So if you’re anything like me, once you got a taste of what life really has to offer (or at least what life outside the Western world really has to offer), you can’t get enough of it. You have one little problem, though: two weeks of vacation (or four to six if you live in Western Europe) just isn’t enough. If you’re like most young professionals out there as I was, you probably spend 40% or more of your waking hours working as a corporate slave chained to a desk in a cube. To add insult to injury, you probably spend another 10% or more of your waking hours driving to and from that corporate prison.

Sure you travel and experience the possibility of something else a few weeks a year and every long weekend you can get your hands on, but it just isn’t close to enough and makes your regular life seem that much worse. The experience of going from hell to paradise and back again gets harder and harder and begins to effect your mood at home.

As your mental health suffers, so does your physical health. You spend eight to ten hours a day at your desk and two hours stuck in traffic and it’s 8pm at night by the time you walk in the door to your Ikea apartment and now you have to worry about dinner. Do you pay too much to order in or eat out, or do you throw together some mediocre concoction comprised of whatever food you can find in your refrigerator that doesn’t resemble some kind of science experiment? All you want to do is sit down on the couch with a glass of Johnny Red (you can’t afford black on the pittance they pay you) and drink yourself into a stupor. You go out sometimes at home, but now that you know what you’re missing, the sight – or, more often, the sound – of these American girls makes you sick. Their incessant, vapid, vacuous ramblings are like nails on a chalkboard. You would give your left nut for another night with your favorite Latin American beauty queen or Eastern European princess but she’s oh so far away. Going to the gym on a regular basis is virtually impossible with a schedule like yours, so now you’re probably getting fat which further affects your mental health and self-esteem. It’s a vicious cycle.

But there is another way! The first step is to escape from the rat race. Now, I’m not going to tell you can just invent a website today and zip off to the Caribbean tomorrow and only work four hours a week as Tim Ferriss claims, but you should still read that book. As I see it, you have four basic options for freeing yourself geographically:

1. Live off savings, a trust fund or the proceeds of the sale of a business you already own, etc.
2. Convince your boss to let you “work from home.”
3. Become an entrepreneur.
4. Derive your income from “the arts.”

Let’s examine your options in depth:

Live off savings, trust fund, proceeds of the sale of a business you already own, etc.: Fuck you if you’re lucky enough to have this option. You don’t need help or advice, you just need balls. Go do it. Stop living the safe life, stop pursuing more material possessions and a bigger payday that you don’t need when you can already go live the life of your dreams now. It’s cheaper than you think.

Convince your boss to let you “work from home”: Some people have managed to pull this off and Tim Ferriss even gives a formula for doing it in The Four Hour Workweek, but for every one person that can pull it off I bet there’s a thousand or more that can’t. More power to you if you can do it but most people can’t. Besides, I’d rather make $20,000 per year working for myself than $40,000 working for somebody else. Fuck that, once you’ve been your own boss you’ll never want go back.

Become an entrepreneur: Easier said than done. This requires a lot of up-front effort, dedication and discipline. It will also require a lot of trial and error and a willingness to fail outright and try again. My father once imparted upon me a great piece of wisdom: there is a high correlation between 8th grade dropouts and successful entrepreneurs. It’s not that there’s no value in education, it’s just that these individuals didn’t have the luxury of giving up. They had to make their businesses work. The most important thing in entrepreneurship is to not give up. Being an entrepreneur is a huge topic and I will write a follow-up article in the future. For the moment, I will again recommend you read The Four Hour Workweek along with Viral Loop: From Facebook to Twitter, How Today’s Smartest Businesses Grow Themselves and Blue Ocean Strategy: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make Competition Irrelevant. Make sure you’ve read those books and start doing a little brainstorming with yourself and any like-minded friends you may have and you’ll be well on your way.

Derive your income from “the arts”: If you’re lucky enough to have the talent and dedicated enough to develop that talent, become an artist of some type, performing or otherwise. If you make your living as an artist chances are that you can either: a) do your work from anywhere or b) get paid to travel. Some people can even do both. Charlie and ¡Raul! are a couple of class A examples. If you are already an artist but you feel you’re tied to your location, chances are you aren’t really, at least not as much as you think. Unless you make fifteen-ton sculptures out of metal in a airplane hangar, you probably don’t really need to be anywhere in particular. Even if you do, there is probably a cheaper airplane hanger somewhere else more desirable to live, with cheaper metal to boot. Rethink your life and strategize accordingly.

