I think money prevents certain types misery more than it buys happiness.
For example, flights with stopovers and shitty public transportation make me miserable and usually sick. By spending money on direct flights and taxis, I save myself many days of life that would otherwise be lost (I have to travel a lot).
Similarly, knowing I can afford good medical care if I get sick, or find a new apartment if mine becomes unpleasant, or send my kids to a private school if public schools are too useless... these things don't make me deeply happy, but if they were not true, that would make me constantly anxious.
Money is a cushion against disaster. If something goes awry, you can use it to buy medical or legal or technical assistance. However, for me personally it does not cause an actually happy or joyful affect, nor does it seem to buy the things that do (except very indirectly).
If you spend more than 20 minutes on your commute (one way), consider moving to somewhere closer to where you work. Walking distance is ideal, biking distance a good second-best. Commutes literally kill; you will not only get more time daily, but also your expected lifetime will increase.
Improve the ergonomics of your computer situation:
Strongly seconding the SSD recomendation. I can't think of anything else that's given so much enjoyment for the money. A SSD dramatically increases perceived performance of a computer beyond what you'd expect from benchmarks. Adding extra ram can hide the latency of a mechanical HD by caching, but it does nothing for worst case performance, and worst case performance is highly salient. I'd much rather use a low spec PC with a SSD than a high spec PC with a mechanical HD. Predictably mediocre performance feels faster than high average performance with high variance.
Other people in this thread have gone down the obvious "spend money to pay people to do things you don't like doing but want done" route. My suggestion is to get hobbies. Awesome, awesome hobbies. Sure, there's a time commitment to continue with a hobby, but they can be put down with little ill effect.Here's what I'd start with:
Archery. Buy a bow and some lessons and perhaps a range membership.
Sailing. Sunscreen, clothing, and a Sunfish or other small dinghy. Maybe get lessons as well. I'd start at a lake.
Blacksmithing or welding. Take some fun classes along those lines at a community college or trade school or the like. Alternatively, you can get pliers and some metal wire and make chain mail (this, however, is much more time intensive, but cheap in terms of money alone).
Racing. You'd probably want to start with go-karts and the like.
Sports. Generally cheap and enjoyable.
As far as programming, writing, and people skills go, a big part of improving is spending time on it. Getting paid feedback can probably help as well.
For life-optimization in general, moving to a place closer to work and cutting down on your commute is worthwhile in general. You'd have to do the math to ...
choose your hobbies wisely. take ecstatic dance in oakland, for instance. its not very expensive, it will make sure your body stays a little fit, there will be great cahances to socialize and flirt. and you wont die.
compare that with motorcicle racing. it is competitive, male oriented, hard to find time and a place to do it, way more expensive, there are no women, it pollutes the earth, and you have to keep a motorbike in good conditions. not to mention you'll live 15 minutes less per hour ran, according to tegmarks old website.
The advice above of getting hobbies is a good one, but choose activities that are physical, social, and will make you healthy and sexy, unless you really, really, really love playing magic the gathering, like i do, then just nerd your money around and leave the other things to another time.
I completely agree with dance lessons as a worthwhile hobby to consider. The point I was trying to get at is that if you have disposable disposable income and free time and your hobbies are "books and computer games", you've probably not done worthwhile exploration as to what hobbies you enjoy.
To get away from the anecdote level and bring in an empirical source, LASIK satisfaction rates are at 95.4%. [non-paywall pdf]
Exactly. Archery doesn't provide strength training if you have to do strength training to do archery. If it would be good at strength training than archers wouldn't need separate strength training.
That's incorrect. Every sport requires additional strength training in order to perform at a high level. Even in strength sports, supplemental strength training is required beyond practicing the sport itself. This doesn't mean that the sport itself doesn't provide a strength adaptation response. Yoga counts as strength training for the sufficiently weak.
In Olympic weightlifting, the contested lifts are the snatch and the clean and jerk. Even minimalistic weightlifting programming involves squatting, and most programs include pressing, rows, deadlifting, and other strength work as well.
Powerlifting is a much simpler sport, testing only the squat, bench press, and deadlift for one repetition. Just practicing the sport would involve doing single reps with squats, bench presses, and deadlifts. Virtually no successful powerlifters train this way. Basically all of them do multiple repetitions on the main lifts, and the majority do other exercises as well.
If you wake up before the sun rises (or have blackout shades), would recommendI this gradual-wakeup light alarm clock. I bought it after seeing someone link it on LessWrong. If your morning wakeups are abrupt, I highly recommend this. For the 30 minutes before your set alarm time, it gradually brightens the light. Then if you're not awake yet by the time the sound comes on, it's birds chirping VERY softly that slowly gets louder. I usually actually mistake them for real birds in my half-asleep state. Its a much more pleasant way to get up in the morning and personally, I feel a lot better when I do.
I also have a Vitamix that I use usually twice a day and I absolutely love it. Great quality and really easy to clean.
