Codie Sanchez had a two-minute walk from her apartment to Goldman Sachs. Her colleague, by every measure sharper and better credentialed, had a 45-minute commute. Both had to be at their desks by 7:30 every morning. The gap in who arrived early, who stayed late, and who made the room when it mattered, compounded quietly into a very different outcome. The point is not that proximity is luck. The point is that proximity is a purchase, and most people never think to make it. Sanchez, who built a nine-figure company out of exactly this kind of thinking, has a framework for deciding which purchases accelerate your income and which ones just make you look like they do.
Start with a number, not a feeling
Before any upgrade, Sanchez runs what she calls the buyback rate. Take your net annual income, divide by roughly 2,000 working hours, then cut that number in half. That result is your threshold. Any task you can hand off to someone else for less than that number is one you should stop doing yourself. At $100,000 a year, the buyback rate is $25 an hour. A virtual assistant at $10 an hour is not a luxury at that point; it is the rational call.
The assistant ladder has three rungs. The first is a virtual assistant, part-time and remote, running between $200 and $3,000 a month depending on hours, handling inbox management, scheduling, and repetitive tasks. The second is an in-house or remote assistant who filters daily life and knows enough about you to act without asking. The third is a chief of staff who runs projects end to end, walks into rooms on your behalf, and earns anywhere from $125,000 to $300,000 a year. Most people are not at rung three yet, but Sanchez is firm: ‘It’s faster if you just do it is probably why you’re not where you want to be at monetarily.’
For deciding which tasks to hand off, she uses the KO sequence: cut, then automate, then delegate, then outsource. Kill whatever should not be done at all. Automate what remains using tools like the email software Superhuman. Delegate what automation cannot handle. Outsource entirely when the task needs no ongoing involvement from you.
The purchases that pay for themselves
On wardrobe, the rule is one. One expensive item worn consistently, whether a high-end bag or a quality watch, signals credibility in rooms where credibility moves money. Everything else follows the rule of three: remove three things from your closet that no longer fit the level you are reaching for and replace them deliberately.
On sleep, an economist cited in the source found higher sleep correlates directly with higher earnings. Sanchez runs the buyback math on the Eight Sleep mattress system, pricing the full setup at roughly $5,000 plus about $100 for a face mask, earplugs, and a better pillow. Against approximately 2,500 hours of sleep a year, that comes out to a $2 buyback rate. Her budget alternative: earplugs and a face mask. Neither requires a Whoop or an Oura ring.
On food, she does not frame clean eating as a wellness signal. Studies she cites show that increased ultra-processed food consumption tracks directly to worse memory and concentration in both younger and older adults. Her household uses a personal chef who comes to their office, cooking three days of food in about three hours at roughly $60 an hour. Prepared meal services like Factor Meals or Tempo run about $200 to $300 a week for 21 meals, which she says clears the buyback rate for many people once they price out two fast-food meals a day for a household.
On skills, she applies what she calls the repeat rule: how many times over your life will you use this skill? Negotiation, she figures, repeats at least a thousand times. Sales repeats in every conversation where money changes hands. The higher the repeat count, the more the learning cost is justified.
The one most people skip entirely is what she calls the exit fund, a separate account with a single purpose: buying your way out. Break a lease, eat a cancellation fee, pay a kill fee to walk away from a draining vendor or client. She notes that Amazon has offered warehouse employees cash payments specifically to leave, because an employee who stays somewhere they do not want to be is a cost to everyone. Price the exit before you sign anything, then set that number aside before you commit.
The nail appointment that never leaves the office
Sanchez’s nail technician comes to her office. So does her hair and makeup artist. So does the person who dyes her hair, her stylist, and the chef who drops off food. Every appointment that used to require a commute now arrives at her desk.
The full logic of the list lands here, not as a spending philosophy but as a time equation. A Harvard economist mapped billions of friendships using Facebook data and found the single strongest predictor of upward economic mobility was not school, neighborhood, or income. It was whether someone’s social circle reached into a higher economic bracket. The gym where the classes are full, the co-working space instead of the kitchen table, the mastermind where everyone paid to be in the same room: these are the purchases that change the equation.
The two-minute walk to Goldman Sachs did not make Sanchez successful on its own. But it meant she was in the room every single morning her colleague was not, and those mornings stacked.
