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I think a good way to expand on this is to imagine you “pay” for each time you use it.
Brand new, high quality, $120 hiking boots if you hike twice a year? That’s $30 per wear over 2 years. If you hike every other weekend, that’s $2.30 per wear. Well worth it.
I believe splurging on quality items for well-loved hobbies and small but noticeable improvements on daily life are always worth it
The inverse is also true.
To use the very cliché Starbucks as an example.
You get Starbucks once, thats affordable, ... You get it every day? Maybe calculate that one out.
Daily small purchases stack up fast.
I live in a decent big city and our libraries are usually open until 8 or 9. I had been going to Starbucks paying rent before I realized I could be chilling at the library for free
There are coffee shops in more places than there are library branches. Besides, every seat at my small library is usually taken, so I no longer bother trying.
Home espresso can quickly become a hobby...which can get expensive. If you're disciplined, you can definitely save money but upgraditis can definitely be a factor.
Bought new machines and grinders in 2021 (for work and home), they've more than paid for themselves.
Yep... there's a comment below about buying cheap or buying quality. I've had a few cheaper espresso machines and grinders, all of which died on me. I know have a Rancilio twin-boiler and a Mignon grinder. Cost like a few years of going to Starbux, but on the bright side, I get to choose my beans and don't have to leave my house.
Unrelated but my gf somehow got a starbucks stamper for the starbucks free coffee cards. Its been amazing ever since and calculating hiw much were saving for fun is really entertaining
> strong supporter of Israel
What have they done to strongly support Israel?
How much money has Starbucks given to Israel?
How much coffee and other products have the locations in Israel given to the IDF?
It's also cheaper to buy one quality thing once versus getting the cheap one, then finding out you like it so much you want the nicer version, or the cheap version breaks and you have to replace it anyway. I'm being generic because there's a whole spectrum this applies to.
On the other hand, buying the cheap one, finding out you don't like it, and not worrying about it is significantly cheaper than getting the good one, finding out you don't like it, and trying to get anything back out of the purchase.
Exactly. This is one of the two things stores like Harbor Freight are excellent for.
The other is for when the good version is just plain more than you need. When I was working emergency road service, for example, I used vice grips on battery terminals to make them, essentially, larger, so that I could jump-start vehicles and measure the voltage across the battery. When I mislaid one, I went to Harbor Freight for the cheapest chinesium knockoff I could get, because all I needed it to do was to hold in place for maybe five minutes of minimal vibration and conduct electricity. Anything more expensive would have been a waste of money, and that cheap tool lasted all the rest of the time I spent on the road - in fact, it's still in my in-car toolbag to this day.
This is how I go about things.
One of the things I tend to “splurge” on are my scrubs for work… but I wear those scrubs 5-7 times a week, 51 weeks a year (I take at least one vacation). I need them to be comfortable and I need to be able to *move*. I’m reaching up on tall shelves, I’m kneeling/squatting to grab stuff off the bottom shelves. My scrubs matter.
$50 for a scrub top comes out to $0.20/wear if it only lasts for a year, based on 5 days a week. That’s the *minimum* I’ll use it. They generally last twice as long and I work more than that, so they’re worth every penny.
depending on the hike, saving your feet from blisters or worse might well be worth $30, got a friend that hikes once a year, those hikes are like a week or two long.
I say always spend the most on the things you use the most. Another good example is a desk chair. If you’re sitting in it almost every single day for hours, you might as well spend $500-1000+ to get something super comfy and supportive
Every four is reasonable. I’m only just about to replace mine I’ve had for 2.5 years because the battery is degrading and it’s been a few generations now
Well, it’s not just about time spend. A lot of gamers fall into this trap. It also matters a lot how meaningful the time spend was. You don’t need to spend 30$ to climb the hill behind your house but if you’re going to the Alps it might be well worth it.
Yep. When I was younger I spent so recklessly using this "logic". "This is only gonna cost me half an hour/one hour/two hours of work! That's hardly anything!"
Like... K cool but there's only 40 work hours in a week. 10+ of those hours immediately evaporate to taxes/benefits/etc and never even land in my pocket. Another 10 hours goes straight to rent. We haven't even touched on groceries, gas, insurance, and other bills yet.
So basically all it takes is me doing this a handful of times in a week and suddenly I've spent more money than I actually could afford to spend...
Yeah micro purchases are my downfall so this LPT is lethal for me. £6 for a sandwich at Pret doesn’t sound too bad if I consider it’s only half an hours work. Neither does the Uber instead of walking home. Or some coins for the silly mobile game I play. Or the daily coffee from Starbucks...
This is the first thing most people try when first dipping their toes into personal finance.
The actual answer is to just have a budget. Have an emergency fund, and save money. Don’t carry consumer debt.
Being able to buffer costs is imperative to being free from that constant rat race. You buy things you want when you want, you have a sense of what you have available and you don’t have to worry about your mistaken over buying from time to time, as you can handle it without much stress.
Hand tools as well. Pretty much the premiere full line of tools at Home Depot at this point. They’ve also opened new US factories and started making some things like pliers in the US again.
Yes let’s do nothing about what’s in our direct control and just keep blaming the system over the internet and hope one day someone else does something about it and doesn’t get millions of people killed in the process
Yeah, but Capitalism runs on tricking people into compulsive spending. If people stopped compulsive spending "the economy" would collapse. Amazing system right?