Freeing yourself geographically is a long term project, not an overnight decision, however it could be the most rewarding thing you ever do for yourself. It also can be a lot less expensive than you might imagine. If you travel anything like we do, you may find that sometimes you actually save money by going on vacation. Why not make your entire life like that? The first year I spent as a geographically free man was in a place that I would call “middle of the road” in terms of price among our favorite destinations. I spent less than my annual salary at my first job after college and it paid for:

1. Rent for a fully furnished one bedroom apartment in a relatively new building with all the modern conveniences, including air conditioning, Internet access, and security.
2. The ability to eat out and go out drinking whenever and wherever I wanted. As a result, I partied my ass off in the best clubs with reservations, VIP tables and bottle service. I also ate every meal in at least a moderate scale restaurant or had food delivered. I never needed to cook.
3. The ability to travel about the region relatively freely and do things like visit the beach and go skiing, staying in hotels or guest houses when I wanted.
4. No need for a car, I took a taxi wherever I went. On less than double my budget you could own a car and have a private driver in many places.
5. Paid way less taxes.
6. Generally wanted for nothing.

The best part is that I was still figuring shit out, it could easily be done for less knowing what I know now. If you’re not a heavy drinker, you can knock thousands off your budget right there. I never did a breakdown but I would have to say if I made a pie chart of my total budget, “drinks in clubs” would definitely be the big piece.

Freeing yourself geographically is the best way to live the best possible lifestyle. If you want to move past the rat race and the tyranny of low quality Western women, this is key.

Even if you aren’t in a position to fully or permanently unplug now, why not embrace The Four Hour Workweek concept of “mini-retirements?” Whatever your case, 99 percent of people out there could live a better, happier more fulfilling lifestyle – they just don’t want to put in the up-front effort to make it happen. Don’t be one of those guys. The world is your oyster. Fuck your boss. Fuck your desk. Fuck rush hour traffic. And most importantly, fuck Mondays! I love Mondays! I don’t mind spending 8 hours a day in my office. My office is the coffee shop full of hot chicks wherever we happen to be that week. It’s where we write our blog and I run my businesses remotely using nothing more than a laptop. I love my life. How many people do you know that can say that and mean it? Do you want to be able to say that? Then make your life into a life that will allow you to.

Free yourself from the rat race. Start living or keep dying.

Several years ago I took a “workshop” or “bootcamp” from a PUA calling himself “Badboy.” Back when I took his bootcamp, he was charging about 2,000 EUR for a weekend course which consisted of just two and a half days of instruction. I decided to take the course because I had read The Game and also a write-up in Playboy magazine about Badboy specifically (in retrospect, it may have only been in some eastern European franchise of Playboy). The article made it sound like Badboy could walk on water whenever chicks were concerned. Money was not a big concern for me at the time, and while I felt pretty stupid for actually doing such a thing, in the end my curiosity got the best of me. I just wanted to see if it was true – was there really such a thing as a guy who could get any girl virtually with the snap of his fingers? It sounded impossible but if it was true I had to see it. Back then the whole PUA thing was considerably more underground than it is today. These douchebags certainly were not on VH1 making fools of them of themselves, and hardly anybody in Europe knew about the seduction community.

To make a long story short, if such a person exists, he is most definitely not Badboy. I don’t try to judge a book by its cover but Badboy certainly didn’t look the part. He was short (very short), skinny, bald and not particularly attractive. He looked like a stiff breeze could knock him over. He gave the impression of a snake oil salesman more than pickup artist. He opened the course by telling us a lot of highly dubious stories about his conquests, including one hell of a whopper about a girl he picked up somewhere buying him a car after just a couple weeks of dating.

Badboy packed ten to fifteen people into his class which he held in a tiny, cramped upstairs room of a pub which I’m sure he got for free…after all, he was just bringing in more business for them. No food or drink was included in the 2,000 EUR course price and neither was lodging. The other students were a rag tag bunch of losers that were all socially awkward in the extreme and some were much too old for the girls they were aspiring to chase. The class essentially consisted of lectures by Badboy and “field exercises.” The lectures were more or less a regurgitation of shit that came from some e-book he was selling at the time, and the field exercises consisted of going out on the street, to cafes or bars and having Badboy instruct his students by saying “Go talk to her!” These field exercises progressed to “Go talk her, but kiss her within x minutes.”

