 years or so) take a major risk and suddenly do something to swing for “grand slams” and “home runs”. All of these items seem to be present today. The consensus view is that Trump will be re-elected and the stock market should continue to go up. That’s great and while it very well could, if you’ve been invested in the market from 2009 to 2018… it’s not that big of a deal to start stacking cash and crypto (we’ve only bought those two asset classes in 2019, we’ll do the same in 2020). To cap it off, if you’re young (anything under 50), you can diversify by simply buying other assets without selling anything you invested from 2009-2018. As a final comment, if you think we’re at the mid-market cycle (not peak) feel free to jump to that section. We’re certainly not going to be offended by differing opinions. The Big Avoids: Anything related to materialism loses significant value at the top of the market. We have used the “Rolex” test as a fantastic barometer. If people look at Rolexes and say “well it’s not an xxx”… you know that people are flush with money. That’s currently occurring today and is quite absurd. A Rolex is the gold standard for a high quality watch. So if the product is no longer getting attention like it does at the bottom of the cycle or mid-cycle… it’s time to avoid buying them. Now we can actually scale this up. Peak market cycles debase brand value across the board. For cars, BMWs and Mercedes are now seen as “middle of the road”, decent shoes like Allen Edmonds are all over the place and on top of this, women are all rocking Louis Vuitton and no one believes they are fake! Avoid *Brand* Clothing: Thinking this through, it means that higher quality material goods will never be sold at lower prices since everyone is competing for “brand awareness”. This is why Gucci is practically one of the only clothing brands that commands attention (cannot find it on any discount outlets like FarFetch). The conclusion from all of this? Everyone has nice stuff so you can actually take your wardrobe spending to zero as it won’t make a difference. Brand clothing loses socio-economic value unless you’re at the absolute top. So what do you do? Well if you remember from an earlier chapter we gave a few options for clothing when you’re making money. The clear answer is to steer to basic made to measure clothing (or custom) without any logos/brands. Why? No one will be able to tell the difference in peak markets. Your fitted clothing will have assumptions around it. So you don’t have to bother with the brands. As long as the material isn’t flimsy (unlikely anyway), you’ll get a lot of comments that suggest it’s a high end product. So you know what to do “smile, nod and agree”. Avoid Upgraded Cars: While we prefer having no car (sticking with Uber black), we recognize that some cities require a car. We’re not that insulated in a bubble. 42

Wall Street Playboys, LLC So if you’re in a car centric city, you’re not going to get a lot of value from the “upper middle range”. The upper middle range refers to a 7-series BMW, a low end Porsche and several others. Effectively? Anything in the $70-90K range. We don’t know why, it just doesn’t add any real value to your social perception. There are only three ranges: 1) stealth wealth driving a basic Honda Civic, 2) mid-range driving a bmw/entry level Tesla and 3) ultra-high-end with a Bentley or Ferrari for example. In peak markets, going to the higher end of the mid-range isn’t noticeable. So don’t bother. Instead decide on your strategy. Since we’re extreme people by nature we’d go with the stealth wealth car or the ultra-high-end. It would depend on the location and culture of the city. If you’re living in a materialistic city like Los Angeles it is definitely better to go with the nice car. If you’re in a city without a car culture, just get a basic stealth wealth car and spend heavier on the events since it is a different version of displayed wealth. Avoid the Big House: If you ignore the prior two items, for the love of God, do not buy a big house at the peak. This absolutely kills you, not because of the leverage, but because of the book value tax set up as well. For those that are not buying yet, the tax payment is tied to the original purchase price. So if you buy a million dollar home and the price goes down, you’re paying tax on that book value. Similarly, if you buy at the bottom you’ve locked in a lower tax level for decades to come. We’ve effectively given away why we’re stacking up cash and crypto at this point. Even if a downturn doesn’t come for another couple years we’ll have a lot of cash on hand to buy a lot of income producing properties at once. The argument made by perpetual renters falls apart in downturns and is accurate in peak markets (since the real value is substantially lower at peak). Keeping it simple… at peak market cycles, expected returns are negative. At the bottom, expected returns are mid-high single digits which substantially offsets any maintenance costs (1.5% of home value). Overall, keep it conservative and assume the value goes up 3-4% over the long-term (adjusted for costs and market cycles). Starting at the top is devastating due the amount of money at stake. Now that we’ve (hopefully) inserted some fear into everyone, the good news is that it’s pretty easy to buy once you see a 20% drop. Unlike stocks, there is more emotional attachment to homes, since families refuse to leave certain areas and they always believe their home is worth more than it is. Unlike stocks you can start shopping aggressively when you see -20-25% or so (we’re referring to high quality areas in general). Avoid The Services Industry: As many of our readers know, the services industry peaks at the top of the economic cycle. This means people are flush with cash paying for massages, facials, cooks, cleaning staffs and even dog walkers. Long story short, this is the last item to avoid. The problem with buying services at the peak is that you overpay by a wide margin (50% or so).

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Wall Street Playboys, LLC We’re not saying to take all of these time saving items to zero, what we’re saying is that your return is going to be next to nothing. You’ll pay market price and that’s basically it. Unless you’re worth $10M+, being smart about economic cycles doesn’t make you cheap… it makes you intelligent. Interestingly, you can actually spend up on items you can use at home. This means you can buy a massage chair, high quality facial cleaners and upgrade all the laundry/cooking equipment you have at home. The return on the investment is actually quite high as you drop your services spending down. To be clear, the services you really shouldn’t skip on are laundry and the once and a while skin cleaning and teeth whitening services (despite buying more to do at home in peak economies, you should still see a professional consistently). People will say that no “man” goes to have their face cleaned. These people also look their age and make less money. No matter what people say, having a sharp looking outfit and youthful face will help you. People are judgmental. The reason why rich people appear to be younger is due to these services (and of course, lower stress) The Big Buys: During peak economies the cities are jam packed. Traffic is through the roof and restaurants are consistently full. You can go out on a Tuesday and have a tough time finding a place to eat. This visible change is also seen at popular bars and clubs. The second thing you’ll notice is a high number of job openings in the “general economy”. The general economy refers to bartenders, restaurants and local entertainment centers (think Times Square in New York). While people will argue that there are always jobs in these areas, the difference is a visible increase in opening and people asking you for help (to fill their vacant slots). In the white collar community, when you see numerous job hops (sharp change in people moving to new opportunities), you should check to see if it above normal. While most focus on the general economy, career hopping in expensive positions is a bigger signal. It means that large scale transaction businesses are also booming. Great near-term of course as you save tons of money. And. Bad long term as it’s unsustainable to see multiple record sales years in a row (particularly in businesses with long sales cycles). The last thing to look for is what we’re currently seeing in e-commerce. Tons of growth for sales of what we’d consider to be junk. Low quality products with 20-40% operating margins. Absolutely nuts! It’s great for the near-term as usual but isn’t sustainable. Unless the products are legitimately different and valuable, the iteration on something that has already been done… shouldn’t be generating massive margins. Spend at Those Restaurants: If you normally went out a couple of times a week, you can ramp this up at least one day per week (maybe even two). Why? The chances of meeting someone important is significantly higher. If things are going well, people usually relax a bit. Even incredibly intense CEOs/CFOs/Hedge Fund managers will go out during the week (more often). Is this due to hubris and overconfidence? Naturally, it is due to a bit of overconfidence as it would be a bull market. And. It means that the deals are closing! This creates free time which is difficult to understand until 1) you enter a high-end revenue generating role or 2) start your own business.

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Wall Street Playboys, LLC So you’re actually creating a positive environment for yourself. While it will feel strange at first (assuming more deals will close), the upside is that you’re much more likely to meet other successful people during the peak economy. To be specific here you want to target restaurants on Tuesday and Wednesday. Everyone goes out on Friday/Saturday so it doesn’t make a big difference and Monday is typically a day where you’re meeting clients or communicating with employees to make sure the ship is running correctly. Monday is generally a difficult work day even if you’re financially set and don’t need to work. The other major reason why you’re spending more at restaurants is to “cut the line”. If you consistently tip well and get to know the staff, you’re going to stand out amongst the crowd in a positive way. This allows you to gain attention at a minimal cost. This attention isn’t for Instagram photos, it is for introductions later in the night or during the dinner. Think about it like this. If you’re in a booming economy and everyone can afford to go out, the value of being able to cut the line goes up dramatically. This applies to both dating and to your work. If you need to take someone out to a nice dinner, it sure doesn’t help if you’re unable to get reservations. Battling over the phone really doesn’t help you. The staff runs the show so you’re absolutely foolish if you treat them poorly. Sure, it still doesn’t guarantee you a seat every day, but it does the following: 1) they will alert you if a certain week is filling up quickly, 2) they will make sure you’re first if they are officially sold out and call you directly to fill the spot and 3) you’re going to be prioritized for every single order. These are huge perks in a normal market, but in a peak market they are incredibly valuable. Spend on Your Long-term Clothing & Living Space: This needs to be crystalized. While you shouldn’t bother with the upper mid-range brands like Ferragamo and Burberry (again nothing wrong with them, they stand out like sore thumbs in down economies and mid-economies), you should take a hard look at all long-term clothing, accessories and even furniture. We kept the cover of the book simple and used a custom suit example, but it applies to anything that’s higher quality/specialized without a brand name. Think of the following items: 1) custom clothing; 2) high quality mattress; 3) all tables, sofas, chairs, silverware; 4) various appliances from laundry machines to surround sound stereos and 5) televisions/pool tables. Hopefully you’re getting the idea. Since these products generally have “price compression” you can always find a good deal and you’ll have extra money to spend on it (since you’re dropping your name brand spending and “luxury” spending across the board). Why is this the case? It’s the case since specific items (listed above) can be found at smaller shops/locations. A custom tailor has a niche business and when his is booming he’ll happily incentivize you to buy more at a discount (or free shirts/custom shoes etc.) since this scales his business. Similarly, all of the customized furniture is typically from boutiques as well. While appliances are not going to be much cheaper, the implied message is that they should be replaced every 5-7 years… So this lines up with your purchasing habits anyway!

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Wall Street Playboys, LLC On the pure entertainment side, since you’ll be going out more instead of buying a new home or car, your place will be upgraded from an activities perspective. While we really doubt this will make a big difference in your life, it’s a nice added touch. Before moving on we’re not contradicting ourselves. You avoid the “status” items as they don’t garner much value in peak economies and you buy high quality custom items that can be used all the time in the future (*no brand signaling* is the difference). Spend a Lot More Going Out: Unsurprisingly, if we’re advising people to go out to restaurants more frequently, we’d also ramp up the nightlife as well. Now we used simplistic alcohol examples, but this can apply to any event based activity. Feel free to spend up on the following: 1) your travel destinations increase in cost – added flexibility, 2) the number of events you go to increases – if you watch live golf or MMA for example and 3) more outdoor type activities such as skiing (jet or snow), rock climbing and anything else you feel like trying. The general theme in “going out” is that you’re going to have a tough time standing out from the crowd. Everyone is dressed well and people who are over-earning relative to their actual value are also in the mix. So it’s a lot more chaotic than normal. Instead of getting annoyed by the increase in people and general decrease in quality (we’re referring to the weekends within this sentence) you can take advantage of the free time you have. While you may go out to more events and eat more than normal, you should be able to reach peak physical fitness (for your age) without losing any sales. For those that recently made it over the hump economically (earning a high amount for your standards), you know how amazing that sounds. Instead of grinding out 60 hours a week, you can easily take it down to 40 with no impact to your personal P&L.

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Bottom of Market Cycle At the bottom of the market you should be licking your lips. This is the best opportunity you will get to increase your net worth while doing no physical work. When the market is down unemployment is high, drug and alcohol consumption goes up, investors flee to food/healthcare/utility/gold for their investments and dividends are slashed (companies with high P/E ratios collapse). Everyone reading this is aware of economic cycles so we’ll just jump right into the main things you should be doing: 1) levering up, 2) buying high-P/E ratio stocks and 3) reducing your cash balance to the lowest feasible number – a few months of emergency money. One of the statements we have made over and over on our blog is that “Crisis is another word for opportunity”. We’re not joking when we emphasize this as an important thing to remember. In fact, the latest crypto crash was the latest clear example, everyone declared Bitcoin as dead ($3000 range) and now it’s up significantly. You know that it is really bad when you physically think everything has collapsed. This is a benefit of being a long-term optimist. If you’re an upbeat person with a bright future, when you feel the need to sell everything and give up. That is when you buy as much as you can. It will feel awful. It will work. The Avoids: As usual we’ll start with the avoid category. If you’ve been through a few macroeconomic downturns it is easy to get over excited and buy the wrong stuff. As a good example, buying bank stocks when they got slaughtered in 2008-2009 actually didn’t work very well unless you were incredibly accurate with timing. Why? Well banks are seeing pressure across all fronts from robot advisors to crypto currencies to regulations to direct listings to lower interest rates. You get the point. While the “old” strategy of buying these stocks on the dip (say 2001 and prior) would have worked… It didn’t work out this time. Avoid Structurally Changing Business Purchases: What do we mean by this? We are referring to industries that are under long-term secular pressure. A good example in the 2000s would have been retail stocks. It was incredibly clear that the money was moving online so you didn’t want to buy a ton of retail related stocks for the long-term. Does this mean that it was a horrendous investment? No. Some retail stocks did incredibly well. We’re simply highlighting that it’s best to avoid since you can find other sectors without these issues and invest there. As of 2020, structurally changing industries include: retail, advertising/media, financial services and various areas of transportation. Use that as a baseline starting point along with your own views: for example we also think certain viewership ratings like the NFL will decline over time (health consequences increasing, kids no longer being pushed to play football). This is not meant to be scary. You can take a pretty balanced approach by buying things that will be around forever: Food, Housing, Healthcare, Technological Innovation, etc. All of these things will never go to zero, it just isn’t possible in our opinion. So. If it’s your first time simply avoid all

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Wall Street Playboys, LLC secularly declining industries and focus your efforts on 1) things that will be around forever or 2) riskier high growth sectors that could blossom into major industries. Avoid Bankruptcy Risk: This is a tough one. Very. Tough. Even if you’re certain that a high quality company will not go bankrupt we would recommend investing less than 5-10% of your purchasing power into it. During downturns public companies can trade at “negative enterprise values” which means they are worth less than the market cap minus the cash balance on the books. Anything with leverage gets extremely dicey since cash flows can remain negative for a lot longer than you expect. Before moving on from this, we’re calling this sub-section a “modest avoid”. While we take a hard stance on avoiding secularly declining stocks, you can risk a small amount of money into a Company that has bankruptcy risk if you’d like. Do not risk a penny you can’t afford to lose and certainly don’t lever up to buy them. The returns are incredibly high if you’re right. So. No need to push the risk profile up. As a fun observation, we’ve noticed that CEOs with an “aura” around them always seem to get out of bankruptcy. The ones with immense political connections also get out of the downturn unscathed. You want to avoid companies that are not well known and under the radar. If you’re going to take on this type of risk you need more than hope… Connections are definitely undervalued in the public markets. Hope is not a strategy. Avoid New Business Partners: This one is simply strange. For some reason when you’re in a downturn, the best way to get leverage is by hiring someone on an hourly/per task basis. Under no circumstances do you try and hire someone as a heavy equity component in anything. Sure you could hire people in positions that have 0.5% equity (like a Series A/Series B level company if that’s where you are at)… Just don’t try a brand new venture with a new person. A downturn forces you to make quick decisions while the world is burning and you don’t want to make these fast decisions with someone new regardless of how qualified they are. On that point, our recommendation does not mean that all business ideas you have will be failures. There is a clear distinction between starting something entirely new (which could work) and working with someone entirely new (which seems to fail… miserably). We have no doubt that this mistake will still be made. We also have no doubt that there will be exceptions to the rule. And. We’re still sticking with our guns on this one since experience matters. On that note Equity in general is a lot cheaper than it should be. We always laugh when people say that Trump could have just “invested in the S&P 500” as if the value of being the decision maker is zero. It is absolutely crazy and laughable. An argument only made by people who have never had ownership in their lives (typically white collar employees/managers). This is probably why big equity changes with a new person doesn’t work. You’re essentially giving away a large percentage of the project/business without thinking about the future value (2-3 years). Doesn’t age well. Avoid Panic Selling: If you’ve been following our blog for a long time and if you’ve read our other products… This should be obvious. Under no circumstances do you sell wealth creating objects. A lot of people attempt to “troll” us in the comments section of our blog by stating things like “oh

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Wall Street Playboys, LLC my god you didn’t sell everything at the top!”. We can’t help but laugh at these bottom feeding peasants as a rich person isn’t going to be moved by a 50% decline in any asset class… He is diversified to begin with! While this is obvious, the way we’d describe the feeling of a bottom is “helpless”. Even if you’re rich, you’re going to feel the pressure when your net worth is cut in half. Don’t panic sell. While this is the shortest part of the section it’s the most important. Panic selling index funds or real estate is an enormous error as the money made on both is on the “purchase”. Getting a great deal is where the leverage comes in (both in stocks and real estate). The Big Buys: Now we can jump into the exciting stuff. The bull market stuff is for weaklings since anyone can make money when things are going up and to the right. The real money is made when everything is falling apart and you take the opportunity to build at least a generation of wealth. Homes: We recommend starting here. No doubt about it and difficult to debate. Why? If you go in this direction, you are absolutely committed to buying the bottom. If you are young and you decide to buy high-flying stocks it may hurt you as the price could go down 20% and you sell. No one said buying the bottom is emotionally easy, it is incredibly difficult. To explain why it is important to try and time your home purchases, do the math on the longterm appreciation of a home. Back 50 years ago the average price of a home was around $75,000 according to Economic Research from the Federal Reserve. At this point the average price of a home is around $375,000. This implies a long-term appreciation rate of just 3%. Also. This doesn’t include inflation which should be another 1-2% or so per year. The real growth rate is somewhere in the low single digits.

Source: U.S. Census Bureau. Now at an initial glance this looks like a terrible investment. Who would want to get 2-3% longterm returns? No one. The issue is that you have to include leverage along with market timing in the numbers. While people may laugh at a “10% decrease” in purchase price. This is actually enormous when you look at it over a long time horizon. 49

Wall Street Playboys, LLC Here is the math. If we know that the growth rate of homes is going to be about 3% over time this will result in 56% returns over 15 years. Now. Remember that the increase is not a straight line up and to the right. It is an incredibly volatile line that jumps around (up and down). So there are years where prices are up 6-12 percent and years where the price is down up to 10%. All you really need to do is buy when the prices are down double digits on a year over year basis. While we gave a 20% number earlier in this book, we’re making it simple to remember if it’s your first time trying to time the bottom. If you’re a smart person with decent negotiating skills, we bet that you’ll get at least 15% off the real value. So how does the math look? If you’re able to lock in a single year when the numbers were down double digits it means that over a 10 year period your returns are going to be close to a 15-year period! This has quite literally moved your returns by 5-years. All of this assumes no leverage which would juice the returns quite a bit. It isn’t fun to talk about but during recessions you have to become as emotionless as possible. You’re going to be dealing with people who are strapped for cash and looking to fire sale their assets. While people will claim that you’re taking advantage of a situation, the reality is that they won’t even be able to sell for the amount they want. People tend to overestimate the value of their homes in the first place. So when you make all of your bids, remember that you should feel uncomfortable when you offer up a price. This means you’ve started low enough and will lock in a good deal. Unsure if excitement is shining through in the prior paragraphs but it should be. We’re going to be absolutely thrilled if the housing market goes down just 10%. The returns compound quickly in just five years: leverage, rental income, lower locked in tax rate and inflation eats away at your loan. Many, many, many multi-millionaires were made between 2009 and 2014 and even a minidownturn will mint a lot more multi-millionaires once again. It gets better! If you were not convinced by the above and the importance of leveraged high probability returns… There is a kicker in this for you. The main kicker is that a home is “displayed wealth”. Displayed wealth is certainly relative as a 20-something person owning a nice condo would be an example of displayed wealth. Similarly. A 40-something person with a fancy home (pool, bar areas, entertainment center etc.) would be a separate example of displayed wealth… Owning a one bedroom at age 40 would not be displayed wealth. Still not convinced? One final idea that has worked. Many people live in two cities as they get older. New York and Los Angeles is common. New York and Miami is also common… So on and so forth. So if you’re already thinking about living in a different location for part of the year, this is your chance to set it up. You buy a high quality rental place in the area, build equity over time and eventually do a like-kind transaction to pick up your second home. At this point we’ve given more than enough reasons to buy the dip in home pricing. While we do agree that there are less headaches from being a life-long renter, the facts remain the same. The

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Wall Street Playboys, LLC majority of people who become rich own real estate and real estate investors are common customers of private wealth management. Service Spending Ramp: You will be able to get massive discounts on any services. This is going to include everything from spas and personal trainers to hiring IT professionals and customer support representatives for your businesses/projects. The latter is probably the best return on your investment. When the economy is booming, services oriented businesses decline in quality. Why? They don’t need to offer amazing services to make a living. As we sit here today, we see low quality service businesses (and employees) somehow making six figures a year. This is absolutely insane as their value does not even come close to this number. The bottom of the economy causes a humbling effect across the entire services industry. Since people are grateful to be employed, their work quality goes up significantly (probably a double). So you should be jumping at the opportunity to ramp up your spending. Paying significantly less (around 25-30%) for better quality work and a locked in higher quality employee is about the best you can ask for. On the pure consumption side, you can ramp up the Spa dates (no attractive woman says no to these), increase your massage/facial frequency and hire the home services. We lump everything related to “home treatment” in that final item as we don’t know if you prefer to have a cleaning person, a cooking person or a gardener for example. This is your first real opportunity to lock in the best service individuals as the high quality ones will have customers cancel for the first time in 3-4 years. Name Brands Back in the Spotlight: Suddenly, all of the men and women with brand name clothing disappear. The bars, clubs and restaurants are emptier and the traffic in your city will fall significantly. This means you will now stand out if you wear clothing that is in the “upper middle” area. If you attempt to wear ultra-high end material then we’d recommend staying away from upper-middle class areas (it could back fire on you as most employees in the $100-200K a year range is where a lot of the job losses occur – middle management). So what do you buy? You buy products in the upper-middle range of course. This means a step down from the Gucci’s of the world and you can go ahead and pick up your basic Rolex if you’re a watch guy (no you don’t need to get the all gold $50,000 version). This will now stand out from the general population and won’t put you into an arena where people despise you. As a side note, while we’re not car people, a standard Mercedes or BMW is also going to put you in the upper middle as well. This will attract positive attention without drawing immense amount of hate. If you plan on going to ultra high-end areas and nothing else… then feel free to have your super car and Gucci clothing. Our best guess is that most readers of our blog are in the $250K range in income (or have the potential to get there quite rapidly) so we’re highlighting the Mercedes/BMW example up front. An interesting point related to made-to-measure/custom clothing is that this also works in down economies. So if you’re extremely lazy and don’t have an interest in running your own social experiments (comparing brands to well fitted clothing), you can ignore this entire section. For

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Wall Street Playboys, LLC what it is worth, we’d recommend experimenting with some brand name clothing. You’ll be absolutely shocked at how quickly women are able to tell the difference. Since most women enjoy shopping quite a bit, they know a lot about men’s clothing as well. Women from wealthier families are even taught how to flush out the “fake rich” from the “real rich” by how they dress. So. We’d recommend going down this path for a couple years as you’ll also get a better understanding of how women survey their environment. Upgrade Your Gym and Lock It In: Right now, there is an actual overflow of people at higher quality gyms. Seriously. Everyone can afford a nicer gym which actually dilutes the value of the location in the first place. In a down economy, pricing drops like a rock. Even nicer gyms realize that most people do not work out consistently so higher membership numbers are key for sustainable operating margins. If you see a downturn, you’ll notice that the gym is significantly emptier. This is your chance to go and find the right place for you and lock in a new rate. Alternatively, you can say you’re quitting the gym and lock in a lower rate for a long period of time. Generally speaking, you should lock in a gym membership for an extremely long duration (call it 5-years or so at minimum). This allows you to avoid pricing hikes when the economy recovers. Alternatively, if you’re going to leave the city shortly, we’d recommend going to the highest level gym you can find for a couple of years. This is where all the high quality people hang out so you want to collect contacts before you leave. This creates the right balance. If you’re going to stay long-term, go to the best gym you can afford and lock it in for multiple years. If you’re leaving soon negotiate a shorter duration stay but do not waste your time with “upper-middle” gyms. Go straight to the ultra-high-end where the richest people hang out.