Time is probably the best thing you can buy for the long term. You could consider investing that money and at 5% you'd have almost a million dollars in 25 years - that may sound like a long time, but it would mean you could be financially independent in your early forties and would allow you spend an additional 8-10 hours a day on things you enjoy if you didn't have to earn a salary.
Think about the things you use very often and/or for extended amounts of time. Buy the highest quality version of that that you can afford. For example shoes, chairs, beds, at any one time you will be in one of the three, so buy the best you can afford. Donating to a feel-good charity might also improve your happiness. The exact amount seems to be irrelevant.
Edit: Another possibility is to buy more than you actually need of items you use, like having multiple nail clippers at multiple locations for convenience instead of having to carry out one specific nailclipper.
Your last line is a good hint to the direction you should be thinking. Find ways to spend money to save time, or improve your experience where you spend a lot of time.
Paying a housecleaner or gardener can free up some time if you don't get value from those activities but do get value from the results. TaskRabbit can get you out of some other errands that fall into the same category (you want done, but don't want to do).
Paying a personal trainer can make your health-improving activities a lot more efficient. Paying for classes is a mixed bag, but can give structure and motivation for learning that you don't get with self-scheduled time.
As a programmer, you may be able to have a more enjoyable and perhaps more effective time at your job if you spend money on equipment rather than limiting yourself to what your employer provides.
Depending on if you have them already, invest in a few tailored pieces clothing that go with a lot and you can wear regularly.
Offer to pay for your friends to come with you to do what you like (for instance if you like ice-skating and you all usually end up at bars, offer to pay for them to come ice-skating with you - they'll be happy to go for free, and you'll get better quality out of your time with them).
Give small amounts to charities you see along the street, if you identify with them (for the warm fuzzies).
Make a habit of buying something nice at a bakery or similar outside work once a week and bringing it in for your colleagues. Chat with them over it.
If you don't have dietary restrictions and are easy about what you eat, get one of those packages where they deliver you recipes and ingredients every week (cut down the time planning, buying and cooking and you can find one that's healthy and balanced - most are by design anyway).
Get a massage every couple of weeks.
Go to some place to get some serious neuromuscula body work that focuses on posture, alignment, balanced muscular strength and tone. Feldenkrais, Hanna, Pilates, Alexander.
Have regular blood work done. Get basic dna testing, if not a full genome (yet).
Hire a cook to stock your fridge with tasty, nutritious meals for the week.
If you wear glasses, try switching to night&day contact lenses. I don't know about others, but it's one of the things I most gladly spend extra money on. They're much, much more comfortable than glasses -- you just put them on and forget about your vision problems until you have to change them. There have been days when I had run out of contacts and had to wear glasses, and the experience was horrible compared to what I was used to.
I brainstormed about this for a while and reflected on what past purchases I had made that I liked and hadn't liked. YMMV but here's what I concluded:
If you want to gain personal skills, a good avenue for spending money is removing distractions that decrease the time you have to devote to these skills. For example, hire cleaners or gardeners to free up the time spent on necessary chores.
The best ratio of happiness per Euro spent I ever got was from a shower with a rain shower head for about 120€. I imagine a full fledged shower panel with massage showers could give even more happiness but maybe with a smaller ratio.
Another example was spending about 400€ on a Saitek pro flight control and X-Plane 10.
Also vacations probably count. There was this seafood plate I once had on Mallorca ...
The thing is, a lot of the advantages you get from money can be had on the cheap if you are reasonably resourceful. For example, it may be awesome to go out with your family to a fancy restaurant for dinner. But it's almost as awesome (and in some ways more awesome) to plan and cook your own nice meal for your family. At far less expense.
(Note I am referring to your typical middle class American here.)
I do agree that saving on commuting time and inconvenience is worthwhile if you can afford it.
How are your savings for retirement?
If you have no retirement savings, you can set some up at an easy to use online brokerage: Your early twenties is a great time to start, managing your retirement account doesn't really have to take a large amount of time, and 50 dollars a day should cover initial expenditures.
Also, at 29, I personally enjoy fiddling around with my retirement account... although it took me a while to figure out the right settings for myself and I did have some initial panics when it was smaller, I wasn't as familiar with the pros and cons of various investment types, and one of my stocks had gone down quite a bit. Now that it is bigger and much more well diversified, it's more fun.
IIRC, the most actionable and strong effect in happiness research is to spend much more money on others - giving people things, buying your friends food/drink. The effect does not intensify with price, so buy others lots of little things!
Lukeprog's excellent post on happiness summarized a lot of this research, and although money itself does not correlate particularly strongly with happiness above a certain level, there are a few things there that money could certainly help with - trainers for various things, social life (better clothes, going to more ev...
Random thought 2:
The next time you get a car, get one with a thermostat. It's an uncommon option and I don't know how much it costs, but the Ford Taurus my parents bought off the lot happened to have one. In other cars, the heat and air conditioning tend to overshoot, leaving me cold in the summer and hot in the winter on long trips.
One of the things that improved my life most after moving to SF was buying a good bike and using it for nearly all my transportation needs. More fun, less stressful, and much healthier than driving or public transit. You want a road bike, not a mountain bike, here, since extra weight makes a huge difference going up hills.