All in all, the whole thing was of no value whatsoever. But what was really disturbing is he would often choose girls that are were far too young as “targets” and even go so far as to select what appeared to be ~14 year old girls walking down the street with their mothers. If he wasn’t selecting underage girls, he’d often pick out totally unattractive girls as targets. If someone complained about the age or attractiveness of the chick, he would say something like “it’s just for practice, go do it, get over your hangups” or something like that. I outright refused this sort of “instruction,” which seemed to really piss him off because it challenged his authority and expert status in front of his other loser students. By this point, I knew I was not going to see what I had paid for, but aside from the bit about the 14 year old girls, it was pretty entertaining.

The most important takeaway from the whole weekend for me was that Badboy had no game whatsoever, or at least none that he demonstrated to the class. He never once demonstrated any skills. What he did do though was let a fat chick twice his size (in height and width) totally emasculate and embarrass him in front of the whole class. What I was able to piece together was that this was some girl he used to bang who was totally pissed at him for unknown reasons. He felt he needed a female stand-in to help him teach his class so that he could do hands-on demonstrations of his slick moves. Instead of using his mad pickup skills to just go get a new chick (and honestly, you could throw a rock in any bar and hit a hotter chick), he decided to let this chick tear him a new asshole in front of all of us, and he just took her shit and swallowed it with a smile just so she would act as the stand-in for him to help him teach his supposed pickup methods. I saw no demonstration of any game whatsoever from Badboy at any point during the weekend.

He walked away with over 20,000 EUR cold hard cash for nothing. It was unbelievable. It was all marketing, all fluff, no substance whatsoever. None of the students got laid during all of this “field work” except for one who ran into a girl he already knew. The whole thing was a total embarrassment. What I can’t believe is how he sold Playboy (even if it was only an eastern European franchise) on this fraud and got them to do a write-up on him.

At the end of the day, all Badboy really has supporting the idea that he’s a modern day Casanova is a bunch of pictures with a bunch of chicks who are all actually quite average and run of the mill for his home country of Croatia. I’ve since learned that you need very little game to bag hot chicks all day in Eastern Europe. Eastern Europe is made of two things: hot chicks and mafia douchebags that treat them like garbage. If you’re a guy in Eastern Europe, the deck is stacked in your favor. Not only that, but it’s easy to get a chick in a bar to pose for a picture with you. It’s even easier than getting her phone number and certainly easier than fucking her or making her your girlfriend. I have just as many pictures with hot chicks as Badboy does, maybe even more. But even if he did fuck all those chicks in Croatia, so what? They grow on trees there. As soon as he loses the home court advantage and visits a foreign country, he’s playing the bitch to get fat chicks to do favors for him.

Badboy is yet another reason to stay as far away from all this PUA shit as possible. Don’t take my word for it, just go check out his blog where he gives cutting edge advice like how to remove a bra with one hand, the proper street approach and asks you to pay him 1,350 EUR to teach you how to pickup girls in Ukraine. You can be retarded, deaf, blind and dumb and still pickup hot girls in Ukraine. It’s actually a challenge to NOT get laid in Ukraine. Other than eastern Europe, I’ve never been anywhere in my life that has a greater supply of stunning women who are absolutely dying to meet any foreign guy that will treat them nice. Anybody that pays this fool to teach pickup in Ukraine deserves to lose their money! Just see “Internet Dating: No in America, Yes in Europe and Asia!” for one of the many ways you can have an unlimited lifetime supply of the hottest Eastern European chicks you’ve ever laid eyes on without paying douchebags like Badboy a dime. It is a crying shame this guy is still out there running the same scam after so many years.

This dude is way cooler than Badboy.

Originally published at The Single Dude’s Guide to Life and Travel on February 16, 2011.

So you’ve already escaped the corporate prison, you’ve implemented a 15 minute business plan and you’ve been doing a ton of traveling. You’re basically a LIP (location independent person), but for some reason your primary residence is still in the US or some other low bang for the buck lame ass Western country.

Maybe you’ve been brainwashed into thinking that the US must be the greatest country in the world because so many foreigners seem to want to move there. It’s true that many foreigners want to move to the US (or some other western country), but aside from the ones that are coming from third world countries where they’re literally starving, most of them are just suffering from a severe case of “the grass is always greener on the other side of the fence” syndrome. Many foreigners that have spent a significant amount of time in the West hate it and have come to the exact same conclusion we have. Check out this huge collection of quotes from foreigners who lived in the US.

