Unfortunately, you’re going to spend the majority of your time staring at a computer screen, working excruciatingly hard and you will have minimal time to really have a social life. So what’s the most efficient way to remain sane? The answer, after too much money wasted over the years, is to run a cost-benefit analysis on your pick-ups. In short, shoot for one night stands, alcohol only meet-ups and only use dates for girls in the 18-21 range that you would allow in your rotation.

One Night Stands: This one is the fastest and most economical as your entire cost should tally to around $40-100. Such as this one. Cheap. At this venue you can shoot for anyone you find attractive and collect phone numbers while filling up your “drink meet up” pipeline. There is no reason to take them out on real dates since you already know they drink alcohol.

Notably, when you go out at night do a quick venue adjustment to your wardrobe. If you know it’s a hipster/dive bar scene, stick with v-necks and well fitted jeans. If it’s in an upper scale scene you’ll suit up and dress a notch above everyone wearing rolled up long-sleeve shirts and 7 for all mankind jeans. Your goal is to stand out just a little bit from the crowd so you’re viewed as interesting.

Drink Dates: This can get slightly more expensive as you want to move to different venues a few times to keep the fun exciting “everything happens in the moment” vibe going. We’ll peg this at ~$100. Since the goal is to continue drinking and dancing as much as possible. The recommended approach is as follows.

• Drink venue, one cocktail each and maybe some small appetizer
• Venue change to dance floor/lounge area (much closer to your apartment)
• Feel the mood change as it hit’s the peak, make intentions clear on dance floor
• Grab shots and leave to your apartment which happens to be ~5 minutes away
• $30 for initial drinks, $15 cab ride, $20 entry to venue, $25 more drinks, $10 cab

“Real Dates“: Since every player will go through a dry spell, you‘re going to run into a few girls worth keeping around during those periods. In that case, you’ll quickly realize American women 25+ years old have priced themselves out of the market! While there are always exceptions to the rule this is a great guideline to have until your game is on lock 24/7/365. To drive the point home, take a look at how quickly expectations rise within a large city as a girl ages.

Expectations by Age

Calculating out a 3 day max date to close for your average player, you find that 21 year olds cap you out in terms of willingness to spend money on a date as the graph below depicts. Basically, as soon as her environment changes, surrounded by tons of guys willing to pay $250+ just to go on a date, her expectations start to skyrocket. In addition, since she’s going to be in your rotation, a weekly or bi-weekly date is going to be next to inevitable.

Before the gripes come in about not needing that much for dates, this analysis assumes you live in a large metropolis where cash is abundant… ie. You should be living in an expensive area because you’re trying to stack cash. Inevitably, she’ll be getting hit on all day by guys trying to buy her affection which has an adverse impact on your bottom-line as well. Bastards.

Conclusion: If you’re in the game long-term… The game of life that is, you want to acquire additional capital on a y/y basis (revenue/investment returns) and increase your net income margin (operating margin expansion). Funny enough, running your life like an actual business is not a bad operating model in the US, you just need to take a step back and realize why your expenses continue to climb, it is usually due to expectations. Keep your expenses flat and one day you won’t even need to compete in this hockey stick expense growth environment. You’ll be living in an area where expectations cap out well below the watermark.