General information-getting (most of this is general "stuff I recommend to anyone", but some of it does require money):
(Not sure whether $50/day allows you to do this in San Francisco, but:) Live within walking/cycling distance of work, grocery stores, nightlife, museums, etc. so you won't have to drive a car every day.
Spend it on other people.
http://www.uvm.edu/~pdodds/teaching/courses/2009-08UVM-300/docs/others/everything/dunn2008a.pdf
Not sure about specific details, but I have a feeling that it is easy to make a mistake of thinking about "what is easy to buy & would be convenient". Sure, it is great to pay someone else to do your dishes, but is that really the best way to convert money into awesomeness?
Instead I would recommend making a specific plan about becoming more awesome, and only then to search for a specific point of the plan where extra money can give me the greatest bonus. For example, let's say I want to become a rock star. I can pay someone to do my dishes, w...
Random thought 1:
Get a 3-channel or 5-channel sound system for your TV and/or computer. My father didn't know what he was missing until he did, and now he thinks it's great. Cost: $1000-2000.
(The reason we got one in the first place is kind of weird: my father likes to watch Blu-Ray movies, but many of them had sound that was totally out of balance: the sound effects were blasting but the spoken dialogue was barely audible. Online research indicated that this was partially a result of converting from 5.1 surround sound to stereo sound; in 5.1 sound, the s...
For some years now I have had a Panasonic breadmaker, model SD-ZB2512. It takes less than five minutes in the evening, generating no mess and no washing up (if you use olive oil instead of butter, so as to avoid generating a fatty knife), and you can have hot fresh bread ready-baked as you wake up. The only downside to bread made this way is that you have to slice it. It tastes dramatically better than all but the most expensive shop-bought bread, and the ingredients store in a cupboard for literally months so it's even highly pandemic-proof. Bread that is...
A more ergonomic computer setup. It's highly surprising how very much it can do for both comfort, health, and performance. Tons of low hanging fruit that people miss. If you spend as much time as it sound siting in the same spot every day it really should be a no expenses spare kind of deal. For most applications I'd even consider it more important than the actual hardware in the box.
You really should look it up more in depth and/or ask someone who knows this stuff at a semi-professional level, but I'll summarize roughly some points.
The most important par...
fish oil supplements do not have the same efficacy as actually eating fish regularly. You can get sashimi grade salmon surprisingly cheaply delivered to your house.
Some ideas:
Nice clothing (http://www.makeyourownjeans.com/ to get custom-designed jeans that fit really well; http://www.threadless.com/ for graphic t-shirts, etc. Or hire someone to help you design your wardrobe.) Hairstyling products can be fun (if you don't want to do a lot of reading, maybe just get these two: 1 2). Also, consider getting a salon haircut; I look way better getting monthly $30 haircuts from a top-rated "men's haircuts" person on Yelp than I do getting irregular $10 budget haircuts.
If you save up a fair amount of money, you can take a substantial amount of time off from work (say 6-12 months), and use it to do something awesome like travel around the world or read the great books or both.
I find it's well worth spending money on reliability and low maintenance for things you use regularly. I cycle as my main form of transport, and I spent extra money on a good set of internal hub gears. The only maintenance required is a yearly oil change. The time needed to clean and adjust derailuer gears probably isn't much, but the subjective feeling of reliability is valuable for me. Likewise, I use tires with strong puncture protection. I'm confident that I can set out to cycle at short notice and arrive at my destination at a predictable time.
The sam...
My favored option is buying durable goods, especially labor-saving devices. $50/day surplus is enough to make one significant purchase (say, a laundry machine or a good-quality item of furniture) each month, for a noticeable long-term improvement in comfort. I don't like spending money in ways that will have to be repeated regularly.
That's my own plan for the next year, anyway; until recently, I spent my surplus paying down debts. (which, incidentally, you should do first if you have any, but I assume since you're asking that you do not.)
Since I don't have $50/day type money, I would do these things if I had it:
Eat well, and go out often. Books and games are better as low-cost entertainment, but my experience is one comes to appreciate social entertainment more.
I don't know whether there a good way to purchase training for people skills in San Francisco for $50/day. I would guess that most seminars are over that price point. What you could buy for that budget might be improv comedy classes.
hire a tutor to teach you programming.
hire someone to search/ check out entertainment stuff that you might like. ( works best if the person likes the same stuff you do.)
On ChrisHallquist's post extolling the virtues of money, the top comment is Eliezer pointing out the lack of concrete examples. Can anyone think of any? This is not just hypothetical: if I think your suggestion is good, I will try it (and report back on how it went)
I care about health, improving personal skills (particularly: programming, writing, people skills), gaining respect (particularly at work), and entertainment (these days: primarily books and computer games). If you think I should care about something else, feel free to suggest it.
I am early-twenties programmer living in San Francisco. In the interest of getting advice useful to more than one person, I'll omit further personal details.
Budget: $50/day
If your idea requires significant ongoing time commitment, that is a major negative.