Now is the time to move abroad, permanently. What are you waiting for? Are you afraid to leave home? Tied down by possessions? Fuck that, man up and get out. Sell everything and give away what you can’t sell. Possessions = slavery. I have never been happier to own less. Ditching my house and all my belongings was the best business decision I ever made. Renting everything you need and only owning the most basic possessions (laptop, camera, clothing, maybe some ski or other sport gear) is super easy in most single dude friendly destinations. Fully furnished apartments are super easy to rent for a minimal premium over unfurnished ones. Think of the freedom you’ll gain. Everybody hates moving, its an absolutely dreaded activity – not for me. I can move in half a day with just one car load of shit. I can change countries, let alone cities at the drop of a hat. Once you’re an LIP you don’t worry about picking the wrong home, you move as frequently or infrequently as you like. When you get bored of one location you just move on, if you like it you stay indefinitely. This is the way to live your life. Once you try it you will never go back.

But there are deeper and darker reasons to move abroad besides the fact that the women are better, the prices are lower and everything is more fun. It should be obvious to all but the most dim-witted individual that the fall of the US and really much of the West has just begun. The dotcom bust and the financial crisis of 2008 were just the tips of the proverbial icebergs. The United States is effectively bankrupt and it is only a matter of time until they default on their debt or trigger an inflationary meltup via unchecked money printing. If these indisputable facts have somehow escaped you so far, I’m willing to give you the benefit of the doubt and I have some recommended reading and viewing for you that will bring you up to speed in a hurry.

• The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine by Michael Lewis
• Liar’s Poker by Michael Lewis – Dated for sure, but instructive because it shows just how long the Wall Street scam has been going on and how little has changed other than the inflation of the paychecks.
• Griftopia: Bubble Machines, Vampire Squids, and the Long Con That Is Breaking America by Matt Taibbi
• The Great Derangement: A Terrifying True Story of War, Politics, and Religion at the Twilight of the American Empire by Matt Taibbi
• Crash Proof 2.0: How to Profit From the Economic Collapse by Peter Schiff
• How an Economy Grows and Why it Crashes by Peter Schiff
• Dismantling America: and Other Controversial Essays by Thomas Sowell
• Basic Economics: A Common Sense Guide to the Economy by Thomas Sowell
• End the Fed by Ron Paul
• The Politically Incorrect Guide to Global Warming: And Environmentalism by Christopher C. Horner - This one is a little bit off-topic, but it does show yet another way big business and big government are fleecing you, the little guy.
• Zero Hedge – An outstanding financial blog that tells it how it is.
• Shadow Stats – real statistics, not the bullshit from the government.
• Inside Job by Charles Ferguson
• Overdose: The Next Financial Crisis
• Dollar Debasement – A summary of how much the dollar has declined in value in the last year.
• The American Dream – a short cartoon that demonstrates how the bankers are fucking everyone in the ass.
• Last but not least, for those with a super short attention span: watch the bears explain quantitative easing.

If you’re still unconvinced, you can simply look at the dollar’s performance against other currencies (which in many cases are also inflating albeit at slower rate) and the price of commodities. The dollar is flirting with all time lows and commodity prices are on fire. This is not the result of a demand surge, as many would have you believe, but rather the result of “Helicopter” Ben Bernanke and his printing press. If you aren’t convinced by this point, you are a lost cause, stop reading here and go back to sitting in the corner and drooling.

If you’re still with me and you weren’t aware of the grim reality of the situation until now, you’re probably scared shitless. Don’t worry, there is still time to do something about all of this. Although the dollar has lost a huge chunk of its value, it still goes quite a long way in many single dude friendly destinations. The key is to exchange all those rapidly devaluing dollars for something that will hold its value, or hopefully even appreciate. Specific investment advice is beyond the scope of this article, although the general principle is to invest in things you think will always have value even the face of a total currency collapse. So for example: a barrel of oil, a bushel of wheat, a ton of steel and a bar of gold are some things one might expect to hold their value or at least some value even during and after a currency collapse. Are we going to be using wheelbarrows full of cash to buy a loaf of bread in the near future? Who knows? But contrary to popular belief, it’s not impossible. And don’t think that you’re safe if you own your home. Counterintuitively, the value of your home, along with all other non-necessities is likely to fall in value at the same time all your basic necessities (read: food, clothing and energy) are skyrocketing in price. So basically, if all your assets are in houses, cars and dollars, you’re going to get double fucked in an inflationary crisis.

If you want specific advice on what to invest in, I think Peter Schiff is a good place to start. Start reading and start thinking for yourself. Make a habit of keeping up with Zero Hedge and reading lots of books. Don’t be intimidated by economic and financial jargon and use common sense. Follow people that make good solid logical arguments that make sense to you. My own personal philosophy is that as long as you’re not a complete dumbass, somebody should be able to explain something to you in layman’s terms in a way that makes sense no matter how complicated the core issue is. If they cannot, they are either bullshitting you or they don’t know what the fuck they’re talking about. I don’t care whether its investments or nuclear physics – do NOT listen to anybody that can’t lay out a solid logical argument that makes sense!

