Being Rich Is Expensive

Being rich is expensive. And I hear a lot of people on this app talk about lifestyle inflation. Like before, when you used to drive a beater that was paid off and you had no car payment, but then you got a nice fancy job and then you got your Benz and now you have a $1,000 car payment. That is not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about the amount of money that I have to spend to be able to work, to be able to sustain my high income. So if we look back, you know, four or five years ago, when my business was just getting off the ground and I was not making a ton of money, and I also probably wasn't working as much as I'm working now, I had the time to cook breakfast every single day and lunch and dinner every single day. I had the ability to not work weekends and not work nights. Like my schedule is less demanding, right? But then it got to a point where the business blew up. And now I'm working a substantially more demanding job than I was just years prior. And that looks like I now need a live-in nanny. I need childcare because I have to be able to go run into the office during second shift if something goes amiss. Like I have to have systems in place that allow me to fulfill my role as the CEO of my business. And that has required things like landscapers. So when I have eight hours on the weekend that I can spend, I want to spend it with my family, not doing the yard. Or having a meal prep service so I'm not just eating junk food every single day because I'm not taking the time, again, to meal prep. And these things, like I feel like when you talk about them without talking about context, without sharing the full context, it looks like lifestyle inflation. Like me talking about landscapers or housekeeper or a live-in nanny sounds like these luxury expenses and they sound like lifestyle inflation. However, I've been the crazy person in spreadsheets doing the math being like, hey, it costs me more money to spend an hour cooking dinner than it does to hire a meal prep service. Or it costs me more money to spend two hours every single weekend doing my yard than if I spent that two hours at work. Because at a certain point, your income and your time is worth so much money that it becomes cheaper to out offload and outsource as much as you can. But it's still just more expensive than my life prior. And so, yeah, I just feel like when you're in that 250,000 to like 600,000 range, like it's just really expensive to be a high earner. Especially as a woman where there's so much of those domestic tasks and child rearing and things that just like fall on your shoulders, like just by society's expectations and how historically women have been in marriages and in motherhood. But yes, I kind of have this phase now where I'm hoping that I can just find a little bit more balance and work less, but we'll see. I have big income goals. My goal is to get my income to 600,000 this year.