It would be nice to have a guide on which exotics to buy and when to buy them.

Something I haven't quite mapped out. I know getting the henchmen as soon as possible with limo and plane is necessary for fast travel between locations. Pretty much all of the mansion, furniture, and decor upgrades are worth it. Vehicles you want to get the fastest ones as early as possible but generally you're going to be blowing money on them to hit the rep cap for Sosa. The investments are generally bad to get based on reputation/cost ratios except for Montana Records which gives 61k rep for 100k and Montana Productions at 1.2m for 443k rep (solid gold bust under Decor is 1m for 350k rep for comparison). Never tried seeing if the 2 million for Montana Holdings was worth it since it does reduce prices for fronts by 10% but the reputation gain from it is only 40k which is really a shitty ratio.

Souzooka was kind enough to give me some notes a while back so I'll just put some of it here for analysis:

Reputation level: Cumulative (Difference between previous and new) (not entirely sure what the surplus here means, probably has to do with reputation gain from story missions naturally)

Reputation level 1: Automatic

Reputation level 2: 150,000 (150,000) (~25,000 - ~30,000)

Reputation level 3: 500,000 (350,000) (~100,000 - ~105,000)

Reputation level 4: 1,000,000 (500,000) (~-381,000 - ~-391,000 SURPLUS)

Reputation level 5: 3,000,000 (2,000,000) (~1,409,000)

Reputation level 6: 6,000,000 (3,000,000) (~1,507,000)

Reputation level 7: 12,000,000 (6,000,000) (~4,992,000)

Reputation level 8: 20,000,000 (8,000,000) (~4,327,000)

Total cost from fronts is $49,985,000 ($1,585,000 of which is Little Cabana and Downtown), that leaves $48,400,000 for the rest, which at 10% equates to $4,840,000 total savings at 10% from the fronts, or $2,840,000 actual after getting Montana Holdings. Is it really worth saving 2.8m over the run? Just really depends on how your drug runs are going. If the savings can stop having to do an entire drug run from the islands it is probably worth doing but otherwise I'm not so sure.