So if you’ve escaped the corporate prison and you’ve got your 15-minute business plan in place, you’re pretty much a full blown LIP – get your ass moving. Start the evacuation process before its too late. If you haven’t completed steps one and two, you better get busy, because nobody knows how much time we have left. Start reading and educating yourself. Move your savings to a safe place and work toward becoming an LIP.

March of Tyranny

Originally published at The Single Dude’s Guide to Life and Travel on June 10, 2011.

Over the last ten years or so, an industry which has been becoming more and more mainstream is that of the “pickup artist” or “dating consultant.” The industry has been popularized by Neil Strauss’ excellent memoir, The Game and the VH1 show The Pick-Up Artist, featuring Mystery, probably the best known of these so called “pickup artists” or PUAs. Over the past 10 years this “industry” has spread like cancer, largely via the internet. Just Google “pickup artist,” “PUA,” or “seduction community” to see what I’m talking about.

This industry is populated with a host of so-called “experts” who claim to be able to teach guys how to meet and be successful with women. They charge hundreds if not thousands of dollars for their products, which include DVDs and live, in-person “bootcamps” where they claim they will teach even the most slovenly loser to be a Casanova in a matter of days.

Although neither me nor Charlie want to be associated with PUAs in any way, we have read a lot of their material. Some of them have some valid general points but many give terrible advice and charge an outrageous amount of money for it. In general I think that PUAs are modern day snake oil salesman.

If you are a total disaster with women, you need to clean up your own act and fix yourself before you can learn how to pick up chicks. If you don’t start from a base of self-confidence and a happy and fulfilling life, PUA material is going to turn you into to some kind of weird, creepy social robot. Hell, most of the PUA guys admit that they were social rejects before they found their particular magic formula. The reality is most of the guys are just selling a bunch of useless CDs, DVDs and books that all say the same basic thing in different words for absolutely outrageous prices. In my opinion, you are much better off just getting your shit together (job, finances, health & fitness, hobbies, etc.) and then going out and meeting a lot of people. If you are a cool, grounded, down to earth person, you will meet more than enough chicks through the course of your normal life, especially if you follow our advice and put yourself in the right places at the right times.

To prove my point, let’s take a look at some of these guys. This toolbox calls himself Tyler Durden. Besides the fact that he looks, acts and sounds like a total douchebag, you have to ask yourself whether or not he’s really telling you anything you can’t figure out yourself. Besides using fancy words like “personality matrixes” (the plural is matrices, douchebag) and “irreverence lens” to describe a simple concept like “confidence is sexy,” what does he really have to say? Use a condom? Don’t get fat? Carbs make you fat? Seriously? Who is paying this guy for advice?

Gunwitch

The choice is yours, but I would highly recommend you avoid this whole PUA scene like the plague other than perhaps reading The Game and another book or two of your choice just to get the general overview. Then again, you CAN get most of this retarded “PUA” shit online for free…

Originally published at The Single Dude’s Guide to Life and Travel on February 10, 2011.

At my and Charlie Bushmeister’s blog, Single Dude Travel, we think a lot about how to spend and make money well. Of course it’s good to have money. Lots and lots of it if possible. Making good money makes all of life easier because of all the other opportunities it opens for the single dude. But there are a lot of common mistakes that guys make with money. So without further ado, here are some basic Single Dude Travel rules for money:

Rule 1: Don’t waste your life in a corporate prison slaving away long hours to make someone else rich.

Rule 2: Don’t be a walking wallet. Avoid golddiggers and girls who take advantage of your money.

A common mistake by guys worldwide, and especially Western guys traveling to poorer countries is the assumption that women will be mainly attracted by money. Believe it or not, in our opinion there are more gold diggers in the West and especially America than poorer countries. In America these days, a huge number of hot chicks think that all that is required of them for success is being a hot chick. Ever been to an NBA game? Whenever I go to a game, I always see a bunch of slutty-looking, really hot chicks sitting without dudes on the lower level. Think they’re just huge hoops fans? They just love Chris Paul’s crossover? Of course not, they’re there to try to catch the eye of some player so they can spend his money. Golddiggers are all the same and they’re all over the world, but in a so-called “advanced post-feminist culture” like America, I’m always surprised by how prevalent golddigging is. It’s understandable coming from, oh let’s say, Chalga Sluts in Bulgaria, but Americans?

