Vivian Tu, CEO of ‘Your Rich BFF’, says these three splurges are really worth the money

Vivian Tu spent her first years after college at a commercial agency. When she worked at JP Morgan, she noticed something about the rich people she worked around: they didn’t dress like that.

“Nobody was really into things that much,” Tu said, catching our attention as our “Rich BFF” thanks to her sound money advice, Business Insider tells us. “Once you had that one watch, the boys wore the same watch every day.”

“It’s quite contradictory to what you see online,” she said, “where, for example, you always need to be photographed in a new outfit, or you always need a new accessory.”

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

Within a few months, she had amassed a dresser drawer full of unwearable pantyhose because she kept buying cheap pantyhose.

“I actually spent more money at that time than if I had bought that nice thing,” says Tu, who also SoFi’s head of financial empowermentsaid.

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