Once you have money, spend it on the things that improve how you look, feel, sleep, use your time and learn, rather than on the fast car, the chain or the mansion you were told to want. It opens by saying you were lied to: the fast car, the diamond chain and the mansion are marketing campaigns built to separate you from hard-earned money, and chasing them puts you back to broke quickly.
What follows are 15 upgrades the video says will take your life to the next level, plus a bonus about buying yourself a new life.
Watch the full video here, or skip to the breakdown below.
The 15 upgrades at a glance
- Your face (0:25)
- Your physical strength (1:39)
- Your bed: mattress, pillows, linens (3:20)
- Your food (4:41)
- Convenience (5:37)
- Your location (7:10)
- Your schedule (7:55)
- House cleaning and subscriptions for essentials (8:46)
- Time with your family (9:41)
- Your teachers (10:31)
- Your stories and adventures (12:16)
- Your charity work (13:40)
- Your wardrobe
- Your subscriptions (15:37)
- Upgrade your life by downgrading your taxes (16:28)
- Bonus: a new life
1. Your face
Fix whatever you dislike and feel is holding you back: the hair mole, crooked teeth, a crooked nose, your eyesight with laser surgery, patches on your skin. Put money behind looking healthy and rested with clean skin.
Your face is how you connect with people every day, and confidence shoots up once you stop carrying that insecurity. A report from IZA World of Labor saying good-looking people earn 15% more and are hired and promoted faster, so veneers pay for themselves. The warning: go easy on the botox.
2. Your physical strength
The face is the easiest fix because the change is quick. Strength takes longer, but the healthier you are, the more enjoyable money becomes. Hire a trainer, pay in advance and say you want a transformation, so someone clears the chaos and keeps you accountable.
Once results show, you get hooked, and your schedule finds the time. Remove friction by picking the gym closest to home and ordering your gear once. Saunas also help with back pain, and one session a week is linked to a 27% lower risk of a cardiovascular death, and that four sessions a week cut the risk of heart failure by almost half.
3. Your bed: mattress, pillows, linens
Growing up poor, you do not realise how bad your sleep setup is. If you never wake fully rested or struggle to reach deep sleep, the bed is the likely culprit. Poor people overpay for cars and TVs, while rich people overpay for mattresses and pillows.
Take the number you think is fine for a mattress, triple it and see what you find. You spend a third of your life in bed. For pillows, the best the team found was an IKEA model costing a fraction of the rest, and for linens, Egyptian cotton with a thread count above 500.
The team says it now feels less rested in luxury hotels than at home.
4. Your food
During the grind most people go through what the script calls their ramen years: you eat only to be fed and add ketchup and hot sauce to make it bearable.
Money changes how you see food. It becomes fuel, and what you eat can add an extra hour of work, focus or training to your day. The goal is higher quality and lower quantity. Poor people eat volume, which is why a bucket of fried chicken has 30 wings while fancy restaurants serve tiny portions.
Eat either for nourishment or for the experience.
5. Convenience
The only thing that beats free is fast. Walking is free, yet people grab a ride, and tap water is free, yet people buy a bottle in front of the store. Money buys convenience: services that you once travelled to now come to you.
Flying private is the extreme case. You pick when the plane leaves, a car drops you at the plane, and there are no lines because security already has your information. If that is out of reach, passes exist that let you skip airport security.
Life is too short to stand in line.
6. Your location
Where you live may be the most important decision you make. It influences who you marry, the script says, who your friends are, what you do for fun and even your political and religious beliefs.
The closer you are to the money, the more money you make. If you started at the bottom, you know it is not a nice place to live, with little going on and a commute to anything worth seeing. Living close to your workplace also gives you time for the things that push you further.
7. Your schedule
Your goal becomes clearing your calendar. You go from saying yes to everything to saying no to most things, and the less you have to do, the more you enjoy what you want to do. Creativity comes from that space, not from carrying rocks up the mountain like Sisyphus every day.
Outsource what you can. People will want your time once you have money, so keep an open calendar but stay too busy for coffee with people who give no serious reason for it.
8. House cleaning and subscriptions for essentials
Outsource the trivial tasks. A cleaner frees time to think about your next steps, and you can still keep the chores you enjoy, such as walking the dog.
Set your bills to autopay as well. The team has recurring payments set up for almost every invoice and checks them once or twice a year. They also send a portion of income automatically into an S&P 500 fund, so dollar-cost averaging runs on autopilot.