But who the fuck wants a golddigger? Do you really want to be with some hot chick and know she’s with you just for your money? If so, you better be damn sure you get a pre-nuptual agreement if you get married, because she’s just waiting for the opportunity to divorce you and take a shitload of that money. It’s not just really rich guys who get caught by golddiggers. There are plenty of women who would love to not work and spend the day shopping with their middle class husband’s money. One must be very careful.

Learn to spot the warning signs of golddigging. Does she have a job other than being a stripper? Career aspirations? Does she even pretend to reach for her wallet when the bill gets there? Does she have someone else in her life (ex-boyfriends, “just friends,” etc.) that have bought major things for her like cars or “tuition”? Is she generally just a materialistic bitch who needs to have designer everything? Does she do a lot of coke? Does she run really fast in high heels? Eject!

There has developed in America a whole new type of golddigger personality which I like to term the “professional dater.” These tend to be pretty and young girls in New York, L.A. or other big cities who know that rich guys will try to impress them with money. These girls go out on several dates a week to expensive restaurants with different guys, ’cause let’s face it, they’re barely making enough working at their mid-level jobs at Macy’s to pay their exorbitantly high rent, much less go to nice restaurants. An easy way to avoid these girls is to never take a girl to dinner on a first date. My general plan for dating is:

• Date 1 (optional): Coffee
• Date 2: Drinks and dancing (possible sex).
• Date 3: Cook to Bang and sex.

As you can see, the cost and time commitment starts small and stays very reasonable. If you’ve been dating for a while, then you can take them to dinner later, but not when you’re still trying to sleep with them for the first time. This is actually a point that the PUA dumbasses got right.

I think that there are only two acceptable situations to take on a golddigger. One, if you’re super poor and in debt up to your eyeballs. Then marry her! The joke’s on her then, but if she’s worth anything as a golddigger she’ll sniff that out immediately. So in reality, the only acceptable scenario is if you’re a childless, old, super-rich guy and you know you’re going to die before you can spend all of your money and then a super hot chick shows up. Make sure you cut that bitch out of your will so the joke is still on her. But watch out, she’ll probably poison you or something so she can get back to her abusive boyfriend she’s been seeing the whole time while you were at your weekly dialysis appointment, you old bastard. If I were you I’d just move to a country where prostitution is legal, like Thailand or Costa Rica, and have a different super hot girl every time I took enough Viagra to get it up. All for way less than a hundred dollars a pop! That totally beats getting poisoned by Anna Nicole Smith.

Rule 3: Don’t throw your money around to impress women.

So now that we’ve established that going after golddiggers is a bad idea, how does one use money around the right girls? One must is to NOT think that your money will be enough to attract a woman.

A lot of guys that travel to Eastern Europe, for example, think that all they have to do is go there, throw a little money around, and the local beauties will be so impressed by his Western standard of living and so attracted to his wallet and his ability to “rescue” them their supposedly shitty lives that they will immediately give him a blowjob right then and there, just because he bought bottle service at the club. This assumption is incredibly insulting to these highly educated successful smart beautiful Russian girls who are really just looking for nice, smart, hot, quality guys like us who treat them like real people too and not some commodity that can be bought and sold.

Be different than all the other guys and their arrogant attitude. Don’t take a girl to super expensive restaurants - cook to bang instead. Don’t buy her a bunch of expensive drinks or drugs. Make your gifts cheap and thoughtful. Most importantly, make yourself and your time the valuable commodity, not your wallet. Get your relationships off on the right foot by setting the tone right. The tone is that the object of your affection should want to spend time with you because you’re a fun and exciting guy to be around. She should enjoy being around you because you make her feel good, not because of what she will get from you if she does.

Rule 4: Don’t be cheap.

It’s good to be thrifty, but unless you’re totally poor, it’s OK to pick up the check sometimes. When you’re with other people, pick up the check sometimes. What goes around comes around. If you meet a local wingman, take him out and buy him a drink or two. That kind of investment will pay off. Add a couple more dollars than you owe when the check comes. Buy a girl’s coffee or ice cream. It feels good to be treated! If you find it’s always you buying the ice cream, then it’s time to reevaluate. Maybe you have a golddigger on your hands. But at least it was Rocky Road and not Cristal or some dumbass diamond ring.

What a chump!

Originally published at The Single Dude’s Guide to Life & Travel on February 23, 2011.