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Middle of Market Cycle Ah yes, we’ve seen the boring piece of the market (the top), the exciting part of the market (the bottom) and now we’re into the hardest part of the market (the middle). Most of your life will be spent in the middle of the cycle so we have various items to cover. The top of the market and the bottom of the market are quite boring (surprisingly) if you’ve been following the advice on our blog and on our website, you’re 100x more prepared for economic cycles than 99% of the population. You’re actually quite bored as you’re gathering up cash and asymmetric investments (peak) or you’re living much cheaper than normal to buy everything at a discount. While women get their kicks from shopping sprees on handbags and clothing, we get our kicks on shopping sprees for homes and stocks. In short, the peak and bottom are a lot more boring than they look. You know the deals are going to close (top) or you begin discounting all your future sales due to the economic climate (bottom). Mid-cycles begin when we’re about a year past the official bottom of the stock market. That’s a good and simple gauge. You’ll hear a lot about the potential for a “double dip”. And. That’s when you’re starting to move into a mid-cycle economy. Economists are mixed on the next year consistently and difficulty around finding work decreases dramatically. For fun... While we think we’re closer to peak and may just be getting old and less risk loving, if you think the market holds for another 5-years this is for you. The Avoids: Mid-cycle doesn’t really have a lot of moving parts to it, but we’ll cover it anyway. The key is really keeping a steady emotional state. In sports, there is a common phrase “not too high not too low” when referring to emotions during big games/events. This is because emotional jumps are when bad decisions are made. You never want to make a decision when you recently made a ton of money, lost a ton of money or are in a heightened emotional state in general. Why are we highlighting this during the mid-cycle instead of peak? It’s because of the compounding effect. In a mid-cycle you’re consistently seeing increases… over and over again. This creates the inflated belief that the next year will also be “up and to the right” which as you know (if you were around for the 2001 or 2008 crash) leads to brutal consequences. Avoid Spending in Advance: While this seems obvious it is incredibly easy to do as your numbers *generally* go up in mid-economic cycle environments. While many will assume we’re referring to sales of a consumable product type business, we are referring to your career as well. While it sounds amazing to go from $100K to $400K in a straight line it rarely works like that. Most people (yes even successful ones) are forced to jump from position to position every few years or so. What does this mean? You should never spend in advance of your income streams no matter how secure you think it is. Good examples include: 1) annual bonus checks – can easily be disappointing, 2) rental income as there could be an issue you need to fix or turnover, 3) anything related to business income – sales, services… all revenue streams have volatility and 4) passive income streams like dividends also have volatility at times.

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Wall Street Playboys, LLC Simple examples of spending in advance include putting down a large amount of cash for a home just before your bonus check hits or holiday sales begin (dangerous as there is too much volatility in the income stream and you’ll never predict your seasonally high sales in Q4). Assuming that you are going to close the sale of one of your assets (business or home for example) that ends up getting delayed so you’re forced into a negative cash flow situation. Unless the money is already cleared and in your accounts, assume that it will fall apart. Attempting to “buy inventory” ahead of a successful launch that is well ahead of normal selling expectations. You may laugh at that one (but everyone including us) has overbought at least once. This leads to an additional headache to deal with and once again causes you to go cash flow negative. Avoid Depreciating Assets (Emphasis): In general, this is never a good purchase. We don’t recommend buying cars if you don’t have to for example. That said, mid-market cycle is just as bad as peak market cycle for depreciating asset purchases (potentially worse, see below). If you do need a car you want to try and time it at the bottom as highlighted in this book. Now you’re probably thinking, well mid-market cycle is no different than the top. Unfortunately, this is a bit flawed in our opinion. If you buy a depreciating asset in the beginning of a market recovery this means your car or asset will become less “prestigious” as well. Remember, your average person is much more interested in appearing successful vs. actually becoming successful. If you buy a solid car like a Mercedes or BMW (upper middle class car), you’re going to have a harder time selling it later. Everyone will try to “one up” the car and go for the Porsche 911 for example. This leads to strange market behaviors that significantly tilt in favor of status/ego/prestige purchases (more than usual). For those in the upper end of the income spectrum, the bigger mistake is from boats. The same thing applies in this market except you *typically* have more money on the line. If you absolutely want to get a boat and it’s your first purchase during the middle of a market, try to come up with a reasonable boat that you can also rent out when you’re not using it. Unless you made $10M+ it doesn’t make sense to buy the boat in a mid-market economy with no income stream. Avoid Numerous Subscriptions: In mid-market cycles you want to prevent yourself from purchasing too many subscription based costs. Things like Netflix aren’t going to matter but once you start buying tons of subscriptions/services products on a monthly basis you have a lot of unwinding to do at the top the market. (No we’re not changing our view on Netflix, it is not something you should have until you’re rich and at most you could use it for entertainment if you bring dates to your place) Fortunately, this section will resonate more with people who are actually going to be rich. Subscriptions, as you can imagine, are related to all the software tools you’ll be using to make your life easier from a money making perspective. Over time these add up quickly, VMware/Citrix, tracking tools, virtual assistants (would include this as part of recurring subscriptions) and of course the annoying server cost/data center side. Don’t get us started on all those remote server issues and computers that continuously shut off. Beyond annoying. This is a tricky line to toe as you don’t want to underinvest in subscription based items that are worth the sticker price. As a good balancing point we would recommend downloading some apps

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Wall Street Playboys, LLC that track your usage (similar to what you see on your phone). We don’t know what you’re using but there are many out there. Use this to help calculate if there is significant value from the software. If you find that you’re using it less and less, cut it out immediately. Since most subscriptions are a year-long or more, you should try and line up all the software tools to have a renewal date on the same month (if you have to buy something get an 18-month subscription to line it up with everything else for example). This forces you to review all your recurring items at the same time (once a year). The Big Buys: A good rule of life is to “front load the pain”. Why? Well most of your life is going to be spent in positive/bull markets so… by front loading the pain (saving, investing, buying appreciating assets), the compounding effect you have is substantial. In fact, if you take the phrase “front load the pain” for everything in life the chances of success are high. Lots of rejections (jobs/relationships), lots of painful nights working past midnight and lots of mental control to avoid going out on weekends to get ahead by working instead. So on and so forth. Heavily Invest in Your Own Skills (Revisit Efficiency): Normally we hate reusing stuff but we have to use this as the starting point since mid-market cycles allow you to “invest in yourself”. In a single bull market you should be able to do the following: 1) maximize your fitness levels, 2) learn how to be a fashionable person with knowledge of colors and patterns, 3) for the clothing haters out there, learning fashion naturally translates into learning Ad design, Website design etc. (what colors/shapes/sizes look the best), 4) learn a trade to improve your real estate skills to allow for “forced appreciation” if you’re stuck between a rock and a hard place and of course 5) continuously improving your sales skills – which is something that will never end. As noted, our other products will allow you to short cut all of the five items above. That said, the most important item is to improve Efficiency (each year) in as many categories as possible. A common theme we have had is that “life gets harder as you age”. Not because of finances but because of your energy levels (working 80 hours a week at age 21 is not the same as 41 no matter how many drugs you take). No Yield Over Yield: This is a general comment for mid-market economic cycles. Since a recession is unlikely to occur immediately after a recovery, you want to focus your attention on capital appreciation type assets. While you will need to build up a cash flow asset portfolio, at the start of a recovery it is better to play the appreciation game. To keep it as simple as possible this means real estate assets with low cap rates and growth stocks with no dividends (typically small cap indexes). Since you’re in a growing market, profitability is less important (you’ve seen this from 2010 through 2019). From a real estate perspective, low cap rates are usually found in the “higher class areas”. Building on the prior comments, as people look to show off their wealth it means that they will move into higher quality neighborhoods as fast as possible. What does this mean? It means the price appreciation game outstrips the yield of a middle class home (See Triangle Investing for our Real Estate Strategies).

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Wall Street Playboys, LLC Tons of Performance Enhancers: Ah yes out of the blue. Covered in more detail later, the biggest and best for last. During mid-cycles smart people will purchase as many performance enhancing items as possible. Life-long items such as HRT/TRT (insert acronym), use of micro-dosing LSD/mushrooms, massages, cryo-therapy, hair transplants, Dysport/Botox and quite literally anything that makes your performance improve. Ah yes. We were careful with the wording there as we said “smart people” will do this. Why? We don’t want to waste our time with average intelligence people who believe that the highest performers are all natural. If you cannot tell the difference in Jeff Bezos, celebrity “transformations for movies” and Elon Musk for example… Your problems will not end there. Being Naïve is okay through age 21 or so… After that reality needs to set in. As usual this is in no way legal or professional advice it is just an opinion. Without intelligent use of performance enhancing items you’re going to undershoot all of your potential by definition. People laugh at Dysport being a performance enhancer. And. Those same people take meetings from attractive women all the time. You want to look young and healthy as it helps close sales. Absolutely no one wakes up and says “I want to hang out with more unattractive people today”. Don’t be foolish. People are judgmental. As a simple summary, there is no reason to “age like a normal person” (when has a normal life ever been the correct answer?). Celebrities have been using drugs for years and if we exclude the ones that die from meth, MDMA and cocaine (meaning harmful drugs), you don’t really see any change to the length of their lives. Guys like Sylvester Stallone are still around (age 73 as of this writing) and don’t appear to have significant health issues. We’ve spent a ton of time researching the topic and have yet to see a negative correlation to Hormone Replacement Therapy, while we’re always open to hearing about it in comments, after a long period of research it appears to be the right move (starting around mid-30s or so).

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Concluding Remarks

By combining this cycle summary with the prior overview on Spending Segments, you should have a solid understanding of the ebbs and flows related to consumption. As you can see, as we got older, we loosened a lot of our bands as it relates to buying brand name goods, larger homes and even a car (although we still don’t need them as major cities have Uber Black). Being adaptable is important and if we were ever forced to live in a car based city, we have several friends who can outline the “right way to do it” as you’ve seen in this product already. The second thing we’d like to mention is that economic cycles are rarely consistent. Some bull markets are over a decade, sometimes they only last 5 years or so. With this in mind we have no issues with differing opinions. While we think 2020 is closer to peak than trough, if you believe that we’re in the middle of a cycle then you can simply jump to the mid-cycle portion. Naturally, if we get to 2021 and the economy is still roaring we won’t be thrilled as we’ll have a crypto/cash balance that needs to be used at some point. So. As they say in gambling… when you put your money into a bet you end up being more emotionally attached to it. At the end of the day, we’re sticking with our call and if it doesn’t happen we’re just stuck with another “rich person problem” of having too much cash and perhaps crypto currency exposure. While this book is focused on spending we do get a lot of questions on how we gauge the up and downs of the economic cycles. There is no real one size fits all answer as you have to develop a good gut instinct. Also. You only have to be right once. What we mean by this is that you only need to call one top or one bottom to make a lot of money. 2008-2018 was probably a once in a lifetime opportunity in terms of the equity market and housing market to get rich. We were fortunate enough to participate in the entire run up. Now we think we’ll go through a small contraction buying risk averse items (cash, crypto and some gold). Moving on we’ll explain the why for illustrative purposes. Cycle Indicators: We look at a few indicators. First we take a look at the Shiller PE ratio which gives a good snapshot of where earnings are relative to historical averages. As a simple metric you don’t want to add much when it’s above 25. We use a higher number (more than the average of 16.7x and more than the median of 15.8x) since companies can generate higher margins through automation and software. 25x seems like a big multiple even accounting for improving operating margins. A number above 30 seems to be quite high in our opinion.

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Source: multpl.com The next indicator we look at is the unemployment rate as mentioned earlier. Here it is below to give you a historical view of the unemployment rate. It doesn’t seem like numbers can move much lower than they are now. Also, we see low quality workers earning high wages (an opinion and yes we realize that sounds rude but there is no other way to phrase it). Our rough metric is to look at around 5-6%. If it is in the high singles we’d load up into equities. If it’s around 4% we’d be extremely worried. We’re currently at 3.5%. We could certainly go to 2.5%... that said… it’s tough to see from a probabilities point of view.

Source: tradingeconomics.com and US Bureau of Labor Statistics.

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Wall Street Playboys, LLC The next metric is the yield curve. As we’ve explained many times in the past the same economic cycle always occurs. Debt is issued. This debt then leads to a return. This leads to more hiring. Over time, companies eventually can’t get a return on their debt in excess of the interest rate. They stop hiring, profits decline and some companies even begin to default. This tightens up the credit market, debt is less readily available and growth slows. We contract and digest. Then recovery begins. Since this is a normal cycle, you generally want to avoid investing when the 2-year yield and 10year yield are similar. Since we stopped adding to equity positions at the end of 2018 that tells you our rough metric. If the 2-year and 10-year yield has a spread of only 0.25% we see limited upside. A good proxy is probably closer to 0.75%. So if we see the spread improve to 0.75% we might adjust again. That said, we’ve been in the 0.00-0.25% range for quite some time now (about a year). Note: light grey in the chart below reflects recessions shortly after yield curve inversion.

Source: Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. Our personal favorite is the consumer confidence index or consumer sentiment. This is the most useful in our opinion as it’s the one thing that will never change… People will always be emotional. If you’ve worked in sales, you’ve seen that people do not buy things for rational reasons they only buy them for emotional reasons. The guys who truly buy for rational reasons are the worst people to target with ads and luckily make up less than 1% of the population or so. Either way, when everyone thinks things are going well, it’s time to bail. When everyone thinks things are bleak it’s time to buy. The 98-100 range is where we draw the line as it is historically a poor time frame to add to equity exposure or purchase expensive assets. The other reason why we like it? It’s consistent. While the metrics for unemployment and multiples have arguments around them: 1) data is flawed or 2) profitability has changed making multiples different long-term… Nothing really impacts a simple poll that says “are things good”. It’s a great emotional read.

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Source: tradingeconomics.com and US Bureau of Labor Statistics. The last item we check (probably harder to read unless you have worked on Wall Street in the past), is the fund raising market. When you see large companies going public that really don’t need money in many cases that’s a sign to get out (or a ton of companies with negative earnings). Another good example was when KKR filed to go public back in 2007 (Blackstone successfully pulled off an IPO in June of 2007!). Think about that, the largest private equity firms were selling or trying and sell shares to the public. Unsurprisingly, this marked the top of the market cycle and we entered a bear market in 2008. To spell it out, Private Equity firms have a goal of buying assets and either selling them or taking them public to “exit” at what they deem as a high valuation. If the entire private equity industry is trying to go public to sell its shares… You can read between the lines pretty easily. At this time we’ve seen an extremely long string of issuances. It has been an incredible run but we’re seeing a slowdown at this time. While SIFMA will likely release 2019 data shortly, we already mentioned that bonuses and compensation across the Street will be down (official payouts in February to March of 2020). This is in conjunction with lower fees in general. Note: for those that want to track this information we recommend keeping it simple and looking at total issuance. For those focused on the equity portion, Renaissance Capital has a finalized number of $46.3B (only tracks IPOs above $50M in market cap, so likely another $2-3B higher than that number as a rough estimate).

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Before moving on here, one of the key items we’d emphasize is that you can’t look at one indicator. This is what the average person tries to do. They learn about one trick or indicator and think that it’ll work 100% of the time (Hint: this is why all those affiliate marketing ads with “THIS ONE WEIRD TRICK” always seem to work!). This is due to laziness. Instead you should always look at things from several angles and do a quick probability analysis on the market going up or down in the future. Our quick analysis says that bull markets are normally around 7-11 years long (we’re on the 12th year) and every single metric that suggests a downturn within 2-years is flashing: employment rates, yield curves, issuances, multiples and consumer sentiment. Since everything is saying the same thing, we’ll go ahead and avoid the market for now and let the principal run. The final thing we’ll add is that social skills are probably the most important when determining if you’re closer to the top or bottom of economic cycles. Our information is unfortunately related to major cities. That said, if you’re in a smaller city you actually have an edge. If you see people buying fancy cars and “flexing” consistently, that’s a good sign of a peak. Uber and Taxi drivers giving you stock picks is also a good sign of a peak. So on and so forth. Use your own social skills to determine if the people in the room are “actually well off” or if they are just spending 90% of their income to appear richer than they actually are.

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Segment on Ages… Before we get into the scaling game, we have to put another disclosure up front. People complain quite a bit about our benchmarks as they seem “unrealistic” to many and “easy” to others (the ultra-successful). As usual, these are simply numbers and benchmarks that we think are attainable for anyone with above average intelligence and above average work ethic. Can you catch up if you’re behind? Yes. Is there a reason to get behind in the first place? No. The above short paragraph summarizes why we don’t argue about these things. If someone can do better that’s amazing and great and if someone is behind, they should try to catch up. After all, this is an opinion based book and there is no “right” way to live. There are religions and 100s of corners of the internet to find different ways of life. Some of the main themes here are the following: 1) you never want to decrease your standard of living, 2) you are free to buy fancy stuff if it will never cause you to go backward in terms of standard of living, 3) your health is more important than wealth as you can’t earn if you’re sick, 4) no one will agree with our exact timeline or preference for “utility maximization” and 5) always assume that your preferences will change over time. There is a reason why 60 year olds are rarely found inside of loud clubs. On that note, a final theme we want to highlight is our preference for convenience, comfort and close knit groups. For people who have been long time readers of this blog it certainly shines through. Not having a car implies that’s we’d prefer to live in a central location of a major city. Spending more money on business class flights vs. a larger apartment, shows the importance of comfort. Finally, the fun activities surround trips vs. massive house parties which also implies a preference for smaller events of 10 people or so. Is there anything “right” or “wrong” about this? No. So we try to show different ways to live within this book if our style is not in line with your preferences. The two hard lines we draw are: 1) don’t go back in standard of living and 2) don’t sacrifice your health. The second one seems like an oxymoron as we recommend working 60+ hours a week in your 20s. And. The reality is that it has practically no impact to your health. We’ve seen many successful people work crazy hours through age 35 and still look extremely young. Even guys like Elon Musk still work long hours sleeping on factory floors to make sure their products are done – he still looks quite healthy. We could use President Trump as a good example of a high energy older person as well (we’ll stop there as the list is never ending). In short, the people who believe that working hard when you’re young causes premature aging are simply making excuses. The stress caused by worrying about bills and your future will age you a lot faster than a few long nights working on a project.

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Chapter 1 – Completely Broke and Starting from Zero (Early 20s) This is by far the most important decade of your life and it isn’t even close. You’re building a foundation for the next 60-80 years or so and if you put in the work early, it pays off for the next 50-70 years. If you find a successful person who is in his 30s the first thing he’ll tell you is how much work and effort he put in during his 20s. Unless the guy was born into a well off family, this is really the best way to make it. You have everything on your side in your 20s. People believe you are lazy and dumb. This allows you to make mistakes without being judged for it and your competition will underestimate you (substantially). As you get older both of those benefits die. Making life changing mistakes at age 40 does not result in a quick recovery. And. Each mistake is likely greater in magnitude due to the amount of money at stake. Also. You don’t have any real responsibilities or dependents. Expectations are a lot lower for a 20 year old. Living with roommates and eating on the cheap is not frowned upon. Being unable to afford a basic steak dinner at age 40? That’s a painful sight to see. None of the above should be a surprise to readers of this blog. We’re now old enough to track people who “screwed around” in their 20s to the ones who didn’t and there is just no debate. 99% of the people who wasted this decade cannot and will not catch up to the snowball of success created in an earlier generation. While we do love to see the “late bloomer” stories, the prior sentences are still true from a broad overview perspective. As an important note, this entire spending segment assumes that you live in a first world country in a major city. Living in Thailand off of a couple of thousand dollars and saving 50% doesn’t mean much. As you’ve seen with other backpackers who go down that path, the compounding effect catches up by mid-30s and suddenly their purchasing power declines. It’s absolutely horrifying to watch but happens year after year after year. When you’re generating a large enough amount of money (able to save 50% in a major city) AND have a chance to live abroad… that’s a different story. So. As a point of emphasis, our numbers relate to major city living. Early 20s Spending (things to avoid): This is where you have the lowest spending hurdles. If you’re entering the work force straight out of college, no one expects you to be rich. This refers to your employer, dating life, personal life and immediate family as well. Instead of viewing this as a bad thing, you should view it as an opportunity to minimize your expenses at no social cost. For starters, there is no reason for the following: 1) your own place, 2) expensive dinner restaurants, 3) higher-end alcohol, 4) a nice car/watch and 5) bottle service. 1) Housing: As long as you have your own room to sleep in, you will be entirely fine in this age bracket. If you live with a roommate at age 22, your dating life will not be negatively impacted. At age 40 it would be severely impacted. So you actually want to take advantage of this social situation. You don’t need to live in an awful place and take it to an extreme (unless you feel like it). Our point here is that there is no *deduction* to your social life for a few years since no one expects you to be “balling out of control”. While you would benefit from living alone in a studio for 63

Wall Street Playboys, LLC example, our point is that this is the one period of time where living with roommates is certainly socially acceptable. Since it is socially acceptable and won’t be a real negative, you should take advantage of the assumptions surrounding your economic status. In terms of an official recommendation, we’d stick with a single room as close as possible to your place of work. Our assumption is that you will start your career directly after college and we also assume that you won’t have a second stream of income up and running. If you follow Efficiency and eventually get a high income earning business that is location independent… You can scratch this strategy entirely. More realistically, it’ll take you 3-5 years to really succeed, so we assume that living close to work is the best move. You can show up earlier, leave later and guarantee you lock in that “top performer” rating (allowing you to pull in a higher income with less lost time). On a quick side note, if you do decide to live at home for some reason (your family is close to work), you should take at least half of what you would be spending (living with roommates) and use that for going out every month. While it usually isn’t a good idea to live at home we realize that it is a growing trend. To make sure your social skills are still solid, we would recommend spending more going out. There is a good balance here between saving a few extra dollars and improving your social skills at the same time. It can work in certain cases. 2) Expensive Restaurants: This is easy to explain. You shouldn’t waste your money in this area in your early 20s unless it is for something that will generate money. For example, if you’re one of the lucky few who is able to get a business up and running early… You may need to go to fancy restaurants to secure clients/deals. This is entirely necessary and entirely okay since this is a “Return on Investment” event. On the other hand, if you are simply going out to fancy dinners for enjoyment… You’re simply wasting your money. Again. We’re assuming that you’re not making a lot of money yet and you’re not rich. Spending a few hundred bucks to eat out is actually a huge waste of money. You’re better off buying high quality groceries and cooking yourself. That extra money, while small over a long time horizon, is needed for inventory, advertising spend and investments in your future self (books, health related items and potentially classes/courses). From a recommendation perspective, we’d stick with upper mid-tier places for special dates. Sushi is a common dinner idea and you can even do steak restaurants assuming it isn’t outrageous. Italian food is also in this upper middle area and works perfectly fine as well (note that this is typically unhealthy). Places that require reservations weeks/months in advance are off the table and you should really avoid eating out in general to fund your business ventures on the side. 3) Higher-End Alcohol: Ah yes another benefit of being extremely young. Your body recovers at rapid paces. We can still remember drinking heavily on certain occasions only to wake up with no hangover or significant decrease in production. Those days are long gone and it isn’t really possible to drink heavily without a noticeable decrease in productivity. Well what is the point here? The point is that you really won’t see a big difference between middle of the road drinks and high quality drinks. We’ve been there before and have no problems saying that we’ve consumed our fair amount of middle of the road alcohol (Corona, various wines, Kettle

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Wall Street Playboys, LLC One etc.). In short, your body is not really going to notice a difference between high quality and mid-quality alcohol so there is no reason to spring for the high quality drinks. Being completely clear here, if it were possible to see no difference between low quality and high quality alcohol, that would be an ideal situation. You could simply drink mid-tier alcohol forever. Unfortunately, unless you have incredibly good genetics, you’re going to upgrade your drinks over time. There is no reason to upgrade the drinks up front as your body will legitimately not know the difference. As a final note on this subject, blacking out and things of that nature shouldn’t occur anymore. Unless you enjoy embarrassing yourself in public. These days, everyone believes it is cool to black out not remember anything and wake up with a “cool story”. Not sure how the culture in the USA devolved into this. Instead you should drink as much as you want for the heavy party nights but blacking out is certainly out of the equation past the age of 22. We’re sure you’ll still go through a binge phase (when you turn rich) but you should wake up with a feeling of immense regret if you legitimately blacked out (not proud). 4) A Nice Car/Watch: Pretty self-explanatory. Trying to flex when you’re not even a millionaire is a complete waste of time. While your average person looks at a guy who makes $200K and says he’s rich compared to the guy making $150K… We’d strongly disagree. Unless you’re making $200K in your sleep and the other guy is making $150K working all week, there isn’t that much of a difference between the two. Being rich requires cash flow while doing absolutely nothing otherwise the person doesn’t “make” any real money. He has income, not wealth. Wealth refers to assets that increase your net worth without your time being expended. Despite multiple warnings about buying status goods when you’re young we’re sure this mistake will be made by several people. So we’re trying to highlight the two biggest expense items to avoid. The classic “rookie” mistake is buying $800 shoes at age 22 to seem cool or those awful Gucci belt buckles strapped onto a suit that costs less than $400. Unless you were born rich and can have the apartment + brand name clothes for everything, don’t bother with it. And. If you’re going to make these mistakes, please don’t make them with items that cost north of $5,000 as you’ll be screaming at yourself in 5 years when it could have funded another online business you want to start. 5) Bottle Service: The young guys with no personalities/physically unattractive pool together to buy a bottle of grey goose and sit at the clubs. Before the party they talk about how “cool the night is going to be” only to go home disappointed as the tables didn’t make up for their lack of social skills. This was quite fun to watch back in the day and it still occurs! If you work in an office environment, you will certainly see colleagues doing this (assuming there is a decent headcount in your office). The reality is that you should be jumping around a ton if you’re young and single. This means you’re going to go out to at least 3-5 places in a single night as you wander around the city. For a lot of young people in New York this is the Lower East Side and the Meat Packing District (although a lot more clubs in that area). If you do decide to go to clubs, you should simply show up dressed well and buy shots/drinks versus bottles. Why? Well this gives you a lot more mobility.

