Vivian Tu Says These Are 3 Splurges Are Actually Worth Your Money

Vivian Tu spent her first years out of college on a trading desk. While working at JP Morgan, she noticed something about the wealthy people she worked around: they didn’t dress like it.

“Nobody really had that fancy of stuff,” Tu, who got our attention as our “Rich BFF” thanks to her sound money advice, told Business Insider. “Once you kind of have the one watch, the guys wore the same watch every single day.”

“It is kind of counterintuitive to what you see online,” she said, “where like, you always need to be photographed in a new outfit, or you always need to have a new accessory.”

Tu’s clearest example goes way back, before she became a two-time New York Times bestseller or host of the “Networth and Chill” podcast, to her first year as a sales and trading analyst. Then, a dress code required nylons under her skirt. She couldn’t justify $60 on a good pair, so she bought $6 pantyhose from the drugstore. They fell apart within a few hours of wear, Tu recalled.

Within a few months, she had amassed a dresser full of unwearable tights because she kept buying the cheap pairs over and over.

“I had actually spent more money over that course of time than had I actually just bought the nice thing,” Tu, who’s also SoFi’s chief of financial empowerment, said.

Buy it nice, or buy it twice. That’s the logic Tu applies to almost every purchase now, and it’s how she landed on a strategy for buying items that are genuinely worth the money.