9. Time with your family
Family time changes once you have some money. Your parents or siblings do not need fancy gifts, but they may need help with a mortgage. Paying it off and telling them you love them removes financial stress and, in the team’s experience, earns more respect.
When travelling with family, the team lets them pay their own flights and expenses but covers the accommodation, so the experience stays high quality and nobody feels like a leech. It is easy to drift apart when life is busy, so nurture these relationships.
10. Your teachers
You never stop learning, you just upgrade your teachers. The people you learn from get more niche, with deeper insight, and you use their input to get more done in less time. Such people are expensive: an executive coach can cost several thousand dollars a month for an hour on a video call.
The same shift that Airbnb brought to luxury homes is happening to self-development, and presents the Alux app as a high-performance coach in your pocket, with daily guided sessions and new expert learning collections every month.
The point is to seek out experts who know what you need to do next.
11. Your stories and adventures
You become the most interesting person in the room by living a life worth telling others about. Travel, try things, get into adventures, focus on the trip rather than the destination, and be a traveller instead of a tourist.
Your bucket list has a clock on it. Spending on experiences makes you richer, it says: the more you experience, the more you learn who you are, and your stories inspire people. Fly to the other side of the planet and take a train from coast to coast, and you will have at least one story to tell.
Money buys freedom, so use that freedom for your own growth.
12. Your charity work
The video measures success by the positive impact you have on the world. Anyone reinvesting everything into a business and giving little away needs to change that, the script says, and that you will see a return on the investment.
Its claim is that the universe gives more to those who give it away, and that each time the team upgraded its giving, a new level of wealth and opportunity followed. It frames giving in percentages: half of one month’s salary is 4.16% of a year’s income.
13. Your wardrobe
Before ordering overpriced sneakers, think quality over quantity and timeless over trendy. That is why rich people seem to dress alike: few or no logos and high-quality fabrics.
Feeling you have nothing to wear is blamed on poor buying choices. Instead of four puffer jackets from a fast-fashion retailer, buy one trench coat that lasts 30 years. If you have no fashion sense, search for a capsule wardrobe and start there.
14. Your subscriptions
For years you were subscribed to a handful of things. Now you can pay for what you used to pull from the internet and stay up to date on everything.
More interesting are the communities behind paywalls: a golf club, a gentlemen’s club, fishing, racing fast cars. Membership puts you in a group passionate about the same thing, and the script calls it a cheat code for adults who sacrificed their social life to build a fortune and now find it hard to make friends.
15. Upgrade your life by downgrading your taxes
To be free is to move freely and do what you want, yet the more you earn, the more some governments ask of you. That is when people look into offshore banking and investments, incorporate in Belize or the British Virgin Islands, or buy a second home in Dubai and rent it out.
Money, in the script’s view, lets you enjoy money more, and it would be a shame to waste that ability.
Bonus: a new life
Some people have made the money and still feel life is shallow. Everything above, taken together, lets you buy yourself a new life: reinvent your identity, make new friends and start over.
That, it says, is one of life’s greatest luxuries. The team spent its first adult decade solving the money equation and might now try writing, speaking, a charitable foundation or art. Once the money exists, you have options, and everyone else lives one life while you can live several.
Spend where it compounds
The thread through the list is that money is best spent on things that make you healthier, more rested, less busy and better taught. Those upgrades feed everything else, from your confidence to the time you have left to enjoy what you earn.
One question is left: if you suddenly got far more money than you have now, what would you spend it on?
FAQ
What should you spend money on first when you get rich?
The video starts with your face, then your physical strength, your bed, your food and convenience. These improve confidence, health, sleep and energy before anything else.
Why does the video recommend spending more on a mattress?
You spend a third of your life in bed. The script suggests tripling the amount you think is reasonable for a mattress and adding quality pillows and high thread count linens.
Why clear your schedule once you have money?
The less you have to do, the more you enjoy what you want to do, and creativity comes from free time. The video suggests outsourcing tasks and saying no to most requests.
Is spending on experiences worth it?
The video argues it is. Experiences teach you who you are, give you stories that inspire people and make you more interesting.
What does it mean to upgrade your teachers?
It means moving from general sources to niche experts with deeper insight, such as executive coaches, so you get more done in less time.
Keep reading
- 15 Things in Life That Get Better with Age
- 15 Things You Should Not Spend Money On
- 15 Important Things to Get Right Early in Life