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Wall Street Playboys, LLC If a place is terrible, you simply leave and go to the next spot. It also allows you to eventually figure out what area is best for you in the future. Early 20s Spending (things to buy): Instead of amassing clutter, everything you purchase should be of use. In simple terms, it should improve your skills in some way. If it doesn’t? Consider it a waste of money. Lots of people will read the prior paragraph and scoff saying you’re giving up the best time of your life. This isn’t even close to true as the peak fun is in the 30-50 age bracket assuming you correctly built up the correct skills in your 20s. We also get a good laugh when people say it is “too much work” to put in all this effort. Beyond funny. It is a lot more work trying to catch up from age 30-60 with lower energy levels, zero passive income and minimal transferable skills. Admittedly, some of the skills we learned ended up being useless. This is simply the name of the game as you don’t know where you’ll end up in about a decade. Luckily you’re at the right place and we can give you several skills that will be used in the future if you plan on becoming successful. Key items: 1) learning how to sell both online and offline, 2) learning about color coordination and design, 3) learning accounting both basic and taxes (structures), 4) learning how to make a speech and 5) learning how to read body language. Before moving on here, you’ll notice that every single one of these is a life-long skill. There is no chance that you’ll be the best in the world at any of them. It just isn’t possible as there is always an area for improvement. “The biggest room in the world is the room for improvement” 1) Learning How to Sell: If you’re ever “bored” and can’t think of anything else to do. Sit down and learn about sales. Online sales or in person sales. It does not matter. You will learn something and it will be used for the rest of your life. In fact, we’d say that sales (any type) is always a good investment. If you’re 40 years old or 60 years old, you’ll still benefit by learning more about sales. No exceptions from a learning perspective. So you should be spending quite a bit of money here. You should be buying books (physical) and even audio books (we hate them but some prefer them). You should look into weekend classes on sales. You should practice copy writing every single weekend until you’re able to make money from it. You should read advertisements on your free time and write down what sales techniques the ad is using. You should also figure out which ad/sales techniques they are *not* using. You should take photos of ads when you walk around in the city. You should think about how the advertisement could be improved. You should click on ads when you’re eating lunch at your desk to see if the writing could be improved. Hopefully you’re seeing a trend here. While most people walk around looking for hand-outs hoping they run into the “right guy” who helps them “suddenly get rich”, you’re walking around looking for ways to improve every single business you see. This general attitude is going to get you extremely far (quickly) as you’re forcing yourself to look for improvements in everything you see. Many will complain that this isn’t “fun” and that’s why they’ll still be complaining about life 10, 20 and 30 years from today. What becomes fun for you is boring for others and that’s why they remain in the same place year after year after year…

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Wall Street Playboys, LLC 2) Learning Design: If you’re going to learn sales… You have to learn design as well. This goes hand in hand by nature as photos, colors, contrast and everything else related to “looks” will be needed to create a successful advertising campaign. So similar to the above, you’re going to buy books, take courses on the weekends (or at night) and spend quite a lot of money on learning what makes something look “good”. Most people (not you after reading this) simply walk around and see things that are eye catching. This could be a nice car they haven’t seen before or a beautiful lady. That’s about the maximum they can gather “wow looks amazing!” Instead you’ll be looking at it from a scientific perspective, I.E. “Why does it look amazing”. While this doesn’t sound like fun you don’t need to announce your beliefs in a public setting. If you see a well-designed vehicle, a beautiful painting etc. your outward reaction can be normal. In the back of your head, attempt to take a screen shot of the image and figure out why it stood out. (Yes you can always take a physical photo as well). The other item to think about is “why are men awful at taking photos?”… Well now you know, they never practiced. So, by learning design you’re investing in your future. You will know how to improve photographs, take better pictures for your friends and family and have a better appreciation for art. You don’t need to change your career and become a designer but it sure helps if you know what does or doesn’t look good. As an important addition, since it is 2020 we would add video editing/sales as well. There is a clear trend to videos (short videos, long form sales videos etc.) that are being utilized to sell. If you want to learn something that differentiates yourself from the crowd we’d bet that videos would be the right area. Just look at how much engagement short videos get TikTok is the latest fad as of 2020. 3) Accounting: Hopefully, most of you will know the basics already. This is probably the only class in University/College that is useful. The rest of the classes are rarely used. If you haven’t taken a basic accounting class, we recommend taking at least 3 University/College level courses and take them seriously. You will use this knowledge in the future (when you become successful). Accounting is about as boring as it gets. In fact, when you’re out in a city and don’t want to talk to someone say you’re an accountant. It creates a feeling of boredom within seconds. That said, by learning accounting you become significantly more organized. This is something you will need when you start earning larger amounts of money with significant volatility. Learning the difference between profits and cash flow… planning appropriately for the unavoidable one-time events and of course constant education on Tax Law. As a point of emphasis, you will eventually outsource all of your tax items to a true professional who has worked within the IRS in the past (ensuring you’re in great hands), however, you must know how to run clean books. In terms of software, QuickBooks is perfectly fine when you’re a beginner. You’re probably using PayPal/Shopify and QuickBooks as starting tools. Since there are hundreds of tools out there, we

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Wall Street Playboys, LLC won’t go down the rabbit hole of finding the best one. The three listed above will be perfectly fine for a beginner. 4) Learning How to Speak in Public: Luckily we don’t have stage fright. Some people do and it is supposedly a common fear for people. We’re not sure why as no one really pays attention to people on stage (they are too busy texting and updating their Instagram photos). If you plan on becoming successful you must learn how to give a speech. “Speech” can be interchangeable with “large public presentation” as we don’t expect you to become the new Martin Luther King Jr. or a church pastor. If you’re on a budget the cheapest way to do this is to take basic singing lessons. We’d recommend singing classes over public speaking classes as they are more likely to be embarrassing. The key to becoming a better speaker is to desensitize yourself to any feeling of embarrassment. Once you’ve tried to sing a few times (we’re horrific), you’ll become numb to embarrassing yourself in front of people. Then when it comes time to do a basic speech on a topic that you already know dead cold, you’ll view it as a walk in the park. As a note, some people recommend using Toastmasters, unfortunately our view is that there is not much at stake in these classes. Unless there is real pressure for you to perform or real embarrassment, you won’t get much out of the interaction. Now as a reminder, that is based on our experience in life (need real pressure or real embarrassment). Some people get value out of classes when there is nothing on the line. We’re not sure how it’s possible as taking free throws with the game on the line (basketball analogy) is not the same as taking free throws when you’re up by 40 points with 30 seconds left. 5) Learning How to Read Body Language: For one reason or another. More people focus on reading implied messages based on what someone says. This is the exact wrong way to operate as 80% of communication is actually body language and the speaking part is a lot harder to read. If someone is clearly negative towards you, having the actual words they say doesn’t mean much as it lacks the original context of the message. We have already recommended books such as “What Every Body Is Saying”, “Emotions Revealed” and “How to Analyze People”… But the reality is that this is going to take hours and hours of practice. When you’re simply tired and can no longer work, we would recommend hanging out at a coffee shop, busy area downtown or a bar. Instead of drinking until you pass out, simply try to make observations. Who is dating who, who is mad at who, which group is more likely to break out into a fight. What you’ll find is that the vast majority of people are extremely predictable. If you’ve been to an airport enough times you can even calculate the exact person that will run up and cry to the attendant about the 30 minute delay and how his “day is ruined”. Notice, we’re suggesting you attempt to predict the situation without any words. This will force you to make reads on the environment based on body language alone. If you believe this is not possible, you’re absolutely nuts! It doesn’t happen over-night (nothing good ever does), but you will become fairly accurate within 3-5 years. As usual, you’ve gotten “good at it” when you predict something will happen with a group of friends only to have them say “wow did not see that

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Wall Street Playboys, LLC coming”. Until that day comes, spend your downtime learning body language. It’ll likely pay off to the tune of a million dollars or more (no we’re not joking). Getting Down to the Numbers and Budget: We have to start somewhere and unless you’re a high performing individual, you’re not going to like our initial number. If you’re starting below this it means you need to focus on the recommendations from Efficiency and simultaneously work longer hours to prevent yourself from falling behind (gig jobs, second source of income etc.). If you start building a deficit early it *isn’t* the end of the world. But. It is an enormous issue. So here it is we’re going to start with $84,000 a year (Gross Income). This is actually a low number if you are successful in the three recommended careers in Efficiency and it is a number that is still attainable if you get a standard “white collar desk job” out of university. If you’re in this camp, you’re probably earning $50-60K a year and need to make up an extra $24-34K per year through a secondary source of income. Before the complaints come in on $2,000 a month being unattainable, we recommend doing “whatever it takes”. If we were forced to go back in time and start in a basic desk job position we’d learn the following and charge for it: 1) copy writing, 2) resume reviews, 3) design – websites and logos for example, 4) fixing iPhones and Samsung phones and 5) watch/battery replacements if that’s a popular accessory in your area. If you’re absolutely stuck, you can also try to drive an Uber during peak hours, become a tutor for kids after work or teach a specific task such as piano lessons. If you did all of the above there is no chance you’re earning less than $84,000 gross income and of course we didn’t include a secondary part time job which is also an option. Although we’d wager the items above (particularly phone repair) will get you there quite easily. $5,000 a Month Net Income: We know the $84,000 number seems strange but it amounts to exactly $5,000 a month. Again. If you’re a competitive person with some smarts, you’re going to get to these numbers right out of college (due to ambition and intelligence alone). We are not going to bother with the annual raise expectations and simply use this as a starting budget. As your numbers improve you can look at the prior chapters and decide how you want to balance it out. As a rule of thumb we’d say you should be saving around 20% of your income (at least) if you’re able to generate $5,000 a month. Unsurprisingly, you won’t have a bunch of fun since you’re too busy trying to generate more and more income. As a rough break down of spending think of it as simple bullets: 

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Housing: As mentioned, try to keep this as low as possible. You want to keep it to around $1,500 and if this requires you to commute a bit that is fine. At this amount you should be able to pull it off, we simply pulled up rental listings now and found numbers between $1,300 and $1,500. For people in NYC, going to the Brooklyn area is also fine assuming you’re going to live close to transportation to get you to work quickly. Art, not a science and commute time is more valuable when compared to size of your room/apartment. Other Bills: We lump this all together, a basic gym membership, cellphone bill, electricity and commuting costs. Take all of this and put it into an “other expense item” and you shouldn’t

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

 

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be higher than $500. This will also cover strange one time charges like a co-pay for a doctors appointment or a new shirt for work Food/Drinks etc.: This refers to consumption only. It does not refer to the occasional night out with your friends. It should come in at around $200 a week or around $28 a day. Considering the prior $500 number for other bills is probably high feel free to round up/down around the edges. Investing In Yourself: As much as you can. This will probably be close to $1,000 a month or so. This is going to be an all-encompassing item as well, outlined by the prior paragraphs in this sub-segment. Fun? Not much. A few hundred bucks here and there if you’re able to reduce spending in the prior four categories. The reality is that our “Other Bills” and constant investing in yourself numbers are a bit high. So you’ll have a few hundred bucks to go out a couple of times per week if you’re smart about it. When you’re not going out this allows you to buy a few items of clothing here and there as well. 20% Savings: Unsurprisingly this lines up and adds up almost perfectly. Housing ($1,500); Other ($500); Food/Drinks ($800), Reinvestment ($1,000) and fun ($200) = $4,000 total. By the time you’re done, you have exactly 3 months of emergency money left. Spending $4,000 while saving $1,000 (multiply by 12) is $12,000/$4,000 = 3 months!

These numbers are not good at all (from a long-term perspective) so looking at the realistic numbers should be a solid shot in the arm to get another form of income up and running. Once you realize that saving $12,000 a year isn’t going to make you rich, you’re forced to swallow the painful pill that reality has handed you. Unlike other people, you’ll accept reality immediately and spend all additional discretionary income on things that will either make you more money or make you more money in the future. You’ll realize that “having fun in your 20s” isn’t really that amazing and by going out 1-2x a week is more than enough. You’ll have more fun in a single year (rich in your 30s) than the entire decade from age 20-29.

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Chapter 2 – Able to Save 30-50% of Income Without Feeling Uncomfortable (Late 20s) Assuming you’ve followed our advice from Efficiency, you should be able to earn around $12,000 a month after taxes by the time you’re in your late 20s. This does not sound achievable as it is more than 2x what you were earning only 5 years ago. The reality? We have been blogging for about 8 years now and we have not seen a single failure from people who really followed through with our advice. While we’ve seen many people give up and 95% of people don’t take the advice, the ones that do have become successful. So we’re using this $12,000 a month benchmark as a good starting point. Before moving on, we do want to thank “you” for all the success emails. We do read them all and do not have a chance to response to all of them. Being successful in the first place is the main item that matters so we really doubt it’s the end of the world if we’re not responsive to every success story. For fun the vast majority have made their wealth through internet businesses. This is not surprising but does show that it is possible to do within about 5 years. The transition ends up being exactly as expected: 1) high-end career, 2) work diligently until business is 2x the career, 3) quit and have the best of both worlds – high income and no need to be locked into one city. The other success stories generally surround real estate and some niche situations where a person goes to a high quality company (gets a ton of stock) and suddenly gets rich. The last one is where most lazy people get excited. Since lazy people don’t have skills, they think the best way to get rich is by getting lucky on a particular stock or crypto currency for example. That said, from a “percentage mix” stand point (success stories tied to the blog), about 80% get rich with their own business, 15% come from real estate or something else more brick and mortar related and around 5% or less hit the jackpot with stock in the right company at the right time. Also. You can already figure out which person has higher life-time earnings as a one-time jackpot does not reoccur in the future. Late 20s Spending (things to avoid): This is unlikely going to take long as a person who makes the first initial jump in income is usually smart enough to adjust his spending. That said, there are still cases where extremely intelligent people make big mistakes and begin spending far more than they should. Or worse… They take their foot off the gas only to become a “turkey”. Turkey is a phrase for someone who thinks they are going to continue living life on the farm (free food and sunshine) only to be taken to the slaughterhouse as their pay no longer justifies their contribution (cliff drop in income to zero – popularized by Nassim Taleb). List of things to avoid: 1) significant leverage, 2) change in life responsibility, 3) low quality clothing, 4) constant business class flights and 5) the expensive watch. 1) Over Leverage: While you can live alone without a problem (basic studio or even one bedroom depending on the city and location), we wouldn’t recommend doing the classic “house rich” trap

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Wall Street Playboys, LLC by buying something where the mortgage ends up being 40% or so of your take home income. While you can certainly do it, the loss in flexibility will hurt you when you’re trying to scale your first successful business (whatever that is). It’s a lot easier to clamp down on expenses for a couple of months and use that money for your business vs. taking out equity from your home/condo. When you make your first big jump, you’re going to “feel rich”. This is a deadly trap as feeling rich is built on flexibility (operating expense mobility). Having high fixed recurring expenses will make you feel poor quickly (or worse you’ll become desensitized to the large risk you took with minimal payout potential). In short, over leverage causes you to become rigid. While there is a time and a place to invest heavily into something, you want to avoid doing this in a way that causes large recurring payments. If you want to make a heavy investment into a new product you’re creating (that’s perfectly fine) doing it with debt at a rate of 5%+ is a bit foolish. As a psychological rule of thumb any time you come into a large amount of money, you want to pause your spending for a while. It is incredibly easy to turn the faucet on when you first come into money. Instead, keep your life unchanged until you “feel” that you’re not rich. The key part here is how you feel about your new net worth. Once you feel that you’re not rich again (usually takes 6 to 12 months), your spending will go up but not to an unreasonable level. 2) Change in Life Responsibility: Here, we’re specifically referring to kids/wife/dependents. There are always “exceptions to the rule” but it’s best to start with a huge no here. You’re at a point in your life where you’ve finally figured out how to earn money at a high rate and have a chance at getting rich. You don’t take your foot off of the gas in the final lap of a race, instead you sprint as hard as you possibly can until you reach the finish line. As an additional note on this topic, while we have no scientific proof, we’ve found that women can sense when a man has become more successful. They call it “Women’s Intuition” for a reason and we believe it is true. You’ll find that people are nicer to you and it is best to be a bit more careful around new acquaintances. As another rule of thumb, a change in life responsibility should be anything that impacts your spending by more than $25,000 a year (that does not appreciate in value). Getting a pet dog is perfectly fine and upgrading some of your lifestyle items will unlikely result in *recurring* expenses of $25,000 or more. We have to emphasize the recurring part as one time spending increases (going out more, traveling more) is something you can cut back on with ease. 3) Low Quality Clothing: You’re now in the higher income brackets/positive territory. There is no reason to dress like a slob, act with bad manners or look physically distraught. We know it’s “cool” to wear hoodies in Silicon Valley, but has anyone looked at their girlfriends? Be realistic. Most coders don’t actually date good looking women since they don’t take care of themselves. Since you’re going to be meeting more and more successful people at this level of income, you want to think about the image you’re sending out to the world. As mentioned before, good looking people and well-dressed people will earn money as they make better first impressions (yes there is actual science to back this one up if you wish to google it).

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Wall Street Playboys, LLC During this general time frame you want to build up a wardrobe, think of it as a “gradient”. Your closet should slowly start with one side of “nice clothing” and every year as you acquire more shirts, suits, slacks, jackets, ties etc… the gradient slowly moves in one direction. If you hit it big (just jump to the older age bracket section) and do a full scale upgrade. Since the income ranges begin to widen quite a bit when you become successful, a good way to avoid over spending is to simply keep your gym clothes and out-door clothing cheap. You don’t need to look impressive when you’re sweating, running and lifting weights so no need to go overboard in this area. Basic products aren’t going to impact your performance at the gym. Please do not become one of those weird people wearing a facemask to “reduce oxygen” at the gym. 4) Constant Business Class Flights: This may sound “Boujee” (a term frequently heard in LA to describe rich people) but it is actually a common mistake. When you start making decent money, your desire for comfort goes up quite a bit and you’ll end up becoming pretty addicted to business class flights. While it is okay to use them for long trips where you’ll retain large amounts of energy (coast to coast or international) we recommend avoiding the vast majority of business class flights. In fact, don’t even use your airline points to upgrade the shorter flights (you’ll create bad habits). As soon as you go down this path the following occurs: 1) you look for upgrades that cost “only a few hundred”, 2) this escalates to $500+ and 3) you end up wasting more time in lounges just to justify the cost of the flights. Feel free to laugh if you’d like. It’ll happen when you get into this income bracket. A good way to offset this bad habit is by booking earlier flights. This conserves energy and doesn’t make you value business class as much. Remember. C-level executives fly in economy quite a bit and unless you’re making millions… If they don’t do it… doesn’t make much sense for you to do it either. When you start making millions per year, this all goes out the window. Just remember, even top 0.1% earning individuals don’t fly business 100% of the time. 5) The Expensive Watch: Ah yes, similar to business class flights you’re “on the cusp” but not there yet. You probably window shop quite a bit, look at different styles of watches and imagine wearing one on the regular. The problem? It still doesn’t line up with your lifestyle *yet*. In order to go down this path you should already have a high quality place to live, a wardrobe that is entirely complete and minimal risk to “lifestyle deflation”. The last part means you should be financially independent. While ~$12,000 a month seems like you’re rich… it doesn’t mean anything if your net worth is $200,000. This would imply that your $10,000 watch is 5% of your entire net worth (insanity). Clear exceptions to this rule include: 1) gifts and 2) watch experts who purchase rare items that appreciate in value – do not use. Both of these are perfectly acceptable as it is rude to sell a product given to you by a family member and a watch collection that goes up in value is certainly not something we’re referring to. Late 20s Spending (things to buy): The prior section was less about spending and more about “reinvesting” as a form of spending. Luckily we’re beyond that point at this level. You should already have a solid understanding of how important it is to reinvest in yourself in terms of skills.

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Wall Street Playboys, LLC Instead we now get to play the game of “lifestyle extension”. This means you’re finding ways to optimize the best years of your life (combined physical and financial perspective) to enjoy it as much as possible. Again. We’re not doom and gloom people. Instead we’re being realistic that your energy and fitness levels will be better at age 27-40 than it will be at age 75 (unless there is life changing technology, but we can’t count on that). Our goal? Figure out how to extend this period of time… As long as humanly possible. As a second disclaimer… we’re going into a big section here. None of this is to be deemed legal or financial advice. All comments in this product (especially going forward) are opinions based on life experiences. Key items to buy: 1) grey market drugs and more...; 2) upgrade to a centralized apartment at minimum, 3) begin purchasing and upgrading physical maintenance items, 4) upgrade your gym and 5) upgrade your electronics. 1) Grey Market Drugs and More: If you’re intelligent… You’ll recognize that famous actors, actresses, professional athletes and other wealthy people don’t seem to age. Their production is also sky high and they seem to recover from injuries quickly. As an example, recovering from torn tendons is not easy and yet many athletes come back quickly through the use of various products from steroids to HGH etc. At this level of wealth we started experimenting with grey market performance enhancing drugs for intelligence/work. Nothing related to physical items (covered later as you shouldn’t touch these until you’re in your mid-30s or so). This list is incredibly long and includes things such as LSD, Mushrooms, Modafinil, Adderall, various types of caffeine, food choices – ginger, wheat grass, barley grass, spinach, chlorella, garlic, beets etc. We don’t even know where to begin so instead we would actually test *all of them*. That’s much more realistic. Why? Well every single person gets a different reaction. If you don’t believe this think through it logically… If some people suffer from peanut allergies and can die while other people may feel sick when consuming gluten… Doesn’t this mean each human body processes food/drugs differently? It sure does. Building on this, if you were athletic (good genetics) you noticed that you were able to consume large amounts of unhealthy food with no real impact. Candy bars, burgers, fries it didn’t matter, you would not see an issue. This begins to change in your late 20s, so you’ll notice that if you eat unhealthily your coordination goes down just a tad, you feel a tad slower and you’re generally more lethargic. Why? Your metabolism comes down a bit and you’re going to feel the impact of light amounts of inflammation (one of the worst things for your body). What to do? Well now that you’ve got extra money you need to figure this out. This is a serious endeavor and something we went through over the course of about 3-years. It takes a long time to really dial in the impact that each item has on your body. So you need to take copious notes and really try to limit external factors (keep the mini experiments as equal as possible). LSD: This is probably the biggest performance enhancer next to caffeine. Unbelievably powerful if you try to do the “Silicon Valley Standard” of 1/8 dosages (a regular tab has around 100

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Wall Street Playboys, LLC micrograms, so 1/8 would represent 12.5 micrograms). You don’t need to do this on a daily basis, for what it is worth we’ve noticed that it is best to take it at maximum 2-3x in a week and more likely once every two weeks or so. The rare cases where you use in 3 times? You should be working extremely long hours – pushing to finish a product for example. We might be micro-dosing as we’re writing this very sentence (who knows!)… Okay we are. The strategy we used was relatively simple. The first step is always the biggest which is to “take the ride”. We took one full dose (a single tab) to get the entire experience. Unlike other people who say it is life changing… we really didn’t get a life changing experience. It simply gave us a good glimpse of what the high looks like. Items seem to be moving, colors are a *lot* brighter and your energy levels are through the roof (tough to fall asleep even if you’re supposed to be tired). After you get the experience you can then move to micro-dosing for a certain period of time. We would recommend testing your reaction to it when you have a lot of mundane projects to finish that *don’t* require tight deadlines. Why? The key here is you don’t want to screw up a project because you’re testing a new supplement/performance enhancing drug. In your late 20s, you already have the energy to power through if needed. By testing it on mundane projects you can evaluate your reaction to it over the course of a week or two. This creates a “neutral” environment and when a real project comes, you know that it won’t impact you negatively. Imagine trying a completely new drug and dealing with anxiety and stress all at once… Not going to end well. Our experience with micro-dosing has primarily impacted us positively from an “alertness” perspective. Hard to explain unless you’ve tried it. One issue with aging is that you become a bit more forgetful and lethargic (running at lower intensity). Since LSD makes everything feel “brighter and more alive” you’re a lot more awake as well. This bleeds into every activity you do. Also. LSD has a lot of properties similar to serotonin so you’re generally a bit happier than normal as well. In fact, LSD has cured depression in some cases and we know people who claim that it fixed their introverted personalities as well (Note… nothing wrong with being introverted, we’re referring to extreme situations where they cannot even socialize). As usual, everyone will have a different reaction. So here is how we would characterize the dosages: 1) if you feel like you’re “loopy” and not focused, this means the dosage was too high. Some people can micro-dose up to 20 micrograms and this seemed like far too much, 2) if you can’t see any impact at all the dosage is too low since you’re unable to pinpoint a single change and 3) the general impact of a correct micro-dose is that the colors around you are “a bit brighter” than usual and you’re able to work longer hours than normal without a reduction in energy levels. Or. You’re able to get more done within the day but are working the same number of hours. Both work and the sweet spot is typically the last one. Longer hours are probably unhealthy long-term (eating into sleep time isn’t good). In terms of consumption there are really two methods: 1) distilled water and 2) a box cutter to precisely cut the tabs. For what it is worth we prefer the distilled water method of consumption. The reason for this? It’s easier to measure out. When you cut the tabs, you might accidentally

