Your 2027 Money Vision Board, Priced (Including the F1 Ticket)
It’s 1am and I’m saving a photo of a dress I will never own to my Vision Board.
You know the one. Girl standing in a paddock in Monaco, sunglasses on, looking like she woke up that way. Caption’s three words and a heart. I saved it. (Then I saved four more, which feels relevant.)
Then I put my phone face down and felt worse than before I picked it up. Which is basically eating a whole sleeve of cookies standing at the counter, except for your brain.
Okay, before anything else. There’s nothing wrong with you for wanting that. Not the dress, not the skincare, not the seat at the race.
I’m so tired of money advice that treats wanting nice things like a personality flaw you’re supposed to budget your way out of. You can want the lip oil and an emergency fund. Those aren’t opposing teams.
The vision board though? That part is broken. Not because it’s silly. Because nobody ever puts a number under the picture.
Why most vision boards quietly fail
A vision board is a mood. That’s the whole point, and I’m not going to pretend otherwise, because I like mine. The Positano photo is staying. (It’s been up since 2023.)
But a mood doesn’t have a deadline. And it can’t tell you if you’re three weeks away from something or three years. So everything on the board feels equally impossible.
And when everything feels equally impossible, you don’t buy any of it. You also don’t save for any of it. The board just sits there being pretty at you.
So I priced mine. Every single thing. Real number, real date. Some of it was way closer than I thought. Some of it was way further off. And honestly? Knowing which was which did more for me than any budgeting app ever has.
The part I don’t love admitting: when I finally sat down and did the math, two things on my board were about six weeks away. Six weeks. I’d been treating them like fantasies for over a year, and not because they were expensive. Because I’d never once looked up what they cost.
Here’s the short version of what I found, before we get into it.
| What | Price | At $25 a week |
|---|---|---|
| Rhode Peptide Lip Treatment | $20 | Under a week |
| Sol de Janeiro Bum Bum Cream, 240ml | $48 | 2 weeks |
| Crème de la Mer, 1oz | $200 | 8 weeks |
| US Grand Prix, three-day general admission | $450 | 18 weeks |
Tier one: under $50, and way closer than you think
Start here. This is where the shame usually lives, so let’s get rid of that first.
The Rhode Peptide Lip Treatment is $20. The Sol de Janeiro Bum Bum Cream is $48 for the full size.
At $10 a week that’s two weeks, and five weeks. That’s not a savings plan. That’s barely a decision.
Okay, here’s the part that got me. Alexandra Saint Mleux, whose outfits are maybe 40% of why my saved folder exists, is an art historian who studied at the École du Louvre. She works at a gallery in Monaco. And one of the brands she partners with is Rhode.
The $20 one. The one sitting in a drawer two feet from me right now.
Look, a lip treatment is not closing the gap between your life and Monaco. (It isn’t. I’ve tested this.) I’m just saying the gap isn’t made of what you think it’s made of. Some of it costs twenty dollars.
Tier two: $200, and this is where it gets interesting
Crème de la Mer is $200 for the 1oz jar. It’s the one in every “what’s in my bathroom” video. And yes, it’s a moisturizer that costs two hundred dollars.
At $25 a week, that’s eight weeks.
I’m not telling you to buy it. I’m telling you that “eight weeks” and “I could never” are two completely different pieces of information. And you’ve probably been carrying the second one around for no reason.
Eight weeks is a thing you can decide about. I could never is a thing you just feel bad about.
And if you look at eight weeks and go, yeah, not for a face cream? That’s not you being disciplined. That’s you knowing what you’d rather have. Which you couldn’t know before, because you didn’t know the number.
Tier three: the F1 weekend, and no, I’m not joking
Okay, this one. This is the thing everyone gets wrong about what’s expensive.
F1 reads as unreachable. Yachts, Monaco, people in linen who have never once checked their balance with one eye closed. (A skill. A tragic skill.)
A three-day General Admission grounds pass to the United States Grand Prix at Circuit of the Americas is $450 including fees.
Four hundred and fifty dollars. For three days. At an actual Formula 1 race.
That’s $37 a month for a year. Or $8.65 a week. Which is less than most people spend on coffee they don’t even remember drinking.
Now be honest with yourself about the rest of it. You still have to get to Austin and sleep somewhere. And race weekend is exactly when flights and hotels know they’ve got you. Budget that separately, and start earlier than feels necessary.
But the ticket? The part that felt impossible? That’s just a savings challenge. It’s this year’s savings challenge, if you want it to be.
Tier four: the boring one that belongs on the board anyway
Put your emergency fund on the vision board. Same board. Same collage. No separate sad spreadsheet.
Not because it’s the responsible choice. Because of what it really gets you, which is the option to leave. A job that’s making you sick. An apartment where the landlord won’t fix anything. Something you’re putting up with because you can’t afford to go yet.
That’s not a boring goal. That’s the most luxurious thing on the whole board. It just doesn’t photograph well, which is the only reason it never makes the cut.
Price it like everything else. If you don’t know your number, I wrote about how much you actually need. It’s usually less scary than the internet makes it sound.
Tier five: the one that changes all the others
Somewhere on your board, put earning more.
Not a vague “abundance” tile. A specific number you want your income to be, with a date on it.
Because everything else on this list is just math. And income is the one thing that moves all of it at once. Eight weeks becomes four. A year becomes seven months.
You can cut your spending down to the bone and you’re still working with the same number coming in. This is the one most vision boards skip. It’s also the one doing the most work.
How to price your board this week
- Open the board. Next to every image, write what that thing costs. Looked up, not guessed.
- Divide it by what you can set aside each week without lying to yourself. Ten dollars is fine. Ten dollars is a real number.
- Write the date next to each one. Not “someday.” A date.
- Look at what’s under three months. That’s your shortlist. And I’d bet money there’s something on it you’d written off completely.
One thing though. Fund these by setting money aside. Not by putting them on a card, and not by splitting them into four payments.
A $200 cream financed at 24% is not the same purchase as a $200 cream. And the version of you eight weeks from now deserves to get the thing without a bill chasing her.
If cash sitting in an account keeps quietly evaporating on you (mine did for years), cash stuffing exists for exactly that problem.
Vision board FAQ
Isn’t putting luxury stuff on a vision board just encouraging overspending?
Only if there are no numbers on it. Putting a price and a date on something is the opposite of impulse spending. The impulse version is the 11pm checkout page. This is the version where you knew what it cost and decided anyway.
What if my board is mostly expensive things?
Then you’ll find out, which is useful. Price all of it. Look at the total. Look at how long it takes. You’ll probably reorder things once you can see them next to each other, and that reordering is the whole exercise.
Should I make a 2027 board in January?
Make it whenever. January boards have a way of being written by someone slightly fictional who gets up at 5am. A board made in August by a tired person is usually more honest.
How do I stop feeling bad when I scroll?
Partly by knowing the prices, honestly. A lot of that feeling is just vagueness. “I could never” is so much heavier to carry than “that’s $200 and I’d rather have the trip.”
Where to start
Pick one thing off your board tonight. Just one. Look up what it costs, divide it by ten, and write the date on your phone.
You’re not going to manifest the Monaco paddock. But you might get to Austin. And you might get there having paid for it in cash, wearing the Rhode Peptide Lip Treatment.
That’s not the consolation prize. That’s the whole thing.
This post may contain affiliate links. See my disclosure.
