Comedian and actress Kathy Griffin tends to be careful when it comes to money. She has no debt, paid $10.5 million for her house in "cash outright" and called her credit score "ridiculous," in a good way, in a recent interview with The Cut.
Still, there's one thing she's consistently willing to splurge on, she says: Traveling by private jet.
To Griffin, paying for a private flight is worth the money because of the peace of mind it gives her. "I have so many threats on my life and I'm going through my mother having dementia and my sister dying," she says. "I'm in a very painful civil suit with a neighbor, I've had a break up after seven years, and I don't know what my future is, so now, I'm the crazy lady who travels with her puppies everywhere."
She acknowledges that not going commercial is an extravagance: "It's definitely a splurge," Griffin says. "The day I have to stop flying private, I will." But for now, Griffin is doing just fine financially: "My net worth is $35 million," she says.
Griffin isn't the only successful person who chooses to travel in style. Billionaire Mark Cuban says buying his own jet is one of the best purchases he's ever made.
"When I first really made a lot of money, I bought a plane," he told Money in 2017. "That was my all-time goal because the asset I value the most is time, and that bought me time."
Although owning the craft is expensive, the price tag is worth it for the "hours and hours" the plane saves him, Cuban says. That's because no matter how much money you have, "time is the one asset we simply don't own," he writes in Men's Fitness.
Billionaire Tilman Fertitta feels the same about the private jet he purchased in his 30s. "It's how I do everything I do, being able to leave when I want to leave, go home when I want to go home," the owner and CEO of Fertitta Entertainment tells CNBC Make It. Without it, he says, "I could not cover near as much ground."
And Bill Gates agrees. When asked in a Reddit AMA in February about how he treats himself, he mentioned "a private jet" he uses sometimes. "It does help me do my Foundation work," he wrote, "but again it is a very privileged thing to have."
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