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Wall Street Playboys, LLC touch them and the measurements are not as precise. By using distilled water you can pretty accurately measure each dose and simply take a shot of it when you’re ready to use it. Our preference has been to take it at around 10:00am. This is around when you’re fully awake and ready to work. We have tried it early in the morning and late at night as well. By taking it early, you don’t really “use it” since you have a daily routine to wake up and by taking it at night you risk being unable to sleep. As a word of warning, do not try to use this every single day. Like anything else you could become dependent on it. Even though there are no official “studies” we really doubt taking low dose LSD for decades is healthy. Similar to how there is no official studies on other substances but we can probably all agree that smoking weed daily for twenty years isn’t a good idea. As a secondary word of warning… Do not try to up the dosage beyond ~1/4 of a tab. In fact you probably don’t want to go over 1/5 of a tab. This will reduce performance and have the exact opposite impact you were hoping for. Caffeine: While not as exciting as the above to your average person (most talentless degenerates think they can take LSD or mushrooms and suddenly become successful, so they jump for joy around hard drugs), caffeine is certainly a performance enhancer. The key? Finding the right way to consume it without feeling terrible! You’re going to drink a lot of caffeine at some point in your life and this will come in various forms: tea, coffee, energy drinks and espressos. In fact, most high earning people know what it is like to “feel sick” from drinking too much coffee. Yes it is possible. Your stomach does not feel good and you actually see a drop in production. We don’t know the scientific reason for why this occurs, but it does. How do you fix it? You fix it by changing the way in which the caffeine is digested. While it sounds illogical, by consuming Yerba Mate and coffee within the same day, you will reduce the negative impacts to your stomach. You can also drink Americanos instead of straight coffee as there is higher water content that dilutes the espresso shot. If you’re stuck working on a long project then you can add butter or some sort of high fat item to your coffee (we’ve heard MCT oil works better for some, sticking with butter has been good enough for us). It absolutely works and it absolutely shouldn’t be done frequently due to the high calorie content. Incredibly unhealthy. For fun, the reason why it works is that the fat content forces the caffeine to disperse slowly (ie. you get a smaller jolt but for a longer period of time). Currently, Yerba Mate appears to be the best source of consistent caffeine. For some reason it does not seem to cause stomach issues and the cost is low as well. You can bulk buy Yerba Mate (sugar free versions) for a couple of dollars per bottle. Avoid buying the sugary versions as the calorie content is high for some strange reason. As usual. Better to go as natural as possible. Mushrooms: This one is strange. Caffeine is easy to figure out through trial and error as it is not considered to be a grey market drug (like Modafinil). Mushrooms on the other hand don’t seem to create a lot of performance enhancing capabilities. Except in one area… Creativity. We’ve found that taking low dosages when you’re attempting to improve the design/look of a product

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Wall Street Playboys, LLC you’ll see higher performance. If you’re trying to do other activities (write, doing math etc.) you won’t see a performance improvement. Naturally, this is less useful for us. Could it be useful for you? Maybe. We don’t really know the answer. Generally speaking, psilocybin mushrooms have a normal dosage of 3 grams (a trip) while a tenth of this would be closer to a micro-dose. The time to use this as a performance enhancer is when you’re most creative. For fun we have noticed that creative work generally occurs in the early morning or late at night. This seems to be the difference between “morning people” and “night people”. Again. We don’t know which one you are and are simply highlighting this as a common trend. With this in mind, if you’re going to micro-dose with psilocybin, we’d do it before you intend on embarking on a creative project. This is a pretty simple rule of thumb and we’d bet you notice the same benefits as we have. As usual, everyone digests and reacts to chemicals differently. Simply use the above as a good starting framework. As a note, some users of psilocybin suggest that it helps with anxiety. We don’t really suffer from this problem so we can’t relate. If you know someone who has suffered from it (or personally suffer from it), this may be more useful for you. It’s a powerful psychedelic and could be used to cure problems in the future (a large amount of research dollars are being poured into psychedelics). Another interesting result from psilocybin is that it also causes you to view yourself in “third person” in many instances. You can hear yourself better and you’re generally happier and more philosophical. Just like the LSD items, you’d have to “take the ride” once to see what it is like to operate on a full dose, then cut the dosage by 1/10 to see if you can get any performance enhancement out of it. We hope that intelligent people are mature enough to find a way to generate value out of it instead of becoming weird hippies living in the mountains. In the end, you want all performance enhancing drugs to… well… cause you to add more to society as a whole. Modafinil and Adderall: We’re combining these two. Why? They are on opposite ends of the spectrum for us. We’re not sure why but when we have experimented with Mofafinil all we got was a weird sick feeling in our stomachs and sometimes a headache (not improved performance). This is extremely controversial. We have talked about this topic to several close friends who live and die by Modafinil. It is strange since the value seems to be quite low when we’ve used it. In fact, we still try it a couple of times per year to make sure there is no added benefit. So far… Same answer, nothing gained except a splitting headache and awful body feeling for a few hours. Adderall is on the other end of the spectrum. It works incredibly well but is absolutely terrible for your body. This is one of those products where we can’t even fathom taking it for more than one or two days per year. You can get an insane amount of work done. In fact you can take it, stare at a book and read straight. If you’re sitting, you’ll stand up and see a nice red crease where your stomach has a slight fold to it (even if you’re in shape). Why? You barely moved as you’re dead focused on the task at hand.

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Wall Street Playboys, LLC We’ve described the above to some people and they say the impact is not as large. So again… if you do down this road you have to test everything yourself (as usual, not in any way to be deemed legal advice… just our opinion). At this point in life, we have no interest in really using Adderall anymore. We’ve gone through the awful period already and the drug seems to be extremely unhealthy. The only time it would make sense is if there is something incredibly big that can’t be missed. And. We doubt that would happen. It is much more likely that major events could be spread across a few painful weeks instead of being compacted into a single day. While the section is short we hope the message is clear. Be careful around Adderall. It is a powerful drug. It does work. But. You really need to be in a situation where it’s “win or go home” to justify using it. As an example, college exams are not high enough on the priority list. If you are running a Company and needed to work all night to make sure products are shipped to avoid 6 figures in losses? Sure, probably an acceptable situation. How All These Drugs Work: Seems like you’re messing with your body quite a bit doesn’t it? If you like it or not, this is how many ultra-wealthy people operate on a daily basis. While we don’t know what billionaires are using (exactly), it is extremely clear that many of them are on various types of performance enhancers. To try and help you save time, below is a good example of a difficult week. If you know that you’re going to work long hours it would look something like the below. Day 1: Wake up and take a shower to increase blood flow. You then do a few sit-ups and pushups along with some light stretching. After that you chug some vitamin rich products such as a freshly made kale and apple juice mixed together. At around 10am you want to take *one dose* of LSD. This would be right before you start the difficult work at around 11am. This will last around 5 hours. When you feel that you’re starting to slow down, you do a light workout (20-30 minutes, such as body weight exercises or some quick sprints and hit the showers). You come back and since your blood flow is high you can now take some caffeine. Day 2: Similar as Day 1. The difference is that you will take a single dose of mushrooms instead. While each person is different, we assume that this day will require more creative work. After about 5-6 hours go by you do the same plan. Hit the gym for a short time frame and come back. One dose of caffeine and work until you’re done. Day 3: This is the reset day. While you’re trying to work extremely hard, you want to limit yourself to a single dose of caffeine if possible. You’ll do a full workout at the gym and ideally lift heavy legs and then go for a long bike ride or run. This will actually energize you. If you know how to lift correctly, you end up having more energy the next day. Also go to sleep a bit earlier to catch up on lost hours from Day 1 and Day 2. Day 4 and 5: Repeat Day 1 followed by Day 2. No real change. You can add around 15 minutes of gym time to lift instead of doing the bare minimum. You hit a single area (typically chest or

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Wall Street Playboys, LLC back) since you already did legs and you won’t have the time to do arms/abs in this difficult time period. Day 6: This will be similar to Day 3 except you replace hard work with yoga/meditation. You need to clear yourself up after having 5 days of significant pain and suffering. This refers to the amount of mental gymnastics you will be doing. If you really kill yourself for 5 days straight you need to reset your brain and take it down a couple of notches. Day 7: Here it gets really interesting. You can repeat the past 6 days for quite some time. In fact, we wager you could do this for about 60 days straight before becoming fatigued. If you are on a short deadline and you can make a huge amount of money then you can look into higher dosages of caffeine. As usual this is an extreme scenario. To give an idea, taking something incredibly powerful like Adderall is something we’ve done only three times in the past 10 years. It really is an “absolute necessity” situation and we doubt we’ll ever do it again (absolutely terrible for your health). Revisiting Some Key Notes On This Topic Based on Experience  Don’t take multiple items on the same day except for a single dose of caffeine  You can absolutely push through a day with only caffeine and drink multiple cups  If you want to avoid stomach issues with high caffeine we’d use Yerba Mate if black coffee begins to give your stomach issues  There is no real value in “upping the dosage” on LSD/mushrooms once you figure out your own tolerance levels. We’ve messed with slightly higher dosages and you can see the performance declines  Do not try to run with all of these products for a full year. It simply isn’t healthy and at most you can go to the extreme regimen above for around 75 days in a year. That gets you over 10weeks. When you’re 30 and making good money, we sure hope you’re not trying to kill yourself with work all the time!  If you attempt to mix different enhancers it typically reduces productivity. For example… drinking a lot of caffeine with a single dose of a psychedelic will reduce performance. Similarly, mixing psychedelics typically results in performance declines as well  Caffeine pills do work… That said, they are extremely harsh so you better have a high tolerance for caffeine and be ready for it to wear off quickly. We think they are far too powerful and reduce performance due to a racing heart  If you find that you’re doing strange things (such as grabbing the glass of water and drinking it only to find out its coffee…) you need to go to sleep. At this point your work quality has fallen too far. The only time you should push through this extreme fatigue is if the deadline is within a few hours  Do not talk to people about your performance enhancers. Just experiment yourself and don’t say anything publicly. If you talk about it publicly you’ll attract the wrong crowd. People who are addicted to psychedelics and are falling behind in life… saying “oh man the colors are amazing” and never use them as performance enhancers. The exception to this rule is quite obvious, they are already rich. You’ll find that people who use psychedelics for fun are either 1) rich already or 2) will never ever get rich. Figure out which camp they are in and do the classic “smile, nod and agree” to the second group 79

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These performance enhancers are not “wonder drugs”. Being in shape is a pre-requisite to getting benefits from them. If you’re out of shape, being in shape will be the biggest performance enhancer for you in the first place These performance enhancers don’t give you a massive edge. Just like anything else, if it helps you 2-4% this is a big benefit over long periods of time. Thinking it’ll turn your average person into above average is beyond foolish Remember… Your body can become accustomed to any of these items. This is part of the reason for oscillating between the enhancers. So if you overdo any of them you may end up getting no benefits at all. You must take at least a month off and zero out all consumption for it to maintain potency. For some people, they have to take 2-3 months off and for others (younger) 2 weeks could be enough Don’t mess with any of these substances until at least late 20s is our best estimate. You probably have enough energy to stick with just caffeine through age 30-33 or so

Lots of Greens: This one is short. We’ve explained it in basic terms before. Try everything. Green powders, drinks, barley/wheat grass shots etc. You want to be able to pinpoint inflections in your energy levels. If you cannot tell the difference you are not consuming enough. Simple strategies include juicing a full pound of a particular vegetable and drinking it straight. This can be up to 12 ounces of the particular green. Is it fun? No. Does it taste great? No. Does it get results? Yes. Repeat this process until you can figure out which greens work for you. As an easier strategy, you can attempt to drink these greens after a night of drinking. As mentioned before we’re certain you’ll go out and get drunk from time to time. If you know you’ll be going out heavily, prepare a particular drink and chug it before you go to bed. You’ll be able to see the impact when you wake up (with or without a hangover… likely without one). While we already put up the basic greens on our approved product area (on the blog), we think it’s important to try all of them when you’re in this income bracket. While we’ve tested a TON of vegetables, Chlorella seems to reign supreme. The next on the list is barley/wheat grass shots. After that is spinach/kale. The Vitamin Game: We get a good laugh when we see the dosages for over the counter vitamins. You can begin experimenting with them by taking higher amounts (3-4x the “normal”). This will give you a better idea on the impact it has on your body. Below is a list of the most important ones (opinion) Vitamin A: The least talked about vitamin and difficult to find in pharmacies. Why? Probably because companies don’t want you to know that Retinol is just concentrated Vitamin A! Seriously. All you have to do is take 3x the normal dose of Vitamin A and lingering acne problems will fade away. Will they go to zero? Probably not. Will it improve your skin? Yes. Vitamin B12: This seems to increase energy levels slightly. You can take a basic vitamin B12 product. It isn’t amazing but it is something you should keep in your internal pharmacy as a normal supplement.

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Wall Street Playboys, LLC Vitamin D: No clear explanation for the impact here. All we know is that people who work long hours inside typically have lower Vitamin D levels. As you get older you’ll simply go outside and hang out in the sun more (no need for this). And. If you’re going to be inside for some reason, have it at your disposal to make sure you don’t run a deficiency. Calcium: If for some reason you’re going to ditch milk/dairy products it makes sense to add a bit of calcium. No real impact that we’re aware of but it’s another item that may screen as “low” as you get older and do more frequent blood work. Unlike the other items one tablet every other day or so is probably enough. If you overdo this one, it can cause issues so don’t try to 2-3x the dosage unless you have a high quality doctor who suggests you need more. As a simple alternative, you can also add sparkling water to your daily drinking habits. Perrier and S. Pellegrino both have ~4% calcium content in their drinks. Fish Oil: Covered more than enough times on the blog but including it here. Take a table spoon of the real stuff once a day. Don’t bother with the tablets as they have a smaller impact in our experience. Vitamin C: Overhyped vitamin. If you’re taking the above, you won’t really need Vitamin C as you’ll get this content from berries/fruits in general. Blueberries as mentioned before have brain healing properties so stick with that over vitamin C tablets. Another alternative? Green Tea. Certain types have high vitamin C concentration. Niacin: As you get older, you may want to take a small amount of niacin (many prefer wax matrix niacin). Many men will suffer from a heart related illness and this can help lower the chances of cardiac related issues (one of the common causes of death). This product can help you as it has proven benefits to keep your cholesterol levels within normal ranges. Generally speaking, advanced health experts (your private doctor… to be explained later) push this product as a potential solution to reducing negative cardiac events. We’ve noticed that it does seem to help energy levels so we take it. Serums and other Supplements: Here we also suggest you test a wide variety of skin care solutions. We do not know what your skin looks like. All we know is that you want to find the right serums that work for you. This could be something that dries out your skin (for people who suffer from oily skin) or it could be a moisturizer. See a professional dermatologist and get a routine going. While someone in their late 20s will laugh at you for being “vain”… You’ll be laughing at them when you look like you haven’t aged over the next decade. The above is the cheat sheet to your Vitamin basics. Feel free to ignore or laugh at it but we can say that they are all helpful. Other items will be individual specific so you can go ahead and test out another 20-30 of them in your free time. We’ve tried hundreds of supplements over the course of a decade. Feel free to go wild in this income bracket/time frame. A few hundred bucks of experimentation is not going to break the bank. Regular Food: This is pretty simple, try everything. Similar to the vitamin game, you want to test out your reactions to a fish based diet, heavy meat based diet, vegetarian etc. What you’ll find (our

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Wall Street Playboys, LLC guess) is that a higher protein diet based on fish/meat/vegetables will yield the best results. We’re not sure who started the “carbohydrate craze” a couple of decades ago but it was certainly wrong. You need more protein and less carbohydrates in general. We’re not as extreme as other people, but we do notice better performance when we avoid sugar, increase protein intake and consume a large amount of green vegetables. Limiting fruit consumption to lower calorie based ones such as blueberries and blackberries. Same story as prior blog posts/products: citrus is for energy levels – lemons/limes, greens are for recovery and meat/fish are for maintaining and building muscle mass. No need to go further than that (beating a dead horse) but including it here to be consistent and organized. 2) Centralize Your Life: If you’re in this ballpark, you want to consolidate all of your activities into a smaller area. This means you’re no longer going to live with roommates, you’re not going to make any concessions (travel long distances/commute) and you’re not going to skimp on quality anymore. Instead, you’re going to attempt to reduce all of your “wasted time”. Wasted time includes: 1) time going to the airport, 2) time going to work – if you’re still in a career, 3) time doing laundry, 4) time going to a bar/club/restaurant, 5) time it takes to get groceries done and 6) cleaning/organizational tasks. While there are always exceptions, you want to find ways to do a 50/50 split. If you were spending say 10 hours a week sucking it up with longer commutes and worse logistics, you can take half of that time to rest and spend the other half producing more income for yourself. This is a good starting point and if you think a different split is better feel free to adjust. The point remains. By centralizing your life you should free up several hours per week that will make your working life extremely easy. It will also give you time to calculate your real worth and realize that it is possible to earn more money by outsourcing tasks like cleaning. This is also an area where frugal people tend to mess up. Just because you’re spending less by living in a less convenient area does not mean it will result in higher savings/investments. At this point, you’re trying to prevent burn out and increase your income. The only way to do this is by centralizing your life and spending some money to put yourself into a “streamlined” lifestyle. You don’t need to go crazy and party every day. And. You don’t need to suffer and negatively impact your quality of life either. If you’re in this income bracket, you deserve a better quality of life and your value has gone up substantially. You’ll make more and save more by doing this. If we were to rank order the time preference it would be: 1) centrally located living situation by yourself – close to work if in a career, 2) cleaning and 3) distance to going out. These three items will offer the best rewards by a wide margin. You’ll go out more, you’ll have more people at your place and you’ll offset your increase in spending with a decrease in wasted time. It works out perfectly as your entire life is upgraded at once instead of being forced to “pick and choose” which looks strange and optically wrong… Like a guy wearing a Gucci belt with a cheap poorly fitted suit.

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Wall Street Playboys, LLC 3) Physical Maintenance: At this point, you should take a hard look at body based maintenance items. You don’t need to worry about hormone replacement or big changes such as hair replacement (looking at you Elon Musk!). Instead we’re focused on upgrading your daily use items to extremely high quality items that improve your overall recovery time frames. The first example is a high quality bed and mattress. You spend 8-hours or so sleeping (about a third of your life). Sleeping on low quality bedding is fine while you’re young but doesn’t help you as you get older. The last thing you want to develop is back/neck issues since you didn’t care about your sleeping arrangement. Similar to the piece on grey market drugs, we don’t know how your body will react to the mattress. That said, you should be spending north of $2,000 on a high quality mattress. We know… the number seems high but it’s realistic since you’re going to use it for at least 5-8 years (don’t go beyond 10 years as the quality degrades noticeably in just 5-8 years). The second physical item you’ll invest in is massage/muscle loosening items: 1) electric pulse massager, 2) budget for professional massages, 3) yoga classes and 4) foam rollers, exercise balls and a muscle roller you can travel with. This is another “non-negotiable” purchase. In your early 20s you could work out and recover without any serious stretching. It didn’t matter. Those days are now gone and you have to pay close attention to your muscles. Typically, you’ll notice it when you get your first leg cramp on a flight. This is simply annoying but it’s a good reminder that your muscles tend to tighten over time. So simply sign up for a yoga class, get used to budgeting in massages and use those massagers consistently. As a small note, working while seated on an exercise ball doesn’t do much but it is a lot better than a normal chair. It’ll also act as a small core exercise for you. If you’re looking for ways to force yourself to stretch more we’d recommend doing the following: 1) add it to your routine after taking a shower as it loosens up your muscles naturally, 2) leave a muscle roller in your carry-on bag at all times which will automatically remind you when you open it up, 3) force yourself to sign up for a weekly yoga class or weekly massage and pay up front so you don’t skip it and 4) create a daily alert to stretch during the slowest period of the day for you. Another way to do it is by reminding yourself to stretch every single time you sit down. You can do really basic stretches while seated naturally – sit with feet underneath you, sit in the butterfly position, lean back while seated with a single leg is underneath you. It’s quite simple and over time it will make sure your muscles are being stretched (lightly) on a frequent basis. To conclude this part, you can also use the electromagnetic massager when you’re reading or doing something in a relaxed position. This is probably the easiest one to remember, just leave the machine near you… You’ll naturally grab it if you see it and it takes less than 5 seconds to put on. 4) Gym Upgrade: This section can also include other activities you do (perhaps you play tennis or golf… or soccer etc.). Essentially, you want to upgrade the environment you are in. When you do this you increase the chances of meeting other high net worth individuals who may be valuable contacts down the line. The chances of running into a wealthy person at Planet Fitness is simply a lot smaller due to the minimal barriers to entry.

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Wall Street Playboys, LLC This is an important upgrade and there are some exceptions to the rule. If you’re not the type of person who goes to the gym 4-5 days a week and for some reason do another outside activity, you may want to upgrade that item and keep the gym at a minimal cost level. It’s certainly possible to upgrade everything and that’s the ideal situation. Our point here is that it isn’t a deal breaker like the first three spending items. A good rule of thumb is to upgrade to the second highest tier. Unless you’re ultra-rich already (which would be a later category) you really don’t need to join a Country Club with high minimum spending amounts. The best example of a high quality generic gym is probably the Equinox. If the Gym costs less than $100/month it probably isn’t high quality (we have no doubt there are *many* exceptions, and our baseline is based on a high cost of living US city). The alternative to the gym upgrade is to increase the spending on your health hobby. Everyone needs at least one hobby that keeps them healthy and you can spend more by taking lessons for a sport you play or by entering a more expensive league/competitive event in your city. This is vague as we don’t know what activity you’ll be doing. Generically speaking, golf is the most common followed by skiing – if you intend on interacting with richer people. Now it wouldn’t been fun if we didn’t give a recommendation, so if forced to choose we would pick golf (assuming you can afford it). It is a lot more mobile relative to skiing which typically requires a lot more planning. As you move up the socio-economic hierarchy, you’ll find that time becomes more and more valuable. Reducing the headaches associated with going golfing relative to going skiing is actually helpful (reduces the number of “no” responses). The last benefit is that golf clubs typically involve more drinking when compared to skiing which typically increases the chances of more information flowing. 5) Upgrade All Electronics/Entertainment: This is the smallest upgrade and the least important unsurprisingly. When you get to this level of income you actually want to have high quality items for all of your electronics. Why? Well it does save you small amounts of time. You don’t need the latest version of everything but you can go ahead and upgrade that laptop you’ve had for 5-8 years. You can also upgrade that cellphone now that it has been over two years. You can also upgrade your surround sound/television etc. if you plan on having people over. (As a note, there is no real reason to have a TV if you’re not rich yet but it’s an example depending on where you live). Another good example of upgrades would be a pool table at your place or you could simply move to a place with better amenities. The point here is that you can probably afford to upgrade a few items without a real impact to your re-investment rate. That’s all we really have to say about this segment as it is by far the least important. It could even be ignored entirely as small upgrades don’t really change your life (social perspective). You’re better off waiting until you’re a millionaire making significantly more per year. As a rough break down of spending ($12,000/month) is below. It’s actually shorter as there is more variability depending on what type of life you’re going to live.

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Housing: This one is probably going to run you at least $3,000 a month. Maybe a bit more/less but we’ll use that as a standard. Other Bills: We lump this all together, a basic gym membership, cellphone bill, electricity and commuting costs. Take all of this and put it into an “other expense item” and you shouldn’t be higher than $600. We simply add $100 for the improved gym. Food/Drinks etc.: This refers to consumption only. It does not refer to the occasional night out with your friends. It should come in at around $250 a week or around $35 a day. Considering the prior $600 number for other bills is probably high feel free to round up/down around the edges. Investing In Yourself: As much as you can… Yet… This will probably be lower at $500 a month or so. This is going to be an all-encompassing item as well, outlined by the prior paragraphs in this sub-segment. You invest less as you’re busy scaling something that succeeded (shift from learning to doing by this income range) Fun? This increases quite a bit and where the volatility comes in. Unless you find something brand new you’re likely ramping up your income streams without a need for more educational investment. Somewhere around $1,400 a month. ~45% Savings: How does this add up: Housing ($3,000); Other ($600); Food/Drinks ($1,000), Reinvestment ($500) and fun ($1,400) = $6,500 total… Saving around $5,500 a month.

Before moving on we know what some people are thinking. Wow you’re spending so little! The reason? You’re still scaling. The weird part about this income range is that you’re not rich yet but you see the light at the end of the tunnel. You’re not going to take your foot off the gas unless you want to live with regret for the rest of your life. So you can certainly spend more but your time is still heavily consumed by work. You do go out more (evidenced by the $1,400 in spending on fun)… But you have more fun and exciting things to do. Regular people won’t get this. When you learn how to earn large amounts of money… that is the most fun you will ever have. Nothing replaces the joy of winning and seeing the numbers/digits on the screen go up.

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Chapter 3 – Millionaire Club with High Quality Cash Flow (30+)

Congratulations! You’ve officially made it. Several people who have read our blog are already here. The millionaire club certainly allows you to spend more as you know you’ll never be living on the street. If you keep it simple and assume that you can always make around 5% ($50,000 per year) with a million dollar portfolio, that’s certainly enough to live in a large number of cities around the world. Are you popping champagne at Liv in Miami? No. Are you worried about basic living expenses anymore? No (assuming you’re smart). Here is the catch/fun part… If you were smart enough and successful enough to make it to a million by 30 you’re not going to pack your bags and move to Thailand any time soon. You will get bored within two months. In fact, we know a lot of people who have quit after accumulating a million or two and every single one of them returns back to work. The only people who quit and successfully stay out of the job market create their own businesses to run… Which is even harder than returning to work! So what do you do? Pretty simple really, you continue to invest in yourself to build up more income streams while simultaneously reducing your hours. If you’re a millionaire, there is no reason to work long hours unless you feel like it. Most of you (we’re guessing now) will likely do the standard “work, rest, work, rest” model. This means you work hard for 1-2 years then take a year or two and do minimal work… this repeats every year going forward. Serial entrepreneurs do this all of the time and we have no problem betting that it will continue to be a common trend. You come up with a decent idea, scale it, sell it and take a break. Millionaire Club, 30+ (things to avoid): 1) extreme hedonism, 2) accidental pregnancy, 3) betting your financial independence principal, 4) over-extended mortgage and 5) the super car – for now. 1) Extreme Hedonism – Drugs, Escorts Alcohol and More: While there is practically no chance you will avoid at least one binge, we strongly recommend keeping tabs on it. You will get hurt (eventually) as your health will suddenly degrade. Generally speaking, you’ll feel invincible physically through age 32-34 or so, at this point you can see the reduction in all of your numbers (lifting, running speeds etc). While you can certainly stay in amazing shape, our point is that these binges are going to kill you over time. Of the three, alcohol is probably the most destructive and escorts are the most dangerous. The difference is that destructive behavior is “socially acceptable” so you end up consuming far too much. On the escort side of the equation, you will be forced to interact with them even if you don’t want to. If you’re smart (likely if you’re reading this blog) you’ll pay them to meet potential clients as well. No. This isn’t a “fake thing” from movies. If it’s common to take clients to strip clubs, it only takes an ounce of common sense to realize this will happen as well. If you don’t believe this all we have to say is “wait and see”. When you see it happen 1-2 times you’ll notice it all over the place, particularly in 5-star hotels. 86

Wall Street Playboys, LLC Before elaborating, we know there are always “exceptions to the rule”… once again. Some people have intense religious beliefs that protect them from this mistake and some are simply ultrastraight edged (engineers commonly fall in here). That said, if you found this blog, the chances that this is you… is quite low. So we’d say 99% to 99.99% chance you’ll go on a bender if you make it. You’ll spend 5-figures (easily) on some crazy nights doing all kinds of things you’ll laugh about later (assuming you survive). We know a few people who have spent in excess of $50,000 per night… several times… within the course of a month or two. The benders are extreme and it might actually be better to get it out of the way in a short period of time versus developing a bad drug habit. From the prior area (when you were still scaling), we mentioned drugs that can help you increase output. Now we’re switching gears and talking about drugs that will *not* help you at all. Recreational drugs that do not improve performance for work are in this category. Instead of going through all of them, we’re just lumping them together. Instead of lecturing everyone on “avoiding them”… you’re going to end up doing them anyway (at least to some extent). So we’ll look past that and emphasize that you should view the drugs as “gifts”. This means you’re doing your best to hand it to someone who actually wants to do it. No. You don’t have to do them to prevent other people from feeling bad. Eventually you become influential enough (rich enough) that no one cares if you’re just drinking instead. Yes. We are aware of the social ramifications of being the “outcast” and are here to tell you that absolutely no one will care if you’re successful enough. Strange how that works! Unsurprisingly, at the top you’ll meet a lot of people who are drug addicted/hard drug users. You’ll find that many ultra-rich people do all kinds of weird stuff from wife swapping/swinger events to heavy dosages of pain killers. All of this is simply terrible for you (opinion) and at minimum you want to *limit” any recreational drug use. Once again, we doubt you’ll make it to $5M+ without trying drugs at least once as you’re going to be surrounded by it for long periods of time. Turning to alcohol… This is another double edged sword. Do too much and you end up hurting yourself. Going with zero usually ends up being a bit too boring. So a good balance is to only drink when you’re really going to have a big event. The other strategy, if you’re really into drinking, is to go out frequently but with a small number of people (under 6 or so). Both of these strategies minimize the chaos. If you’re into big events, be prepared to drink a lot on those nights. Someone always takes it “too far” which then drags the average alcohol consumption up a ton. If you do the small group set up, you drink less but more frequently over longer periods of time. Now how do we really prevent you from going into the deep end? The answer is actually physical fitness. You’re going to pick up a private doctor, learn about hormone replacement therapy and take it seriously. Once you go down this route, it will absolutely “put the clamps down” on your drinking habits. Also. If you’re in great shape, you will immediately notice the impact of

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Wall Street Playboys, LLC drug/alcohol usage on your body. Even pro-athletes see their metabolisms slow down and if you’re in shape you’ll get a wake-up call within a year after “making it”. 2) Accidental Pregnancy: So you thought you had it all figured out by giving escorts a fake name and never telling someone you’re rich? Think again! That’s right. Once you get rich word gets around. It simply does. You don’t even have to be “ultrarich”. Once you start making around $20,000 per month after taxes, you will be marked within a few months. How you ask? Simple: 1) your friend tells a friend… who tells a friend, 2) you go to an expensive event and show up in a publication or you are seen by someone else who talks, 3) you are spotted at the front of a major sporting event – usually thousands of dollars for the ticket, 4) your mannerisms will begin to give you away – speech patterns, walking speed and working hours and 5) you get drunk and something slips in the way you describe your life. And. For fun, you’re not going to complain about anything which will be another tell over time. If you don’t think this could happen to you… You’re simply suffering from overconfidence. Many, many, many people have this happen to them. All it takes is one mistake one night and you’re done. So we recommend you take this seriously. If you’re extremely serious about this you should live in a place with security cameras and consistently send messages and take photos to prove that you’ve never done anything illegal as well. Some women will even fake that they are pregnant to get you to meet them again. People laugh but having a hidden camera is actually quite smart to avoid getting into legal issues as well (fake crime allegations). These are extremely serious issues for rich people. While your average person is concerned about gold diggers (when he isn’t even rich), the real issue is an accidental pregnancy or lawsuit that is based on a “you vs. them” outcome. Don’t get yourself involved in the last two and take extreme measures to make sure this is the case. Gold diggers aren’t a problem at all if you’re avoiding those two… Just because a girl likes men with money? That doesn’t actually matter at all. This section is short but we would recommend printing out the page and saving it. If you miss this one all of your hard work could go up in flames. Yes. It is that big of an issue. As a closing note, there is an “exception to the rule” again. Which is? Odd individuals who don’t attract the prettier girls when they are rich. We’ve seen a few of these usually 1) out of shape, 2) extremely unattractive or 3) extremely strange social mannerisms. We can’t help everyone as we can only help people within a certain band. So if someone is this off (can’t succeed on dating market even when rich) they should seek some sort of professional help. 3) Betting the Principal: Even if you think you found the next Google start up, never bet your principal. Your principal refers the exact dollar amount you need to live off of dividends/interest income. Keeping it simple again, if you can live off of $5,000 a month, you are not allowed to ever sell the investments that are generating $60,000 a year. There are no exceptions to this rule on the investment side of the equation. The only exception is related to health if you’re forced to pay for a life-saving procedure.

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Wall Street Playboys, LLC You’d be surprised at how many people mess this up as well! This is why many rich people go from rich to broke and sometimes make it back to being rich again. The key is to win the game once (financial independence) and never look back. As usual, people who have never been rich think it is easy. Unfortunately, it is not. It’s mentally taxing to stay the course when you see certain investments doubling, quadrupling or even going up by 10x. The good news? If you followed our path to riches from Efficiency, you should already have a high income. Since you didn’t make your money by winning the lottery in a one-time windfall, we’d bet you’re making around $20-30K per month after taxes and you’re in the 7-figure camp by thirty. This means you have more than enough money to invest in higher risk ventures in the future. You simply take one extra year (not much) and save $200K+. This allows you to invest in high risk ventures. Betting the principal is simply equal to adrenaline seeking. Anyone who does this is simply bored with their current living situation. The way to get out of boredom is by either starting a new project or by selling your current company to start a new one. Having zero “earned income” after a sale is an immense motivator. While we got lucky in this regard, we think an easy way to avoid betting the principal is to find an asset with “forced appreciation”. The two easiest ones: 1) real estate and 2) internet business. If you’re bored you simply buy one of the two. A home that you’re going to fix (force appreciate) or an internet asset that you can fix. This is a simple and fun game that you’re already used to playing. It also gives you more cash flow to reinvest into higher risk ventures. 4) Over Extended Mortgage: As mentioned in the first section of this book (and the second), you’re free to make assumptions on where we are in the market cycle. Hopefully, we can agree on one thing… You can never be 100% certain. So? If you’re going to buy a big place and that’s the type of life you’re hoping to live (house party type environment), you should assume that the price of the house will go down by at least 25-30% the day you buy it. The chances that this occurs is next to zero percent since you’d have to buy the exact peak. That said, it causes you to re-evaluate the purchase and make a smart long-term decision. As we’ve mentioned this isn’t the style of life for us (prefer urban areas and higher quality apartments with amenities), but it is a common decision to make for many wealthy people. You’ll end up going to a lot of large house parties and yes all the vices will be there (drugs, alcohol, gold diggers, strippers, escorts etc.). We still get a good laugh when people say that these parties only have women in their late 20s to early 30s time-frame, they are showing their cards (that they never made it) without realizing it. Anyway. Back to the point. If you’re going to do all of this and you recently came into a large amount of money, it would be wise to start off slower than you think. If the price of the home drops you won’t be moved and forced to sell (eating a large loss) in a bad economy. The best way to think about the purchase is the “stress test”. If you will feel mentally stressed by the mortgage payment (to the point that you want and need to work harder), that’s probably too high. If you look at the payment and say “well even if I lose my active income today I can easily make

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Wall Street Playboys, LLC payments for 5-years” then you’re in good shape. The whole point of getting rich was to take your stress levels to an extremely low level… Taking on a massive mortgage defeats the point. Stress should be self-inflicted, which is the best kind of stress (going to the gym, working on a personal project/company etc.). A rule of thumb someone else gave us is that your passive income should never be smaller than your house payment. So if your passive income is $5,000 a month, the mortgage shouldn’t be higher than that. Not sure if that’s accurate (as we’ve never gone down this path) but the individual is quite rich and lives in a large home as of this writing. 5) The Super Car: The only real item out of your range is the super car. A super car would be something in the $150,000+ range with high maintenance and insurance costs as well. Even if you’re a car guy, the depreciation and upkeep is going to be painful to eat. Not to mention the near guaranteed speeding and parking tickets you’ll rack up due to targeting. A good number to think about is around 5% of your net worth. That’s about the most you’re able to spend on a car. So if you’re a millionaire and have a car valued at $45,000, you’re pretty safe and good to go. We still get boat loads of laughs from the guys driving $40,000 cars with a net worth of $200K or less. By buying a depreciating asset with 20% of their net worth, if the car value goes down by about 10% they are already -2% total net worth for the year. Considering that normal returns are around 8% they are 25% behind already! No one likes doing this math. And. The numbers never lie. From a recommendation perspective, it is unlikely going to be better than Uber Black. A simple solution to transportation that is higher quality. If you live in a major city, most places are within 10-15 minutes and going with Uber Black isn’t going to impact your monthly spending patterns at all. Unless you’re in a place like Los Angeles, a car really isn’t necessary in most major cities. For example, Miami is considered a city where you “need a car” but it simply isn’t true. The amount you spend traveling is certainly higher than other areas like New York but when you add up all of the receipts over the course of the year, it doesn’t reach the total cost of car ownership on an annual basis: depreciation, insurance, gas, etc. Beyond Los Angeles and the “car person”, the only other group that may need one is the outdoor person (example: Skiing, Rock Climbing, Camping gear etc.). In this scenario, grabbing a truck or an SUV is a more likely purchase. Oddly, we’ve noticed that people in this group are *less* likely to go through a massive hedonism streak (bender). Probably because they spend their extra money going outdoors more often which is healthier and pushes them into a completely different environment. We are only partially joking when we say this “teach your kids to ski/snowboard/golf”. Why? Well based on that information alone you’re likely decreasing the chances that they burn all their money on drugs, alcohol and women when you’re gone. Millionaire Club, 30+ (things to buy): After your inevitable bender(s) you should take a quick pause and realize you can ratchet up the discretionary spending quite a bit. No need to spend every cent as you likely want to invest/buy new companies/assets but you can certainly increase the

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Wall Street Playboys, LLC variable cost line on your annual spending. As a simple rule of thumb spend whatever you want but keep recurring costs away if you can. The only recurring cost is the most important item you’ll buy which is a professional private doctor for Hormone Replacement Therapy (HRT). Key items to buy at this level: 1) invest in your health (as usual!) with a private doctor, 2) complete upgrade of all wardrobe items including that watch if you like, 3) likely a small vacation home, 4) tons of services and 5) upgrade the flights. 1) Hormone Replacement Therapy and More: Similar to the other section, we have buried this into the middle of the product for a few reasons. First… less than 10% of people actually read an entire book like this and this is only going to be useful for people who take action (only the 10% of the people who end up reading this would be in the group anyway). Second, the topic is always controversial despite all of the evidence being readily available (no one is willing to read an endocrinology book). And. Third, it costs money and requires a life-long commitment combined with personal responsibility (another thing regular people lack). Before jumping in, from our own research, getting a private doctor and entering into the world of hormone replacement therapy should only be considered under three circumstances: 1) you are able to afford ~$6,000/ year on your health forever, 2) you are around your mid 30s or older and 3) you have taken responsibility for your life and have frozen your sperm in a worst case scenario that you’re unable to have kids after undergoing treatment. If you don’t pass all three tests, we would not recommend it. We’re sure there are exceptions to the age (for some reason you suffer from a physical illness that lowers your metrics earlier in life), but the other two are not negotiable. Before moving on, these are our opinions and should not be considered legal/health advice in any regard. The problem with offering a general solution is that “general solutions” won’t work in this camp. You have to go and find a doctor who is well versed in anti-aging and hormone replacement in your area. As a general rule of thumb, they are readily available in Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York, Florida, Las Vegas and Texas (yes some are states others are cities). You should spend at least a full year researching this topic on your own time and finding people who have had success with a particular doctor before committing. If you want our opinion, you want to find a doctor in Los Angeles given that this city has a high concentration of people on gear (more testing for longer periods of time). Why is the cost higher at $500/month when other people claim it can be done for a few hundred dollars a year? Well if you’re well off you want to maximize every single metric you can. We see a lot of individuals talking about TRT (Testosterone Replacement Therapy), but this does not include all of the other things you’re likely trying to maximize. Thyroid, HGH, all vitamins, potentially HCG for maintaining fertility, bi-yearly blood work/check-ups and any other items that may show up in your bloodwork. Can it be a lot cheaper than $500/month? Yes it can. We’re simply using a higher number so you budget intelligently if you go down this path when you reach your mid 30s. How Does This Work? The process is relatively simple after you figure out which doctor you’ll be working with. You sign a bunch of paper work saying you won’t litigate (etc. etc.), and then you go in for blood work. After your initial screen comes back, you will go through every line item on the page (always go for the highest level of detail with your first screening as you’re trying to

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Wall Street Playboys, LLC maximize your health). This is then explained to you and you can cross check this with your own research. At this point you go through all the major deficiencies and see which ones can be solved with simple changes: going outside more for vitamin D or simply changing your diet for example. The ones that cannot? You begin taking supplements to improve all of the numbers that are low. This could mean taking testosterone injections, starting with HGH, using HCG, taking vitamin D supplements, taking magnesium… so on and so forth. This is where we can’t give away some “magical formula” as you have to put in the work yourself (figuring out what needs to be fixed). You’ll pay your monthly/quarterly/yearly fee and then simply begin your protocol. After about 36 months you’ll take yet another blood test to go over your metrics again. At this point you should be close to “dialed in” and will likely notice a sudden change to your physical fitness levels (mental alertness, energy levels etc.). You receive yet another set of results to see if additional tweaks need to be made (yes this usually takes at least two cycles to get down correctly). To conclude… You make the final adjustments take a third test to see the results and are usually “cruising” at that point. You then reduce the number of times you need a check up to around 2x a year and simply maintain your normal protocol going forward. Naysayers and Debates: We don’t even bother with the people who are against HRT. There is no point. This paragraph is just to explain why we don’t write about it on the blog or on twitter. The reason is because it doesn’t attract the right type of people. The people who are smart enough to figure this out, don’t talk about it publicly. Yes there are exceptions (we have friends who talk about this all of the time that are extremely intelligent). And. We also know a lot of people who simply take steroids/TRT/HRT and only make $150,000/year... while simultaneously talking about gym gains all day. The best example you can look at is Jeff Bezos… it doesn’t take more than a spec of IQ to realize he is on gear (you’re free to believe differently but it just doesn’t add up from a logical point of view). Also. Getting on gear isn’t going to make someone smart as we see a lot of talentless people look for magic potions to fix their lives (HRT is a potion to get more performance out of someone who already has talent, it isn’t magical!) Some Concluding Remarks: To maintain credibility here, we have absolutely no clue what *exactly* Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Hollywood celebrities are taking. Why? We know that every single one of these people are on a different regiment. This can range from TRT to HGH to basic vitamin changes. There is just no possible way to know exactly what one single person is taking (unless you live with them and they show you everything). If you have read a few endocrinology books, took your health seriously and know what to look for your opinion will more likely than not line up with ours (these individuals are on gear). This isn’t a bad thing, it says that the industry is evolving. We’ve finally reached a point where you typically take different things based on your ethnicity (seriously it is true). Men and women take different products and they are even fine tuning for your heritage.

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Wall Street Playboys, LLC Many of you will become financially successful (or already are) and its best to learn about this as soon as possible. If you become rich at 30 or 40? Less relevant. Knowing that this is the truth and those famous people are on “gear” of some sort? Priceless. The only remarks we’ll reiterate are the same: 1) make sure you can afford this for the rest of your life, 2) make sure you’re in your 30s at minimum and 3) freeze your sperm in case you want to have kids in the future – extra protection for you even if you don’t end up doing HRT therapy long-term Hair Replacement: If you end up suffering from hair loss (hopefully you don’t!), you can always go down the Elon Musk path of hair replacement to fix your looks. Take a look at Elon Musk before his surgery and after his surgery. He looks 100x better with hair and it isn’t really debatable. Sure, he’s rich enough and successful enough to do whatever he likes (go bald and stay bald) but who in the world wants to “look their age” and “age naturally” when they are rich and can afford to look 100x better without any impact to their finances? Another theory we have on this topic is that good looking people have more photos taken of them. Just go to a popular restaurant/bar/club. They take pictures of the attractive people not the ugly ones. If you make sure you’re good looking (the best looks you can have), you’re increasing your publicity over the long-term if you’re already a public figure. While this has less than a 5% chance of being the reason for Musk doing this, it’s a concept worth mulling on. Botox/Dysport: Similar to the above, if you have skin that is beginning to wrinkle quite a bit and show your age more than you would like, go ahead and get regular Dysport/Botox injections. You get them around 2x per year and you can start as low as a half dosage when you’re young (prevents decay) and increase it later as you get older. Just like anything else, starting earlier results in better long-term results. The catch is that you need the money set aside to make this a life-long commitment. If you’re successful you will meet many CEOs and CFOs of small/medium/large companies along with many high net-worth individuals. Once you know how to spot people using Botox/Dysport you can’t “un-see” it and will realize that it is quite prevalent. Consistent Physical Work: This will be a step function up in terms of usage for you in this net worth range. You can now afford to consistently see a massage therapist, chiropractor, dermatologist for skin treatment etc. There is no reason to skimp on this category. As you get older blood flow is usually a bit worse and your muscles cramp/tighten more frequently. You will notice this double time when you fly quite a bit (your feet/legs are clearly swollen). Instead of limiting the treatment sessions to once in a while, you should now make them frequent to keep your body optimized from day one. Despite being seen as a luxury item, you’ll eventually see it as part of your weekly routine. While going every day is unlikely, you’ll probably increase your usage to around 1x per week. For what it is worth, try to make your massage days after 1)

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Wall Street Playboys, LLC your hardest workout day and 2) before your roughest work day. If Monday is your hardest work day, try to make Sunday the massage day with Saturday being the highest stress workout day. Another solid purchase is a high quality electric massage chair. While you can still use your basic electric pulse massager (cheaper in the $50-100 arena), purchasing a full high quality massage chair is also a great add on for your home/apartment. You can use the chair when you’re reading, responding to email or even taking phone calls. Since a high quality chair will have various levels of functionality, you can target specific areas without moving around. As a note here, we know that younger readers are laughing. What “old person” needs a massage chair… We’ll say the same thing, which is the following: “your body will slow down over time”. There is just no way around it. If you go on Twitter and follow rich people, all of them talk about doing yoga, meditation and other activities that induce muscle relaxation. We’re simply giving you a heads up now so when you get your first muscle cramp boarding that cross Atlantic Ocean flight, you’ll remember this small section and look into muscle relaxing investments. 2) Complete Wardrobe Upgrade: At this point, you’re going to look at your closet and start throwing away a large amount of the lower quality items (Donate them to Goodwill or another service in your local area). While we don’t see a real point in having high-end gym clothing and sneakers, if you want to upgrade those, go for it. The cost is only going to be in the low 4-figure range if you get everything. The area where you’re going to spend more is at the higher end of the spectrum: 1) highest quality shoes, 2) higher quality suits – only custom with better material and 3) if you’re a watch person you can go ahead and pick up one of the flashier items – as mentioned this typically means a Rolex since that’s an international standard for high quality. The interesting part about this is you want to do everything at once. If you find yourself cutting corners you either aren’t rich enough yet and should go back to the prior section. Or. You’re hurting yourself by looking strange. This is an important item to remember. We still get emails from people saying that their upgraded wardrobe didn’t “work”. After prodding we find out they are buying the wrong colors, half upgraded it (only had nice shoes and a cheap suit) or they made themselves look foolish with a Gucci belt and $200 shoes which effectively makes the Gucci belt appear to be a fake (even if it’s real). To cap it off, some people attempt to wear clothing that doesn’t match their personalities which is the biggest embarrassment in the group. The key to high-end clothing? You have to have everything match up or else it really looks like a fake. This is also how women can quickly spot fake purses. A girl carrying a LV bag with jeans that cost $20 is typically a giveaway. Similar to a guy wearing a “Rolex” but his hair isn’t even combed and his shoes look 10 years old with scuff marks all over them. The only guys who pull off the expensive watch look like this are the ultra-wealthy with a regular shirt, pair of jeans and a watch worth $100,000+ (since the watch is so expensive it offsets the look – Richard Millie or Patek). If you’re only “rich”, not wealthy, you’re better off matching everything so you look congruent.

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Wall Street Playboys, LLC 3) Small Vacation Home: This is going to be surprising to some. Unless you’re completely cookie cutter, you’re not going to spend all of your money on rental properties. Typically, if you live in a high cost of living area, there are a couple of cities you enjoy visiting for a month or so out of the year. We’ve seen a huge range, it could be another country entirely (Russia, Latin America, Canada, Spain)… It could be the “standard” which would be a basic place in Hawaii… It could be Miami, another common place for those on the East Coast. It could be Vegas as well, if you live in California, this is quite common (assuming you’re single, the married ones naturally veer to Hawaii/Mexico). Since we assume you’re still single for this section, a general strategy is to buy a place that you could live in if you decide to move. Also. The reason for Florida and Nevada is also quite obvious, 0% state tax! So if you decide to pull the trigger and move to your small vacation property, you can potentially lower your tax bill and have the infrastructure set up for an official move. For those that are extremely money hungry, a final strategy is to buy a high quality place and rent it out. You then wait until they leave and move in when you’ve got more money in the bank. This doesn’t seem to actually play out based on what we’ve seen. Instead when the person buys their “future home” and rents it out… the price goes up… the rents go up… they end up buying a different place entirely later down the line. The only time we’ve seen this strategy play out is when the home is sold out right! So in both cases, 95% of these ideas end up never playing out and the person either sells it or buys something entirely different. Now you’re probably wondering why you’d ever do this. Mathematically you might be able to earn more from a rental. Say you had $250,000 and you could either generate $15,000 a year or you could buy a place outright. Well it comes down to how many days you’re going to end up spending in that apartment/home. No different than the math that people run when looking to buy a cabin for skiing. Relatively rich people attempt to calculate the days and back into their implied return. The real value generated here is actually comfort/privacy. If you spend say 50 days out of the year in your vacation spot… that would be an implied number of $300/day. If you only did 25 days, it would be $600 but you could be using AirBnB to subsidize your costs. With all of this in here, we’d say it is better to either move entirely or not bother with a half-baked vacation home. The only exception is if you find a good deal in a place you can’t pass up. Say you find an ideal place in Hawaii but are not ready to move there. You’re better off finding a way to use it as a short term rental (probably make out with positive cash flow) and decrease the hassles associated with moving in (don’t have to kick anyone out). As a fun note, it really doesn’t matter which strategy you choose. The cost of the asset is going to be low relative to your annual cash flows and will be a rounding error even if you make a mistake here. We’re simply highlighting a purchase you’ll likely make and would recommend steering you to something that is going to be a short term rental at minimum. Oh… And… we’d recommend going with a tax free place like Florida since you’re going to leave to a tax free state in the future anyway. 4) Tons of Services: This is going to make your life significantly better. In fact, you’ll wonder how you lived without having everything taken care of for you. It’s beyond worth it. The problem? It’s

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Wall Street Playboys, LLC a recurring cost so you better be sure when you ramp up the services spending. This isn’t referring to the massage/skin maintenance as that is considered an investment in our opinion (long-term health and higher earnings associated with being more attractive). Tons of services include: cleaning, cooking, chores/delivery, email and even online dating (we don’t do the last one but some people just pay a guy to filter out all of their matches and even organize the first meet-up). You’d be surprised at how much time this saves. Imagine waking up and not being forced to read your email. Instead it gets filtered through an assistant who simply deletes all the junk mail for you and you don’t even look at your phone in the morning unless there is a clear message to do so! On the cleaning and cooking side, this is self-explanatory. Depending on how much you’re making you can decide if you’ll hire a full time chef or if this means you’ll be delivering everything and only cooking for entertainment purposes from time to time. If you end up having a family, this generally doesn’t apply as we’ve noticed well off people seem to get enjoyment out of making their own food as a hobby unless they have a large number of people over (throwing a party for example). In terms of a rule of thumb, we’d say that you should be able to upgrade to full “outsourcing” before you leave and upgrade your apartment/home. Why? It really makes life that much better. Sometimes this is a combination of living in a nice apartment complex (valet service etc) and in some other cases this is maxing out all of your items for a standard home (having yard service along with all the other services mentioned). The way we stumbled onto this strategy was by going to a lot of third world countries when we were in the “explore the world phase”. When you go to a large number of them you find that well off people always have a helper who takes care of the vast majority of their tasks. In the USA this isn’t really common and we’d recommend doing it if you can afford it at this level of income. You save hundreds of hours of time even if you decide to have someone pick up groceries and skip the paid chef. In fact we’d say that a full service one bedroom apartment in a central location is better than a large 3 bedroom apartment with a built in office since you would spend even more time taking care of the place. Once you free up your time you’re unlikely going to go back. The freedom and time is worth way more than you think. You’re simply used to doing chores and haven’t added up the time cost until now! 5) Go Ahead and Upgrade: Now for people who fly a lot, they know that having a straight shot flight is better than connecting flights that may be delayed. For example it is better to fly directly to Texas instead of doing a stop in Atlanta on the way to Texas from the North East even if it is in business class. Now that we’ve killed off the “exception to the rule” person, you should feel completely comfortable upgrading all of your flights to business class. There will be exceptions as always 1) if a flight is outrageously expensive, 2) there are no seats or 3) time constraints. That said, you should go ahead and start using more discretionary spending for a better flying environment. It is not unreasonable to assume that you’ll fly around 200,000 miles in a year. Even if you’re completely out of your

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Wall Street Playboys, LLC career and work online, you end up bouncing around living in various countries for fun and to prevent boredom. This doesn’t make a dent in your finances unless you’re going out of your way to fly business/first class at all times. Realistically, you’ll fly quite a bit in economy class/economy plus due to last second bookings and flight timing. As a note, if you end up flying around 100,000 miles per year, you probably want to stick with a single airline. This will give you some extra benefits (flying with a family member or girlfriend for example). If you move into the 200,000 miles per year area… You can pretty much use any airline you wish. You’ll accumulate enough status/miles/points to be regarded as a high-end client at multiple airlines so consolidating won’t make a big difference. Of course it is always best to stick with a single airline but at that level of travel, you’re going to be up the ranks on multiple carriers. As a small side note, there is no point in talking about credit card rewards and ranking them. They change every 6 months or so anyway. Just try to get ones that provide cash back and after that one start churning out airlines for mileage. If you’re already rich (this arena) you don’t even bother as it’s a waste of time. On that thought, you should actually have your virtual assistant do the work! General Budget: Now that you’re rich your spending is going to vary wildly based on your personality. If you’re not rich yet, you’re still in the prior category and saving 60%+ since that’s how the math works. Once you’re rich we’ll outline a basic budget for $12,000 in spending per month below. ~40% Savings ($20,000 a month): How does this add up: Housing ($5,000); Other ($1,000); Food/Drinks ($1,500), Reinvestment ($500), Services ($1,000) and fun ($3,000) = $12,000 total… Saving around $8,000 a month despite not needing to save anymore.

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Chapter 4 – Set It and Forget It (40s) At this point, you’re basically set for life and don’t have much to worry about. As long as you’re not making outlandish moves such as risking your entire net worth on your next venture, you can sit back and see a steady increase in your net worth. Sure, when the economy is down or a particular asset class is down you may be flat to down for a year… and you’ll recover within 12-months anyway. Our guess is that you’ll be making decisions on if you want a family and what to do with your assets/net worth when you die. These decisions don’t really have a playbook as we’re unsure of your goals. If you’re going to have a family be sure to set up trust funds and a tax advantaged situation for all of your dependents. This is a huge topic that can take up an entire book by itself so you’re better off going back to your tax planner and having a professional set you up properly. The last thing you want to do is accidentally give the government 1 cent more than you should. Keep every penny between you and the people you want to inherit your empire. Since you’re rich at this point (from a net worth and income point of view), there are a lot of things you can buy that won’t hurt your future: 1) super cars/boats, 2) much larger homes well in excess of what you need, 3) exclusive property or multiple vacation homes and 4) flying private consistently. Before providing the snapshot we realize this is unlikely going to happen to the vast majority of readers. Even if someone is successful… getting over $25-50M requires a lot of luck and buying a super car worth $250K when you’ve only got $2.5-4.0M in net worth is just foolish. So we’re keeping it short but want to highlight some of the crazy stuff you can do with your money if you get up this high. 1) Super Car or Boat: At this level of wealth (we assume you’re worth $5-10M+ and are earning at least high six figures per year), you’re not going to be impacted by having a super car worth $200,000+. That said, similar to what other rich people will tell you, buying a super car ends up getting old as you realize you’re primarily buying it for the attention and to impress other people. In some rare instances, there are people who really enjoy super cars. Los Angeles and Miami are known as being car cities for example. That said, the chances are high that you’ll get tired of it and won’t end up being a car person. So if you go down this path we’d recommend leasing first. This reduces your initial upfront cost, you get a chance to try a couple of different super cars and you have a lot less regret when you return it (not forced to sell it well below original purchase price). Now onto the Boat. For this one you can probably start with a boat that duals as a rental. Spoke about this before in an earlier section. Take a look at the boat rentals in your area and there is usually a third party who will help you rent it out when you’re not using it. If you actually live near the water and will be using it frequently then start with a basic used boat. That’s an extremely broad statement for a reason as you can easily spend a million plus on a huge boat. 98

Wall Street Playboys, LLC Instead cap your spending at something around 25% of annual income (if you’re buying a boat you should be generating nearly 7-figures per year). This is a good reality check as well. If you’re generating $400K after taxes it limits you to $100,000. Even from the quick summary above, you’ve probably correctly figured out that our wealthier friends are car people and not boat people. We never really got pushed into the boat life for one reason or another but the ultra-wealthy with yachts etc. are quite common down in Miami. Our best guess is that the people who golf, ski and drive fast cars don’t overlap as much with the people who prefer water related activities (who knows the real answer as all rich people are eccentric to an extent). 2) A Huge House! This is what the classic version of *rich* looks like. When people think of a rich man/woman they envision a huge house with some special ringtone for the doorbell and a butler similar to the old TV show “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air” (see we do know some basic pop culture!). At this point in the wealth spectrum, upgrading your house is actually quite safe. Why? Well… unlike the boat or the car, the home is likely going to go up in value over a long period of time and in a worst case scenario is more likely to at least hold its value. Yes there are exceptions such as Detroit where prices came down and essentially never recovered (they are rare though). The only area where this can get dangerous is if the maintenance on the house or the cost of renovation begins to spiral out of control. If you go from living in say a $700,000 place to a $2,100,000 place, your expenses probably go up by more than 3x even though you’re home value has gone up 3x. Why? Well take a look at the list of upkeep items: 1) more cleaning due to square footage, 2) likely more yard work due to plot of land, 3) likely step up in electrical/gas bills, 4) 3x increase or more in tax bill since based on book value unless your first home never went up in value and 5) all of those extra rooms need furniture bells/whistles and of course eventual replacement of all items as well. Assuming you’ve done a good job with the first place (your original $700,000 home in this example), we’d go ahead and take the *variable* expenses and add an additional 20% for every 100% increase in home price. This creates an additional buffer room since it is unlikely that you’ll downgrade your furniture/amenities when moving to a larger place. 3) Exclusive Property and Vacation Homes: This is another area of ultra-wealth where you purchase a large property near the beach (exclusivity) or in an expensive area such as Aspen. Similar to the view on the larger home, as long as it doesn’t break the bank it shouldn’t be an issue. A good example is beach front property as the supply is factually limited to a small amount of square footage near the beach. The game you’re playing here is essentially the same, while the cost is high, the value of the asset likely remains or goes up due to exclusivity.

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Wall Street Playboys, LLC Depending on what stage of life you’re in (still interested in working hard), you probably won’t use the asset much. It is there for price appreciation and use for maybe 1 month out of the year. For what it is worth, if you’re under 45 or so it is much more common to have a “dual living situation” where you live in say New York for half the year and in Miami or Los Angeles for the other half. In this case you may not even do the exclusive large vacation home and stick with two high quality centrally located homes. 4) Flying Private Consistently: At this point, you’re simply ultra-wealthy and live in a different world. While it may be worth it to have a small allocation for a Net Jets account (travel needs dependent), it is unlikely that you will ever fly private consistently or own your own jet. If this is you, well we have no idea how you found this website or product since you’re already set for life and don’t need advice from anyone in terms of spending. Since we have no idea how the cost analysis works for purchasing a Jet (different ball game), a good way to ramp up your travel expense without being worth $100M+ is by doing the following: 1) get a NetJets account, 2) look at new startups like BlackBird who have created an “Uber for planes” and 3) consider pooling your accounts with friends to make sure all of the mileage is used up on an annual basis. The only item in here that is likely relevant is the start-up BlackBird, who knows if the company is around within a year of this book being out, but the concept is simple. Since the biggest issue with flying (short flights) is time constraints, BlackBird is an app that offers short flights for cheap. These are not luxury at all. You simply fly a small plane short distances (primarily under an hour and a half or so of flight time) and avoid long lines. We wouldn’t be surprised to see this become more common for something like Vegas to Los Angeles or within the state of Texas. So it’s something to look into (one negative note, as of this writing it seems to be more focused on California given that it is headquartered in California).

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Chapter 5 –Some Basic After Tax Income Brackets The main brackets to be aware of are really as follows on an after Tax Basis: 1) $5,000-9,000, 2) $9,001-$15,000, 3) $15,001-$30,000 and 4) $30,001+. Our guess is that you’ll fall into four different lifestyle categories. These are the main four and unless you become ultra-rich (making $100,000+ per month after taxes), you’ll more likely stay in these ball park ranges. At $5,000+ you’re barely saving money and should be investing every cent you can into yourself. Since you have to generate more income. Investing a few thousand dollars into stocks/crypto/real estate etc. doesn’t move the needle. What will move the needle for you is a step function in monthly income. At the second level you finally have “breathing room” and more likely than not are seeing exponential income growth. Lots of people get stuck in this range because they work a basic Career and get lazy. They never think about the future or diversify their income streams. This is an absolute killer and it explains why only ~3% of the population has a million dollars or so. The third section, when you’re clearing ~$20,000 a month is when you start to feel rich. There isn’t much you can’t do. If you’re smart you can essentially live the lifestyle of “well off people” but not ultra-rich. You end up being extremely happy with where you are in life. What happens next? You focus on building out large amounts of cash flow to make sure you can live like this forever. We don’t know how long it will take you but it’s 100% possible to get to a point where you’re making $240,000 per year after taxes with minimal to no work. And the fourth bracket. Realistically, we should have put something like $30,001-$50,000 a month. At this point you really need horrible habits to lose money or not be extremely rich. There isn’t much to do. For those that are in the know and have actually gotten rich, there is something about the ~$500K/year mark that results in forced savings. It just isn’t really possible to blow this type of money unless you have a drug addiction or make foolish mistakes like a lot of rappers/sports stars (again… no hate on their income, just stating facts since many go broke). Naturally, there is a “next level” to all this which is absolutely insane levels of income ($100,000+ per month after taxes while doing nothing) as an example. Remember all of the numbers in here are referring to straight spending (does not assume you are saving money). So if you’re somehow able to spend more than $100,000 a month consistently you’re living on a different planet. You’re able to look into extreme items across the board including (Yachts, private flights etc.) Again. As you can tell, we’re not in this ulra-rich range at this time. While we have definitely spent a large amount of money in a single month, on a day to day living basis, we haven’t really seen a reason to spend this type of cash consistently. We’re sure it’s possible but it doesn’t seem to be likely without some big fixed cost expenses. You can’t include mortgage payments within the calculation (since those rental properties are paying off the mortgage) and the chances of being worth around $50 million without owning your home

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Wall Street Playboys, LLC is probably close to zero percent. Anyway. It’s fun to put into an excel sheet… Seeing what you can afford… You just won’t pull the trigger (our best guess). Before moving on, if you do know ultra-wealthy people (know meaning you can call them and talk to them once and awhile… not fake stories you hear through three handshakes), you know that security and privacy *can become* a big concern. Even in the USA, ultra-rich individuals do have security concerns (kidnapping of their kids etc.). This is why the “Rich Kids of Instagram” end up being taken down swiftly (resulting in more security costs as well). If the ultra-rich person is smart about it and doesn’t run around with multiple high-end escorts & a loud Ferrari, then no one cares. We’re putting this paragraph in here to emphasize that you can become *very* rich without these issues, but if you open Pandora’s box with multiple escorts on each arm driving around in 5-6 Ferraris, you’ll eventually become a target. As usual you want to be rich not famous and the more you push on the spending pedal the more likely you open yourself up to “risk of fame”. If you end up getting to $50M+ and simply stay quiet as it builds to a billion dollars or more, you’re in great shape. And. The reality is that you’d probably be living the same life anyway. Unfortunately, no matter what we do to try and explain the above... Some guy will always barge in and say “oh I know this and that person that disproves this”. Which is fine. We have no interest in spending to a point where it commands attention (from regular people) as we’ve seen nothing good come from it. Get as rich as you like and spend as much as you like without becoming famous. This is also why rich people all hang out together. You can spend in front of each other without jealousy and on top of that, you don’t need each other. As a final attempt, you will end up doing stupid stuff when you make it (burn tens of thousands partying and doing stupid things in a single month… or six)… Just remember, the more you do this… the more regular people you will attract. Once you’re famous and public it isn’t something you can take back. You’ll probably love your life without the fame anyway. Some Suggestions: As usual every person is different so we’re going to outline our own general rank order for spending. Since the prior few pages probably put absolute disgust on the faces of anyone who is a socialist… We can start from the bottom and work up. Luckily, growing up closer to the bottom has its perks as your baseline standard of living needs is quite low (can slowly ratchet up by enjoying every single new upgrade more than a person who already had the same things since age five) Our general value proposition is as follows: 1) health, 2) convenience/privacy, 3) comfort, 4) flexibility and 5) space. The above assumes that quality is created equal. And. If you look at the rank order assuming the quality of everything is the same, we’d move in that order. This helps explain why we’d prefer a high quality one bedroom apartment over a larger home in the suburbs if it takes 1-2 hours to get to the airport.

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Wall Street Playboys, LLC Ten Step Process to Maximizing Your Spending STEP 1

At the bottom of the totem pole you're simply looking for ways to invest into yourself. All you really need to focus on is: 1) healthy food/health insurance, 2) a place to sleep and 3) every cent going into something that increases your earnings potential. If it doesn't relate to any of those items, you can probably skip it

STEP 2

At the second step we assume you've got a normal cash flow (general comment), this means you should then look to save time. Unless you're investing in yourself, you should be reducing all your wasted time to practically nothing. This usually means moving to central locations and outsourcing as many chores as possible

STEP 3

Moving onto some discretionary items, you should now live in your own place. That's probably the biggest step function you will get in terms of your social life. Living alone allows you to think better and it also reduces "lost time" that is spent talking to people you live with.

STEP 4

In this arena, since you live alone in a central location you want to focus on upgrading your contacts. This means it's time to upgrade your gym, your social circle and the places you go out to. You should be going out on a weekly basis to nice places (not just random lower quality bars and clubs). Upgrade wardrobe here.

STEP 5

Now that you've got a decent set up in your city, we'd then look to expand to multiple other cities. Ramping up traveling and forcing yourself to become integrated in multiple cities. This pays off down the line. If you've only stayed in a single city the connections you make are too concentrated into one location. Travel goes up a lot.

STEP 6

Now that you can afford even more than this we would then ramp up every single service/health item you can. This means we think you'll be happier with zero chores and a slightly smaller place instead of upgrading to a massive place. Ideal situation is a high-end condo in the center of your city with weekly massages for example. Upgrade wardrobe here.

STEP 7

At this point you now look at upgrading to an even bigger place or if you're happy with where you are we'd go for the second city location. If you followed step five closely, you already know which city you would prefer to call your second home. So go ahead and build a second base in that city.

STEP 8

If you've got your dual living situation set up, you now enter into the luxury market if that fits your personality. High quality watch/car etc. "New Rich" is when you have tons of free time and that vacation home. As you keep going up the stack, you end up seeing various types of materialism come back at least for a decent amount of time

STEP 9

This is the private flight/insane spending category. Boats/mega houses etc. everything is good to go in this area. This will be driven by your personality and can't really be done as a recommendation as your hobbies will differ from everyone else. Just make sure you can't go broke.

STEP 10

Do whatever you want, just don't get famous. We strongly recommend against being a known rich person and if you can get to billions while being unknown you're set. Intelligently plan what you'll do when you die and make sure all of those trusts/wills/contracts are set up. Making money in business makes it possible to remain anonymous while being worth a ton!

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Sub-Section On Social Life Spending We’ve given highlights on how this scales up but it makes sense to have a sub-section on it for organizational purposes. There is no reason to start at the absolute bottom of the totem pole (not able to go out) since your entire life should be focused on improving your income streams and staying healthy. So we’ll jump into basic social life and ramp up all the way to the extreme where variance gets higher and higher. Thursday and Saturday: These are the two days we would recommend for your typical week (as mentioned in Efficiency). Friday is full of too many Happy Hour people and Thursday ensures that the people you meet are likely living in the city. Saturday is generally a solid night overall as the people who went out on Friday for Happy Hour are less likely to go out on Saturday (still a good chunk of them). Since this is your first level of spending, we’d go ahead and avoid clubs for now. There will be a large number of bars/lounges that have minimal entry fees ($5-10) or even free. It’s quite easy to keep your costs low if you avoid bottles with your group of friends and stick with either going out solo or with one other person. To keep it simple we’d just drink shots, some sort of mixed drink and sparkling water. If you end up drinking too much you can just switch to sparking water as no one is going to know it doesn’t have alcohol in it (you’re already partying anyway and likely tipsy!). While you could do what everyone else does (tons of beer/White Claw/wine), it’s easier to do the strategy we outlined in this paragraph. You end up drinking less calories, feel lighter and you can drink wine if you’re at a wine bar or if you’re going to buy a bottle for a date. Since you’re not earning a lot of money, your value is tied to your social skills and how good you can look. That’s really all there is. People talk about “game” and things like that but we’ll just stick with the phrase social skills. Look as good as you possibly can and get used to talking to people frequently. You’re going to have a lot more options later so don’t worry about it. We’ll flag that time period later on. As a side note, there are some people who prefer to throw parties with friends if they are living with roommates. As it’s somewhat cheaper and makes the connections a lot easier. For what it is worth, we’ve seen that this is actually quite annoying to keep up. Most of the guys who do this end up getting trapped into relationships far too early (in their mid-20s) and miss out on the big upside later on. We are not against this idea. We’re just pointing out that this typically occurs based on our observations. If you’ve got it engrained in your brain to avoid having kids until your early/mid-30s you’re good to go. Basic Dating Notes: Since you’re grinding away and need the money (nothing wrong with this we’ve been there before), just stick with the following: 1) bar/drinks for dates, 2) meeting people at house parties/friends and 3) going to the beach/park on a nice day with a bottle of wine. You’re young so no one is going to think you’re being cheap, it’s completely acceptable. Ramp the Restaurants and Ideal Locations: The next step up after going to normal bars and lounges is to ramp up your spending at specific restaurants and bars. The way this works? After 104

Wall Street Playboys, LLC going out for a couple years you’re going to have a set of people you hang out with that are either 1) on the same life path as you or 2) unrelated – usually girls that you consistently go out with. It’s just how it works. On that topic, we do get a lot of questions on how to get your first set of people to go out with. And…. The answer is just repetition. Realistically, if you’re going to be successful you already know a handful of people who will also be successful in the future. So that keeps it simple, you go out with one of them more often. The second group, the social group, is just from going out a lot. You’ll go and party and hook up with someone who then has a friend and for some reason you two end up becoming friends. Just how it works. As you can see from the last two paragraphs, the reason why we’re ending them with the phrase: Just how it works, is because it takes time. The only people who can verify that this is true are the same people who are going out frequently already. They have their spots they go to, they have a few restaurants where they are known and they don’t need to really plan anything for a particular weekend. Over time you probably want to have a few nice restaurants to go to. It helps you relax a bit and on top of that you can always take a date there. We’re not referring to places with massive lines and reservation lists. Instead you meet someone, tell them to meet you at the sushi bar and you eat something small and drink. Extremely common. If you’re making reservations for someone you’ve just met, something has gone terribly wrong (we’re referring to dating here). This period will last a decent amount of time assuming you’re in accumulation phase. You’re still trying to stack a decent amount of money while enjoying your life a bit more. We’re guessing you’re generating around $10,000 a month in after tax income as a baseline. As a final note, this general range also has you going to more concerts and festivals. This is quite common for the mid-20s age band. As you can see from the next sections, it doesn’t last long if you end up making a lot more money in the near future. Basic Dating Notes: You probably ratchet up your spending a decent amount: 1) sushi spot with drinks or anything small bites with drinks, 2) you can go ahead and spend on a few trips to cheaper areas – Thailand, South America, Eastern Europe and as of this current writing Canada and 3) you can ramp up the events based spending. Clubs and Travel: Now you’re doing well financially. You can ramp up your bigger activities which typically means jumping around to various clubs and bars in a single night while also traveling a lot more. Since you’ve been going out frequently for a few years, some faces have changed and some locations have changed. That said, you can now upgrade all the venues a bit and feel free to spend a lot more out in clubs versus just bars. You’re probably in your late 20s at this point. Going forward, your life turns into a smaller and smaller triangle. This means you’re going to live a life that most will believe is either fake or not attainable. You’ll go out to new cities and go there more frequently. This leads to meeting other well off people (who else has money to go out in other cities frequently on weekdays? Only other well off people). You’ll meet them when you’re Skiing, golfing, playing tennis, at a high-end gym etc.

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Wall Street Playboys, LLC It gets a bit out of hand as you end up visiting all of your friends in various cities around the USA and eventually internationally. As a note, this is a big clue that someone is well off. If his or her *close* friends are scattered all over the place and not in a single city. It is an incredibly obvious tell since the person has to have the financial means to go to these places frequently and on top of that it suggests their social life is quite good… otherwise they would be stuck within a particular bubble. On that note we do want to emphasize the importance of traveling. While you can certainly stay in a single city, it is a lot more fun when you have various people to reach out to on both a domestic and international level. Why? Well your social circle is always going to evolve. You’ll have a handful of people (around there) that actually make it and become successful with a 10+ year friendship. Those are locked in and unlikely change unless something drastic happens. The rest of the people you meet will unlikely ever reach a point where they are trusted as much as those five. So… by traveling a bit more you’re able to have more soft touch relationships. This is fantastic for your future. The number of rich people in a particular city always has an eventual cap (sure NYC, San Francisco and Los Angeles have a ton), our point is referencing your personal tastes. If you enjoy doing 7-8 activities the chances that you’ll find a good contact who also does the same stuff is actually lower. Why? You’ve been going out for years in your home city so you probably tapped out the number. If someone with similar preferences came in your acquaintance or friend would say “you should meet XYZ you’d get along” and that would be it. Much higher return by ramping up the travel to branch out more and increase your probabilities. In this income range you are doing three things: 1) your original life in the prior section, going out to dinner/bars/lounges with a small set of people, 2) traveling a ton more and 3) organizing small vacations/trips with new groups of people. As a note, at this level you begin to *see* real wealth. Why? You will now be invited to a lot of exclusive parties with other people who have tons of money. You’ll see ridiculous things. People will hire strippers/escorts to go to the parties. Lots of gold diggers all over the place as well. In addition, you’ll also experience real “flexing” where some guy might park his $250,000 car in the living room as a form of show casing. DJs are hired for these parties and of course the vast majority of the women there are under the age of 25 and tons of hard drugs are being used. If someone is over the age of 25 they are usually the wife/partner of someone else in the room already. If you continue to travel a lot and again (are at least a millionaire) you’ll also go to Yacht parties and other similarly outrageous events. The above sounds fake and out of a movie but if you’re a millionaire (around this range) you’re aware of these events and will end up at several of them (again this assumes you are decently attractive and have solid social skills). The people who are not aware are usually out at these strange “black and white” ball events with other people who have weaker social skills. We’re sure we just offended a lot of well off people with the prior sentence… But… Again… It is just an observation we’ve made.

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Wall Street Playboys, LLC As a secondary fun note, we’re convinced that “Art Imitates Life”. For those that are aware of the saying it means that life is much crazier than the stuff you see in movies and in pictures. Basic Dating Notes: At this point you’re going to be dating some Gold Diggers. We still get great enjoyment from people with no gold worrying about Gold Diggers (no one looks for aluminum foil). Since it will be obvious from the way you live, you’ll group the girls you’re dating into two categories: 1) Gold Diggers and 2) Non-Gold Diggers. After the Gold Digger attempts to become more expensive on you, you’ll just find a different girl. People like to say they won’t do this but just like the bender you’ll go on when you get rich, you’ll mess around with Gold Diggers, strippers, escorts and all kinds of people with a “price tag”. Eventually, you’ll come to have no problems with Gold Diggers at all, you just won’t make dumb decisions around them. Entering Wealthy Status: Now you’re officially wealthy. If this is the case, you’re flying business/first and throwing events more often. Instead of everyone going to dinner/bars/clubs, you’re going to the golf course, skiing, live sports events or… the same old dinner/bars/clubs! This is realistic as there is a limit to how much you can do on a weekly basis. If you spent the last 10 days golfing and skiing, you’re not going to be interested in doing it again for another 10 days straight. Small changes are made. Instead of going to dinner you probably get one of the private rooms. Instead of staying at a high-end hotel you upgrade to a suite or rent a larger luxury place. Instead of inviting a date to watch the game at the sushi place you just give her one of your tickets (season pass) and go to the game…. doing the exact same thing (except live). Instead of a weekend ski trip you might fly over to Iceland for a weekend of partying. The options in this category become a bit absurd. You’re likely living in two cities (two homes) and are officially unable to relate to the regular person unless you go out of your way to remain integrated. In this wealth range donations become quite common as well. You can donate to organizations you trust (going to fund raisers that cost $1,500 per plate) and more. The last item that becomes more commonplace if you are this rich is Art. Lots of wealthy people become more integrated into the Art scene. Extreme living, donations and Art are quite common for one, two and three on the list for the ultra-rich. Notes Before the Complaints and Naysayers Get a Chance  “It Didn’t Work” – Usually this complaint comes from people who have recently just made it. If you just made it, it only takes about a year to ramp up your social life. Quick math. If you area actually well off, you can easily talk to three girls per day. This is over 1,000 per year. If you talk to 1,000 people and don’t have any interest that’s simply a personality/looks issue you have to solve. 5% is extremely low and that would be 50 dates in a single year. Honestly, talking to three people is not even hard so you could really try and ramp that number up to ten… At that point you’re talking about 3,650 people every year? If your dating life isn’t jam packed with that many people (outrageous number of people to talk to), you have to find someone else to help 107

Wall Street Playboys, LLC  “Spending to Make Up for Deficiency” – The second complaint is still mind boggling. There are TONS of rich people who are absolutely owned by their wives/girlfriends since they don’t have good social skills. We still can’t believe how many people are in this situation. For that group, we’d say the following “SPEND LESS”. You have to learn how to meet attractive people without spending a ton of money. By spending tons and tons with no results you’re basically trying to offset your weak social skills with more money. A terrible idea. Fix your looks, fix your outfits, fix your fitness and find the right place where you get the best reaction. Social skills need to improve if you’re actually well off and still shoot blanks  “The Circles Become Small” – the reason why most people won’t believe anything in this social section is that they never lived it and never achieved much. That’s the reality from a math perspective. Making $250K+ post tax money puts you around the top 1% in earnings (implies gross income just over top 1% - or close enough). The difference? As mentioned in the first and second bullet most guys are simply poor socially and never figure it out. So they spend and spend thinking it’ll fix their social problems when it won’t. This leads to smaller and smaller groups that all hang out together and know one another. When the groups eventually collide they all get along to some extent since they realize they can have more fun by filtering out all the strange people from the fun ones  “It Won’t Be Linear” – All improvement that is good is non-linear. Lots of nothing then suddenly a big jump. So you might be doing well in terms of social skills and not so good on the money side. You know where to focus your energy. Similarly, you might even jump spending categories if you have an exit, say making $150K a year but sell a company for $2-4 million. This means you have to try even harder to make up for where you lack so your new social sphere matches your skills.  “It Becomes Automatic” – After a while it becomes so second nature you forget about all the people you met. It becomes a bad dream (similar to when you were broke and then made it). At this point you end up like our blog… You get tired of answering these questions that just feel childish. We can’t explain it until it becomes second nature. We understand that everyone has a different learning curve but if someone really can’t fix their social skills after 2-3 years? That’s something we don’t even want to try and fix… so we avoid answering these questions in the first place. We can only really help people within 2 standard deviations. If someone is really on one extreme edge making it nearly impossible to improve, we really doubt we’re the right people to ask anyway While the five bullets above were painful to write we really doubt this will apply to 95% of the readers here. If you’re actually trying to improve your social life when you get rich it is practically impossible to fail. We’ve seen several people with incredibly poor social skills do well. It just takes a few months to a year (max)… Then you’ll get bored of it like us. Bored meaning you won’t want to explain the same concepts over and over again since they are second nature to you.

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Conclusion

In a strange change of tune, one of the messages we’d actually leave you with when it comes to spending is this “You will make mistakes… a lot of them”. Unless you plan on living an incredibly dull life, you’re going to make some purchases you regret later. There is nothing wrong with this, it is simply something you should be prepared for mentally. If you’re a successful person, you probably set high standards for yourself and beat yourself up over bad decisions. If you didn’t? You wouldn’t be successful in the first place. So… Expect to make some crazy purchases and bad decisions when it comes to your social life as well. If you find that you’re going down the wrong path, hit the escape button immediately and cut your losses. Don’t marry the stripper. Don’t buy another super car (lease instead if you want to “give it another try”). Don’t get addicted to hard drugs. Some of you may be laughing at those three things but we’ve seen them happen and as you can imagine it does not end well. The second message… You’re not going to regret spending money on the following items: 1) your health – blood work, skin care etc., 2) your physical fitness – nice gyms, massages etc., 3) reduction in your commute/free time, 4) experiences that are once in a lifetime in nature and 5) anything that appreciates in value. The fifth part is really a reference to housing and the importance of buying the first downturn you can. You only need to nail that one once and you’re good to go for the next 20-30 years. The last message we’d like to make is related to your own personal life. This book was about spending and how to maximize your own personal utility. After all, you didn’t get rich to live in a hut for the rest of your life. You could always become a monk and move to the mountains if you wanted to go down that path. What’s the last message? Spending any amount of money to help your friends and family will never lead to regret. Under a couple of huge assumptions. You must assume you never see it again and you must make sure the money goes to something of real value. Buying your sister a fancier car isn’t really a good example. Buying your sister her first car because she needs it to get to work and can’t afford one right now is a great example. Anything that helps a person recover from illness/pain is also extremely rewarding. In terms of the impact you’ll make it’s no different than the outline: 1) health, 2) decrease in stress/increase in free time and 3) experience based items. If you go down the path of buying people fancy items consistently it either leads to 1) bitterness if the other person is not successful in life or 2) dependence on your charity which is also bad. A good example we would recommend spending on is additional training. If you have a friend or family member you’ve known for years and they want to go into software coding for some reason, feel free to pay for that education. Additional training in a skill that is of value is a good balance between being generous and them being forced to perform and appreciate your generosity. Oddly enough, you will also hit a “spending cap”. What this means is that you’ll have a hard time spending more than $X/month unless you make crazy decisions. This number is quite different for everyone but it exists. When that day comes you’ll focus your attention on trust funds, charity and ways to leave some sort of legacy. A parting quote for those that make it “Never Work for the Same Money Twice” 109

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Thank You Note and the Future What was supposed to be a fun hobby has evolved into a writing habit. We’re generally fans of writing as it increases creativity and forces you to communicate effectively. We had no idea we’d get to this level of scale and have to say thank you to everyone who has picked up this book. Think of this product as sitting down and talking about spending over a drink that costs less than $10 (dirt cheap for NYC standards!) What are we going to do from here? Well you deserve at least a hint. First, we’ve been pretty vocal/obvious on our current beliefs surrounding crypto currencies. While many reading this will laugh and say there is no way we can “understand it”, we can only laugh back as 20-30 hours a week of free time and no monetary spending limit usually leads to rapid information consumption. So we’ll dabble on this topic more in the future. Why? Our answer has nothing to do with inflation or libertarian beliefs. Instead it is due to the people we’ve met at conferences around the world which shows us that a lot of the smartest people in the world are moving into the space. Do we know what the “answer” is over the next decade? No. Do we have near 100% conviction it will be a major game changer? Yes. It is next to impossible that all of the smartest people in technology will be wrong. Before moving on, you don’t need to care about crypto currencies to get rich (just a reminder!) Second, we’re going to try and find a structure to buying and flipping internet assets. While it has been an absolute pain finding even one internet business to flip in a year, we’ve seen some similarities spring up. It is likely possible for anyone to do the exact same mechanism and create a “blue print” to flipping them. It is really no different than a fixer upper home. If you know the cap rates and the rough costs to fix the asset, you have a good feel for the return. While unlikely as cookie cutter as a home, we think it’s possible for various types of business models. Third, big focus no longevity. As you can see we’ve tried to stress the importance of health in this product as it relates to spending. Health always comes first and this is due to experience. After having a few health set-backs, it’s a big reminder that our time on this planet is short. We’ll do additional research on anti-aging, stress and organ replacements. That last one sounds extreme but we do want to know how it works (if something terrible happens and you need blood/a transplant). These are serious matters and it doesn’t feel good to know that we’d be searching for answers while simultaneously in a bad spot. Fourth, mental health research is another big one we’re focused on. It’s so big we’re separating it out from the prior section on health. This is something to learn about as we’ve noticed that panic attacks and lack of emotional maturity seems to be prevalent in the United States. We’re going to look into the topic for quite a bit of time to come up with real answers/solutions. Fifth, stress reduction techniques. At this point we’re interested in reducing stress levels across the board. In fact, we’ve even noticed an immediate change in skin tone/quality based on stress alone. Stress has been linked to not just grey/white hairs but to eczema/psoriasis and several other annoying problems. Stress is also related to inflammation which is also quite bad for you. In fact, sugar is also linked to inflammation which explains why it is quite bad for you.

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Wall Street Playboys, LLC Sixth, long term physical flexibility. Yes we are serious about this. We haven’t found many good resources for maintaining flexibility as one gets older. Sure you can do basic yoga classes and things like that but it really isn’t structured. The entire weightlifting industry has become oversaturated (since that is where all the money is) and flexibility isn’t something “men” take seriously. It’s all about seeming as tough/hard as possible but your body becomes less mobile and we want to reduce this as much as possible. Seventh, big focus on taxes. At this point, we have to really take this a lot more seriously. As more of your income moves online (assuming you followed Efficiency) you get to open up a lot of different tax avenues. Also. Dividends, capital gains and rental income have different tax rules associated with them. We’re going to spend a good amount of time doing our own research on this topic. Eighth, reduce our time spent on hobbies. We’re not referring to the blog in this case (we’ve got the right amount of effort there at 1x a week or so). Over the past couple of years we had an exit that caused us to get lazy. Lazy in terms of making money. We’re going to try and press for the next couple of years as our free time has turned into a bit of boredom. While we realize these are “rich people problems” imagine being on summer vacation as a kid for a couple years. You definitely want to do something new and that’s what we’re going to do. One of our projects failed and we think it’s partially due to this laziness “on the beach” attitude. Ninth, meditation training. Since we know we’ll be ramping up the stress levels (purposefully) we’re going to ramp up meditation training as well. This will result in better control over our thoughts and improved performance (at least this is what geniuses on Twitter tell us). All jokes aside, it does work and we want to maximize the impact of meditation. Tenth, finding the right places to donate money. Our close friends have complained privately about our lack of interest in donations. When multiple people (who you’ve known for 20+ years) say the same thing, it’s usually a problem. So we’ll figure out why they are so interested in it and find the right way to distribute excess money every year. To close it out, we have talked about a few topics in here that we will not expand upon in our Q&As. Luckily, we gave out the “formula” for the grey area performance enhancers and on top of that can’t give a formula for the physical portion (need a private professional doctor). We hope everyone reading this become rich, a real possibility given that we cater to a small subset of the population. We’ve probably grown a bit over confident on this given the high number of success stories we’ve seen. That said, we really believe it. If you found this blog and actually try as hard as you can on the things we mention, it’s pretty difficult to fail. The ones who do fail, usually work “50 hours a week” between ages 22-27 and complain that they didn’t succeed (of course this would never work!). You have to pay the price up front and reap the rewards 10 years down the line. As always, the guy who is rich and is only 30 years old isn’t rich because of what he did yesterday. He is rich because of what he did 10 years ago.

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Appendix 1 - Happiness is Utilitarianism – Our Stoic Framework

In economic theory we learn that every single one of us is trying to maximize our “Utility”. Utility is defined in various ways however, the underlying concept for utility is that we as humans do whatever it takes to maximize our utility. This could be in the form of happiness gained from having more money, a family, good health etc. Since we’ve focused primarily on income for the past few posts lets look at how to maximize your lifetime utility. Our Framework for Utilitarianism First Pillar – Health & Energy: This is the first pillar to any type of *long-term* utility maximization framework. This is also extremely complex because health does not simply mean you get to walk around. If you’re 25 years old and you can barely run or bench press your own weight, your health is actually sub-par. Health means that you’re in the top 10% for your age bracket. If you’re forty years old and you can still crank out sprints, squat a large amount of weight and look significantly younger than your true age… You’re winning in this category without a doubt. Without your health you cannot help your family, your friends, your bank account or anyone else in your life that is important to you. Second Pillar – Time: If your health is in check, the next item you’re fighting is time. Time is not valued equally. We’re not talking about the ”future value of a dollar” but the future value of your time. If you’re 20 years old, we have no doubt your ability to both crank out long hours of work and party all night is sky high. Try this at 50 and it’ll be tough! No one likes to talk about this but life is also a game of time maximization or efficiency. “If you could spend $10M between the ages of 20 and 40 or if you could spend $100M between the ages of 60 and 80… which one would you choose?” We’d choose option number 1 in a heartbeat! Remember… Getting rich is easy. Getting rich young enough to enjoy it is a different story. Third Pillar – Freedom: Once your health is in check and you’ve recognized the importance of succeeding quickly, you’ll find that your freedom is the third most important item to check off. If you’re making good money and are healthy, the next “dopamine rush” will come from overall freedom. In our case, freedom is living a private life without needing to answer to anyone. For others, it may be the freedom to simply work anywhere in the world. Typically, “freedom” is earned by having a large net worth. Fourth Pillar – Your Family: Many people derive a material amount of happiness or “utility” from having a family. Two people gave up 18 years of their lives to give all of us a chance at the game of life. Not being able to pay it back or help them when they are close to their deathbeds is beyond repulsive in our opinion. Finally, if they are pulling you down, yes you should walk away. Just remember they did give you the shot in the first place so holding a grudge will not help you long-term. Fifth Pillar – Self to Self Comparisons: There is no point in comparing yourself to anyone else. That person likely has a host of largely different problems than you have. We all know the multimillionaires out there that crawl up into a ball when their wives come around… or the happy go lucky vagabond that can’t afford to pay for sushi. Comparisons to other people do not contribute anything to your utility. If you’re making the right risk adjusted decisions on a consistent basis there is no reason to worry about comparisons because you made the right decision at that *point* 112

Wall Street Playboys, LLC in time. Overall, we would take a look at the table below to get a solid understanding of how we view the Five Pillars.

Reading the Table: The chart is simplistic however it can be understood as follows: #1 Health and Energy: no matter what we do the available energy we have declines over time, knowing this you’ll want to use money as a tool to offset the energy reductions. The conclusion is to accumulate assets in your 20s and by the 30-50 time frame you’re spending more without going negative, #2 Time: No one can pay to get their time back. Each day (by definition) we’re closer to the curtain call so your time should become more valuable over the years (even Bill Gates can’t go back in time!), #3 Freedom: with correct decision makings, your amount of freedom should increase every single decade with a goal of being set sometime between 30 and 50 at minimum, #4 Family: in an ideal world this will remain as a constant positive. If you have a good relationship with your family and decide for or against having a family, the amount of utility should always be maximized because it is within your control and #5 Self Comparisons: Similar to freedom, we should all learn to only compare ourselves to our past selves. Look back a year and if you have the same beliefs, that’s not a good sign! This is a skill that will be learned over time and ideally executed upon in the 30-40 range. Reverse Engineer Utilitarianism

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Wall Street Playboys, LLC Another concept we’ve been flirting with is reverse engineering Utilitarianism. Given the number of punches that life that will throw your way, by simply avoiding the pitfalls you’ll reverse engineer utilitarianism. #1 Avoid Getting Burned Twice: This can be in the form of being burned from a business, consumer purchases or even health. Being foolish once (touching the hot stove) is acceptable, continuously touching it is not. As an example, the vast majority of our readers are aware of affiliate marketing (cloaking) and the sketchy underworld of online sales. Maybe you were fooled once by a purchase that wasn’t even pre-loaded with aggressive copy, we’ll say that’s okay…. Once. Next time, take a step back and ask “What is the person selling and can I check the claims”. If someone is selling testosterone boosters but readily takes anabolic steroids and injects exogenous testosterone… Why in the world do they have to use the steroids and TRT therapy if the product is so good? Another example would be diet pills where a proclaimed doctor is 50 pounds overweight but shells out “weight loss pills”… if they worked why is the seller overweight? So on and so forth. To avoid getting burned twice learn the lesson of what to look for next time instead of getting upset about it. Most will just get angry and upset which achieves nothing. Find the systematic approach to solve the issue instead. #2 Make Statistically Intelligent Decisions: We know. The live it up today crowd is going to say you might get hit by a bus tomorrow so you better burn through everything you got! This is simply crazy talk as most people are not going to be hit by a bus and you can reverse engineer your life expectancy as well. Instead of commuting by car (extremely dangerous proposition), try to structure your life around walking and airlines instead. By making broad intelligent decisions you’ll likely live until the average age (somewhere around 80) and you can go ahead and take risks (without risk life is boring) since you’ve structured your life around statistically bad decisions that don’t add value to your life. #3 Jump a Decade: We’ve used this trick maybe 100 times. Every 3-5 years sit down and ask “what can I do in this decade that I won’t be able to do later”. This question will bring up both small and large items such as attending a rap concert or deciding to have a family. If you find that you’ve never had a specific life experience that is eroding away (tougher to do in the future) go ahead and pencil it in for this year. You’ll reduce the amount of regrets you’ll have on your death bed some 400 fold! In addition, you can also do this on a 5 year basis as well (shorter mental jumps). #4 Look Back Three Years: Every three years take a look back and decide if you missed anything. If you do this in your 20s you’ll get a resounding no. This becomes significantly more complex as you get older since you put a large amount of time into increasing your net worth. A broad stroke look at the past three years prevents an “event gap”. If we only do this once eery 510 years it will be very easy to look back and say “I wish i didn’t take life so seriously” a common complaint amongst individuals on their deathbeds. #5 Reverse Engineer Your Happiness: The last thing we’ve added to the list is reverse engineering happiness. We’ve explained many times that it is 100% normal to be unhappy in your 20s. Most successful people are filled with intensity at age 20 as they have a lot to prove (see the chart – Pillar 5) which does not lead to consistent happiness. Happiness is earned (a mental choice)

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Wall Street Playboys, LLC and tracking your overall happiness with life (if it’s improving or not) is critical to reverse engineering long-term utility. If you’ve gone from being easily angered to only “sometimes” angered, call that a win over the course of a couple of years. Make sure this is going up every single year.

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Appendix 2 – End of the Road When you reach your financial security levels, most people ask “what next?” Instead of answering the question, which is impossible for each person, we’ll provide a sneak peek at how your actions will *likely* change. As noted this is from the perspective of a business owner and no longer from someone interested (at all) in Wall Street. In addition, we’re assuming you’re a single male. Finally, this post can also be interpreted as “how to spot someone who has made it”. 1) You Will No Longer Have an Interest in “Opinions”: A common criticism here is we delete comments from people we don’t like and mark them as spam so they never return. Why? Simple. We don’t care about the opinions of people we don’t know. When you’re set for life you think differently. This is not a forum for “discussions” (see waste of time) and should never be viewed as one. Instead of doing what most regular people do, we do the opposite… The typical person will ask 10+ people their “opinion” on a topic to make sure they make the “right move”. When you’ve already made it in life you’re not wasting your time discussing topics. You’re spending your time getting things done. This is simply because a successful person *knows how to find the right answer*. Most people don’t deserve the right to an opinion in the first place. Why? They have not succeeded in the topic they wish to speak about. Instead of polling tens, hundreds, or thousands of people to get an answer that feels right, you’ll have a clear and concise step-by-step process to finding the right person to answer the question. Instead of asking strangers or acquaintances, you’ll go through your personal process and find the right person. Once that person is found, you pay the price to obtain the answer from them and execute as they say. 2) Disconnection from People: In our prior post, explaining how money will change your life, several unsuccessful people attempted to ignore the word *temporary* when we walked through the *temporary* negative effects of money. This is because your average person is looking for an excuse to avoid getting the things they want the most (fear of failure). This disconnection will likely ebb and flow depending on your own personal state. But. For the most part, it will be *temporary* in nature as you learn to hide your wealth from society (assuming that is the path you take). It is certainly not normal to wake up on a Monday or a Saturday and not know the difference. For most, the days are clearly different as they have people to report to and deadlines to meet. Interestingly, when financially set, you’re better off creating a reason to get on a somewhat normal schedule on weekdays to create your own grounding mechanism (avoid downward drug and alcohol spiral). This will help bridge the disconnection gap a bit. The gap will always be there. But. You’ll find ways to ground yourself for a more “relatable” life style. Hint: there is a reason many rich people turn to charity work, forced human connection.

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Wall Street Playboys, LLC 3) Nothing to Talk About: Unless you’re out with friends to meet other new people, you’re not going to have much to say in one on one conversations. You’ll come off as eccentric already. Most people have many issues they want to vent about while your entire goal is finding new challenges or sources of entertainment (dopamine rush without the health impacts). You’re certainly not going to blow the lid on exactly what you’re doing so you’ll find yourself avoiding the topic everyone talks about: Work/Money. Ironically, once you have it, you don’t talk much about it during your *personal life* (again assumes you’ll be a stealth wealth person). Since you have less to talk about, your social priorities will shift quite a bit. The only way for you to be enticed to go out and have fun is if there is someone you specifically wish to meet. Otherwise, you’ll likely go out solo and have a carefree night without being interviewed for the 100th time about “What is it that you do again… exactly?”. 4) No Stress: Assuming you’ve learned the art of stoicism, you’re not going to have any stress in your life at all. Your only interest will be in maintaining your current health, which is worth more than every single cent in your bank account. If we think about stress, it usually involves negative things that could occur to you if you fail at doing something. Therefore, if you can fail at anything and still be fine… it is almost impossible to become stressed. Your only stress will be self inflicted through physical exhaustion (fitness) or product creation (mental stress). The real takeaway is that no one can apply stress to you anymore because they have no control over your life. Similar to creating forced human connections by picking up a routine that is done during the weekdays, you’ll create self inflected stress. Most will turn to the money game, trying to increase the numbers on a screen since it is the hardest game to play. There is no fun in life without a challenge. 5) Irrational Buying Behavior: You won’t think about *planning* for purchases anymore, you’ll simply look at items you want… buy them… or go through long stretches of buying nothing. If you’re earning more than you can spend the behaviors you exhibit won’t make much sense. Sometimes you’ll find yourself buying many items at once for prices that appear to be inflated (you won’t care) and other times you’ll delay purchases for long periods of time because you don’t feel like spending the time to obtain them. The key here is that planning is no longer in your vocabulary when it comes to general goods/products. You’ll learn that possessions don’t matter much to you and all of your planning will surround memorable life events (trips) that take up material blocks of time. 6) Skyrocketing Time Value: The value of your time will increase at an exponential rate, you’ll become more protective of your free time on a weekly basis. Tolerance levels also decline at the same rate. This means you’re going to quickly change priorities and where you spend your time will rapidly evolve on a monthly basis *at minimum* as you review each week and the time you used wisely or burned each day. An interesting note is your hobbies will evolve as well, for better or worse this blog will become a more sporadic hobby in the future. We haven’t seen much need to write anymore. We feel the

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Wall Street Playboys, LLC content on the blog is already enough for anyone with a high IQ and competitive drive to succeed without silly motivation or discussion. On a more positive note, we’ve officially started creating a basic product we wish we had several years ago. When our internal metrics are hit we’ll go ahead and press publish with limited “marketing” since books are not good products for money making purposes (Why? it is nonrecurring revenue). 7) Rapid Learning of Complex Topics: Since the two types of growth are essentially financial and mental, you’ll find time to dive into complex topics. Each month (or year) you’ll find a new “difficult” topic that interests you and become a quasi expert in the field. We use the word quasi as you’ll know enough about the field to have interesting questions, but you won’t have the tools necessary to solve those questions without giving up another major slug of your time. Maybe you’ll be different but every 3-6 months you’ll find the *truth* about a new topic which only makes you much more dangerous as people will be unable to lie to you easily. You’ll find yourself saying the tried and true “Wow, I don’t know anything about XXX can you tell me about it?” only to see if the person is a liar. 8) Mainstream Understanding: Instead of being part of the mainstream, you’ll understand the psychology of the mainstream. This is vastly different from being a participant as you’re simply selling your items based on mainstream philosophies while you avoid partaking in any of them. To put it more simply, the things you find fun… people will loathe and the things you loathe… you’ll sell, because its what the mainstream wants. There is nothing wrong with selling mainstream products as that is where the market is. The joke is that your own preferences never match up to the needs of your average customer. If your product works and you use it yourself… the way you sell it would unlikely ever work on yourself. 9) Stable Dopamine Levels: The largest rush you’ll ever get is when you’re free. There is no doubt about it and once you’ve gone through the temporary drug/alcohol spiral to try and chase that next high, you’ll settle into a steady emotional state. People can yell at you, they can suck up to you, they can even attempt to get physical with you… Your emotional state won’t change much. Unless your life is actually at risk you’re unlikely going to get a material adrenaline rush. This does not mean you have no emotions, it simply means you will always be stable. The highs and lows are smaller and day to day changes are quite irrelevant. Try to envision a buddhist monk and you’ll get an idea, the only difference is a slight smile to your face as you won’t require the intense mental concentration. 10) Distain for Authority: So long as you’re not breaking the actual law (sent to jail) you’re not going to have a shred of tolerance for anyone who attempts to act as an authority figure over you. In short? You’re no longer employable. An accelerated increase in your pushback to anyone telling you what to do will be seen in short order. We can’t speak for the rich men with wives who boss them around as we’ll never understand those folks, but the rest usually exhibit personality traits of a recluse. Historically, it was bad to be

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Wall Street Playboys, LLC ostracized from a tribe as it was part of basic survival. In this case, the isolation will be self inflicted as answering to someone will not be on the priority list. 11) Inability to Be Bored, Only Frustrated: Assuming you have a type B personality, you won’t find yourself being bored. You’ll go through spurts of being social and spurts of learning new topics as stated above. There are too many topics to learn about and too many places to see to possibly become bored for long stretches of time. In fact, you won’t be bored for short stretches of time The one downside, is delays in time (airplane delays, traffic etc.) will drive you nuts. Burning of your time is one of the rare items (next to health/your family) that will have any ability to impact your emotions negatively. This shows up in two ways: 1) if it is a travel delay you’ll scramble to find productive things to do… likely fail at doing something remotely and 2) if someone is wasting your time, you’ll pay the bill and leave or simply leave the conversation abruptly if there is no reason to wait. 12) No Impact from Rejections: This is a broad topic but can involve trying to sell a product to dating. When you know that you’re already set, it becomes impossible for anyone to rattle you with a “no”. If a person doesn’t want to buy your product you simply move to the next. Similarly, if you’re chatting to a girl on a date and she is negative towards you it won’t even be an after thought. Previously, most people will feel some emotion when hearing a “no” in either work or play. But. Those days are long gone and you can even take an emphatic no publicly. The event will be forgotten within 24 hours. You’ll only remember positive things from your past as the negative items won’t seem relevant anymore. Again. Forgotten instantly. 13) Decrease in Mental Circles: When you’re doing everything to climb up, your brain is “on” constantly. You’re trapped in your head for the most part trying to figure out the next move. When you’re done, it is *extremely* easy to turn this function on and off. You could have emails, phone calls, text messages and a siren going off in the background but you’ll be able to tune out all of it at a moments notice. This is critical as being trapped in your mind actually reduces work performance. Being able to shut down all thoughts as if you are at rest will allow you to learn and create at faster rates than the past. 14) Annoyance With Travel: A small topic but a dead giveaway someone is very well off financially. They absolutely hate flights that are not direct. They absolutely hate being in the airport. Finally? They also absolutely loathe specific cities and will do their best to avoid them at all cost. “To travel to love to laugh” is something younger people want to do. “To see the world”. You’ll be tired of moving around a lot and will have a few set places you will call home. 15) Everyone Knows Each Other: The triangle gets smaller and smaller on the way up. The reality is that anyone who works in the same industry as us (no, not Wall Street anymore) has

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Wall Street Playboys, LLC probably already crossed paths several times. In fact, we’d wager that if you’re in the top 1% (keeping it simple) in your industry… You’ll know every single person who is at or above your level by first name and last name basis within 6 months. Simply no chance it won’t be the case. Funny enough, when you go to events/parties… Everyone will know the same people as well. This is why it does not make sense to put your face out there unless you are willing to pay the toll of being famous. Summary Notes Below is a quick summary of what to expect and we’ll also throw in some fun nuances and see if anyone recognizes similar traits in people they know (that are financially set). – No interest in opinions, therefore will come off as a “know it all” and will generally dislike people unless prefaced with a reason to be speaking to them. – Generally disconnected from society creating a largely eccentric personality by default – Does not want to reveal much about his/her life with new people and therefore avoids all topics that most people chat about (work/stressful situations) – Appears to be largely carefree – Irrational behavior when it comes to spending habits – Difficult to get a hold of unless “sold” on the event – Interested in many new topics and continues to learn a new obscure item each year – Understands human psychology well, yet all decisions on personal basis appear to be done with cut-throat logic – Un-rattled emotionally, yet easily annoyed when treated like a “regular person” by a regular person. – Zero tolerance level for wasting of time or being told what to do (unless specifically asking an expert and likely paying for said information) – The word bored is killed from the vocabulary list – Cannot seem to understand negative feelings associated with rejection, because rejections have no impact on their lives… Clarity of thought – Speed of travel is more important than comfort of travel (will travel “in style” if it does not impact flight duration) – Seems to have the same biz contacts that remain unchanged for many years

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Appendix 3 – The Five Rigged Games in Life

There are several things you cannot control in life and most of them occur before you’re even born: 1) who your parents are, 2) your nationality, 3) your genetics and 4) the education you start with. Naturally, all four of these things have a large starting impact on your life. Being born with a billionaire parent vs. under the poverty line, dramatically changes your life. There are always ways to get out of these situations but there is no denying the truth. Being born with the “right” items out of the gate makes life significantly easier. There is good news however. Life is a rigged game so if you play the cards correctly and “hack the system” you’ll get out quite easily. Since information is a commodity anyone can get rich even if they have bad results from the big “four”. You can still get access to the internet, read for free and get rich without stepping into a classroom. In fact, we have a clear outline for $1 million dollars in 10 years and this is written in less than 10 pages. In the past, information was not equal and it was possible to lie about the truth (the truth about how making money is done) and that is largely left to the foolish. In 2018, anyone who falls for get rich quick schemes is well below the bottom quartile of the intelligence spectrum. Even if someone falls into the bottom quartile, the logic and reasoning is publicly available to be seen and proven over and over again. Maybe the hot stove is touched once… But it is unlikely to continue unless there really is a sucker born every second (based on our experience, this is still true. A sucker is born every second, likely faster!). Jokes aside, the same sucker can learn from his mistakes if he really takes the time to read. Money is the First Rigged Game The first rigged game is certainly money and there is one big trap here. The trap? The personality destruction that comes with it. You’ll find that “most” rich people are boring as rocks. They are extremely conservative and simply worked hard all day long slaving away to make money. They are so conservative they don’t even think the 4% rule works and likely live at 35% of annual passive income “just in case”. These are the same people that exhibit large amounts of passive aggressive behavior, live with quiet desperation and just don’t see money as a tool (instead they view it as their actual worth). If you avoid this trap, you can win the “money game” by simply feeding these individuals what they want to hear “that they are right”. If you have no talents at all, simply put yourself in a position to tell rich people they are smart. This will make you rich. If you do have talents, you can simply sell products that target insecurity. This is exactly why Ferrari’s and name brands exist. Since money is the *identity* of your typical rich person (he has little beyond this) selling to that identity will make you even richer than the most basic strategy of “telling them what they want to hear”. For those that are uninitiated: the typical answer for getting rich is to give people something they need. We just take it further. We already know the highest profitability lies with the rich and we also know they are insecure. So all you need to do is find a product that makes their life easier and make it seem prestigious. An obvious example would be Fiji Water. It is simply expensive water but is branded as prestigious. This is why you see them in all those high end hotels. Absolute nonsense, but a great business. The difference between a want and a need is that the “need” part cannot be ignored. Frugal people have low “need” levels because they are laser focused on cutting costs. A rich person is the exact reverse. He doesn’t have to cut costs. This leaves you with only one option, which is targeting his 121

Wall Street Playboys, LLC or her *need* for approval. Rich people are just regular people on steroids. They believe they are better than everyone else (they believe this deeply) and simply hide the fact. There is no denying the truth though. They have an absolute *need* to be seen as better than other people. Sometimes it is materialism but for the most part it is attention. Now that you know how the money game works we have given out the two most obvious ways to get rich: 1) You feed the need for attention or 2) you sell them a product that gives them more attention. That is really all there is to it. The second option takes a *LOT* more work and offers a *LOT* more financial gain. The first option is for people who really have minimal skills and just want to benefit off the hierarchy of life. Afterall, if the CEO of a multi-billion dollar company loves you, it is unlikely you’ll be fired within his firm even if you’re simply working in Human Resources handing out the paychecks. Happiness is the Second Rigged Game The second rigged game is being happy in general. From the first section you can see that there is a clear way to get rich without having any talents. Once you have this money, it does not guarantee you will be happy. Being happy is more inclusive: personal relationships, self-esteem etc. Fortunately, just like money there is a basic formula to being happy which is as follows: Don’t bother comparing yourself to anyone else and put all your effort into each day. That is really all there is. You’d think the formula would be more complex but it isn’t. The problem is that most people can’t do either one. Comparing yourself to others is encouraged by practically everyone. You’ll get passive aggressive comments suggesting someone who is your age or younger is already more successful. You’ll get passive aggressive comments about being less important or “inferior” to older people as well. It is interesting because people who exhibit this behavior are not happy otherwise they wouldn’t waste their time with the comments in the first place! If someone is both happy and rich they don’t even bother, they are more interested in having a good day. The second one is more psychological. Once you’re set financially, you may go through the classic drug and alcohol addiction cycle as becoming financially independent is the hardest hurdle to jump through in the game of life. After this you’ll find a balance in the stress spectrum. At the lowest end, if you do nothing, you’ll get bored. Flat out bored. On the other end, if you try to do too much, you’ll be stressed out again and defeat the purpose of beating the “money game” in the first place. We’ll leave it up to the reader on how to adjust when they get there, but we’ve found that working until “tired” and calling it a day is just enough. No more long nights, no more stress. The only time the far end of the stress spectrum is acceptable is when you know it is temporary in nature. Then you balance this out with an equal amount of time of relaxation. Remember, just because those digits go up doesn’t really mean much. Sure you may upgrade from a three bedroom to a four bedroom… but it’s definitely not going to compare to the original dopamine rush of being “done”. Relationships are the Third Rigged Game Eventually, you learn human psychology. If the general framework is learned, you’ll never have a problem with relationships. Well… Never is a strong word, but you can reduce the probability by

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Wall Street Playboys, LLC a large amount (probably 90%). Relationships are no longer a topic of this blog, it hasn’t been for a couple of years since it should be figured out by late 20s (at minimum). Continuing to talk about “strategies” to meet people becomes ridiculous since you’ll end up attracting the people who like your personality if you move up the value chain enough. We haven’t met a single rich and lonely person who didn’t have some sort of personality disorder. Learning how to strategize is essentially a Bandaid on a gun shot wound. It will bleed out eventually so don’t bother. How to win this rigged game? Quite simple. Never enter into a single relationship that you don’t think will last a lifetime. That is right. As soon as you see a single character flaw you have to leave. You’re essentially front-running the inevitable (which would be a parting of ways). It may take one day to figure this out or it may take three years. It does not matter. Once you realize the relationship isn’t going to work you should leave. We’re using the word relationship broadly because you can apply it to anything: people you hire, people you date, people you are friends with etc. This makes your real relationships extremely clear cut and dry when compared to your “acquaintances”. How to manage acquaintances? Yet again change the expectations here. If you have an acquaintance for swimming, don’t expect them to be interested in your businesses or other hobbies if they are completely unrelated to his field of work. Generally, an acquaintance is someone who you have a single item in common with. There is no reason to expect more out of someone who only have one overlapping interest. This also allows acquaintances to come and go throughout your life without doing any sort of damage to your personal life. Yes it is terrible when your golf buddy leaves and you’re forced to find someone else but it’s not the end of the world. Sure beats hiring the same guy to your company for a role he wouldn’t succeed in and leaving on a negative note. The last item: believe in incentives. No matter what, people are animals. If they are incentivized to do something and it increases over time… Don’t be surprised when it happens. This means you should not be surprised to see your closest relationships (not acquaintances) turn sour if they are put into a situation where they are incentivized to act poorly. People are capable of accomplishing practically anything. That said, it would be wise to incentivize them to align with your interests. Before asking for something, make sure everything is aligned otherwise you’ll be sorely disappointed long-term. This is naturally more of an art than science since everyone does favors here and there. The “tit-for-tat” is mentally noted no matter how close the person is. Momentum is the Fourth Rigged Game Physics applies to everything: Objects in motion stay in motion. Once you’ve established yourself, the key is simply moving in the “right direction”. We constantly laugh when people believe they will “officially retire”. Anyone who makes it to a few million dollars early in life, is ideally smart enough to realize he will get bored doing nothing. The key is simply maintaining “momentum”. This is a massively rigged game. If you have $5 million dollars, with just 4% return you’re looking at $200,000. This means your “money momentum” only requires you to spend under $200,000. Many people assume this means you should spend $200,000… That couldn’t be more wrong. What this means is that your CASH FLOW is what determines what you spend in a year. We’ve said this many times but it continues to get mis-interpreted. Cash flow is more important than net

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Wall Street Playboys, LLC worth because it determines your long-term net worth. Your net worth is going to go up and down a ton every single day. Anyone who is actually rich knows this and does not worry about the fluctuating digits in the air. If you have $5M and the portfolio tanks 10%… There is practically no way to offset this since that is a $500,000 decline in a single day. Instead you should look at your quarterly cash flows and decide if it was net positive or net negative. That is all that matters. If your cash flow coming in is always well above your cash spend you’re not going to go broke. Once this capital machine is up and running you’ll realize why rich people don’t “know” what they are worth. But they certainly know exactly how much cash flow came in last month or last quarter. If the passive income drops to say $100,000 for a year… It still isn’t a big deal. You simply hold onto those investments, spend under the total annual income for the year. No change. (Total annual income would be $100K + cash flow from your business). It bears repeating. Once the nest egg is made, the momentum game is yours to screw up! Practically impossible for any intelligent individual. Importance is the Fifth Rigged Game The final rigged game is this desire to be seen as important. Once we realize we’re just a spec on the earth and no one cares if we stay or leave, the ego takes a big step back. Attention is natural as humans do want interactions. That said, keep this level as low as possible. Much better to let people believe they are smarter than you and better than you unless there is a clear reason to show your cards. We’ve seen nothing but negative ramifications from being an attention monkey. Attention is certainly a way to make money… that said you don’t need the money anyway… so why bother? Just an ego stroke. Once basic way to avoid this pitfall is by avoiding brand names for as long as humanly possible. Since it is all but guaranteed you purchase a few fancy items in the future, limiting these items is key. There is a line between “doing this for me” and “doing this to impress others”. The second item in quotes always ends in tears. Conclusion: These are the five rigged games. We’ve been blogging for about 6 years and yet we still get mis-interpretations of all of them. This is likely because there is too much marketing out there. While this is a publicly available article… We’re still going to invest heavily in brands (targeting insecurity), fast food (terrible for health) and insurances (related to fear, similar to those stock market going to zero articles). While we don’t believe in them ourselves, it doesn’t mean that they will fail. In fact, it means they will succeed since 99% won’t get through the first step! This is all good news for anyone reading this, they know exactly how to play the game… They know that people won’t change and therefore… they know how to take advantage of this rigged game.

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Appendix 4 – Random Bullets Related to Spending/Lifestyle

Below is list of things we’ve noticed in no order. We figured we missed some key items that may have gotten lost and this should fill in any small holes. 

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Homes are generally the best balance between materialism and positive reactions. Since a high quality home is unlikely going to decline severely in value you can “flex” a bit without having any worries about declines in value. Also. We’ve noticed it’s by far the best display of status/wealth. The one downside is that someone has to see it naturally. You’re going to make a fool of yourself if you try to show people photos as a crutch for social skills. Much better to take someone there and not mention it and you’ll see how quickly they change their body language You are on the right track in terms of style when you get positive complements from women. This is step one and actually scales up. The first one is just basic eye contact and the last one is when the girl quite literally looks at you head to toe. They do the same thing that guys do to attractive women. If you’ve never had this done in a positive way you’re still not at peak “style” for your looks. As a note, clear exceptions are people who look absolutely crazy (dressed like a whacko at a sports event for example) this is not the look you’re striving for Another fun one is the suit example. Some guys cannot pull this look off, we’re not sure why. That said a ton of you will be able to pull it off. So in rank order of reactions: 1) well-fitted suit, 2) well-fitted suit with tie and 3) well fitted suit with pocket square. If you want to push to the very end, well fitted suit with pocket square and high-end watch is the end of the game. You can do the square + tie but it doesn’t change the reaction that much, essentially the same as just a square and watch Cufflinks do get attention. The problem? They need to either be 1) entertaining or 2) extremely high quality that they are noticeable. We used to believe that they didn’t get noticed at all. That assumption turned out to be totally wrong. “Entertaining” is going to depend on the event you’re at and isn’t something we can really teach. Just think about the people who will be there and the right type of cufflink that will resonate with them, an obvious example would be a golden tennis racket cufflink if you’re going to an event where a ton of people play tennis Tie pins seem to be useless. They simply fall or are not really seen as interesting. Not sure why. Once in a great while someone will notice it. But. The cost of having a bunch of them is probably not worth it Despite all the items above focused on suits and fit, the colors you choose will outweigh the brands you have as an initial impression. It just looks horrible if you try to use high-end brands but the colors are clashing and you look like you’re “trying hard”. Don’t do this Cars are a solid status symbol but we haven’t seen enough to justify upgrading from Uber Black. Once you’ve moved from Uber to Uber Black, anyone you’re riding with will appreciate the higher quality car. As noted, we don’t have a ton of experience and really note that there is an upgrade when you use Uber Black instead of regular Uber X rides Spas are one of the best date ideas no one does. This is probably because most guys aren’t able to figure out the dating game (rather sad). Most underutilized date in human history None of the fashion advice above works if you’re out of shape. Buying custom suits when off the rack items fit you perfectly is a waste of money. Why? Well if your body fits to off the rack clothing it means you’re not really in shape at all. Clothing is made to fit average people and you shouldn’t be average relative to your height

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Any high quality restaurant with a bar area is probably the best place to spend your time. You can take dates there without having any sort of awkward pauses as the environment is noisy and it’s a lot easier to make sure you get a seat Having the staff know who you are adds something like 100x to your ability to gain interest from anyone new you bring. This is a clear signal since you’re taking someone to a high quality place yet they now know it’s a normal occurrence for you If you’re buying something that just doesn’t mesh with your personality… Don’t buy it. To take it to an extreme, if you’re more introverted you probably don’t want to wear loud clothing such as hot pink or neon even if those colors somehow look good on you. It kills your image and sets alarms off Assume you will be damaging the clothing you’re going out in. This is a good way to gut check yourself. If you’re buying something and would be furious if alcohol spills on it or it gets ruined within a few wears… It’s out of your price band A great “status symbol” is free time. So if you are smart, you’ll find ways to schedule dates/meetings when most people can’t even go out. This means you’ll be going out on weekdays a lot more than normal As soon as you can afford champagne for drinks you’re set. You can go down the rabbit hole of extreme levels of high-end alcohol (wines, hard liquor etc.) but this is a never ending pit. Just stick with high quality items that people are aware of and avoid this whole battle entirely Skip the nuts. Seriously. When you travel a lot in business class and get free nuts at nicer restaurants just tell them you’re not interested. These things never make you feel full and you’ll actually gain weight by eating them every day. It takes about 6 months but you’ll step on a scale and suddenly be heavier! Unbelievable. Nuts are terrible for maintaining your weight… Best to avoid the fiasco entirely Sparkling water will taste better over time. Drink them more on flights and you’ll convert If you are not meeting people when you’re sober, it means your social skills are weak and you shouldn’t be focused on spending (items in this book). If you’re already meeting people randomly during the day, your social skills are likely solid and you’ll end up benefitting a ton from the higher spending. We’ve found that this is a good test for social skills. Meeting people while completely sober during the day If your spending is going up but you’re not getting the results you want. You *probably* need to spend less and figure out what is going wrong with your social interactions Over time you will get bored (mentioned earlier) and will be able to predict a particular night with extreme accuracy. People read this and think it’s sad but it isn’t. Boring and predictable can also be relaxing Don’t bother with “tit for tat”. If you spend money, assume it generates no value in the future. This is the safest assumption. Also this forces you to really think about how much you’re allowing yourself to spend in a month. If you don’t care… Then you’re certainly not over spending If you go to a third world country you are showing status without knowing it. Women will notice mixed drinks vs. beer. They will notice the quality difference in the alcohol you buy. They will even notice your shoes are clean and high-end. Many think the women are just nicer… No… They just know you’re richer and you’re flashing it without knowing Be prepared for significant changes in reactions when you get rich (assumes you have good social skills). Many people will come out of the woodwork and suddenly people are “nicer”

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