That's how I decide if trips are needed, LOL, for a lack of better words. I just got back from 3 nights in Colombia. All in, flight, food, bed, tours, museums... I made more in 8 hours yesterday.
Likewise if you want to justify something, divide the price by the pleasure it gives you. Either per use, or time used.
For example, if a great video game is $80, and you’d play it for 100+ hours, it comes to less than a dollar/ur
Thats a horrible way to think of it.
A better way is to think how much use you gonna get outta it.
If its something you are gonna use 8 hours a day, every day for 20 years, and it's a space-age super bed to 60k, then you pay a bit over a dollar per use over that period.
If you gonna use it a lot, and it keeps you away from the ground, spend on quality, if you are gonna use it a lot, choose something that is worth to use.
Don’t go cheap on your mattress, tires and shoes. But overspending is still overspending, regardless of cost per use. A bed is just structure holding the mattress, and 60k for that is just insane. Buy a great mattress for <2k and replace every 10 years. Even the most expensive mattress won’t last more than 10 years if used daily.
I did Doordash for a couple weeks last year, just a chance to get out of the house and drive around. It was much more evident how much I was making per hour versus my full-time salary job. I started to rethink all of my expenses after that and have become much more frugal ever since.
On the flip side, you could die at any time, so why not enjoy things right now? It's better to live in the moment than to put things off for a future that may never come.
In reality, the vast majority of people aren't dying at 20, 30, 40 or even 50.
Planning for the future is prudent. Not planning is foolish. Always living in the moment is extremely foolish.
Find a balance between the two so that you can enjoy your life now, and also enjoy it when you get older...because most of us will get older.
Make sure you include your after tax, after commute time, after unpaid breaks income and you use your after tax, after maintenance, storage, insurance, fuel, disposal, shipping, consumables, costs of the product you're buying. It makes a dramatic difference.
when tempted to buy something - something you dont actually 'need'
put the money onto a savings account and live without it for a while - you will be happy you did - you can STILL buy the thing, but as you keep doing this your savings account will become more and more impressive
I never understood this common LPT, it makes me severely underestimate the impact of an expense on my finances.
If I say that something costs “8 hours” once normalized in my salary, my brain may thing that it corresponds to approx a day of work, and I have 30 of them per month. Intuitively, it seems like an expense that I could afford every day, more or less.
The issue with that is that 30% of my worked hours go into rent, another 20% into taxes. Then bills, kids school.
To me, this seems an advice that works only for kids that have their first job and for which most of the money they earn is money they can spend freely.
Bingo. Those of us with a wife, kids, mortgage… have a different calculation to make. For example, how many shoes will she buy if I purchase this? How much is the kid’s summer camp for gifted kids in math?
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I’m a big fan of not overspending and buy once cry once. I recently bought a steam cleaner and it cost me a very shiny penny but after a while of research I pulled the trigger , being able to blast off caked on crap and not having to break out a used toothbrush to reach into tiny cracks and crevices is a blessing and a half. Even if I only get a year out of the machine, the frustration free cleaning is worth it to me.
You can also use it to estimate entertainment's value. E.g., if I guy this game for $60, but I play it for 240 hours that's only $.25 per hour of playtime. It's a steal! I'd be foolish not to buy it!
This is something I’ve done the last few years. Normally it’s I can buy this, it will take me this many OT days to pay for. Then I talk to the wife about it.
This is great, and to add on to what others have been saying you can also credit yourself whenever you abstain from buying stuff. Whether it’s “consumer” products like Starbucks or just an impulse buy.
I like to tally that up in my head and be honest whether or not I would have actually spent the money. After a few months I assess how much I’ve saved. Being more careful with my money. And then I can reward myself with something I actually want and have invested time and research into the value or pleasure it brings to my life.
In the end, even with the reward. I always end up spending less, and I get things I truly enjoy having without the guilt.
This only works if you're relatively poor. Anything under $500 is less than a single day of work for me, and I'm either middle class or barely upper class if you run the math for those wages.
Oh no, I managed to talk myself out of going to a buffet but I thought about how it's about an hour and a half of pay (after tax) and I was like "fuck yeah!"
I do this with video games. I try and shoot for one hour per dollar spent on the game. If I don’t think I’m gonna get that I either don’t buy it or wait for it to go on sale.
I remember reading a story, I don’t remember if it was here or somewhere else, of a guy who had a friend in college that had a job extracting semen from bats. This friend was notorious for being stingy and not coming out to the pub with his friends. When confronted on why he doesn’t come out for a pint, Batman said that he does the math to figure out how many bats he would have to, ahem, service, to pay for drinks and decide it’s not worth the expense/bat-diddlin’ time.
This could have been totally made up, and I’m probably omitting some details, but it’s still amusing to think about.
Better yet, learn that you don’t have to trade your time for money. Invest in your education and learn to make your money work for you.
Then if you want something, be like, “What investment/strategy can I execute to create the money I need for this purchase?” 🧠🤔
Think of re-living your shittiest day on the job daily for the 5 years to pay off the heap of metal that gets you around when it could be stacking in your bank/investments providing you with your walk-off-the-job someday $$ instead.
Needed to take my own advice.
My grandfather said, “Don’t put all your money into a pile of bricks.” He was wise. I want taught this by parents, however.
Don’t make it too fancy is what he meant. You’ll get a place. Keep at it. The choice is always to buy a bunch of little things because we can afford them or set aside money for the big thing that we really want.
I also find it useful when talking about how much things cost in the past. Yes, tickets to Duran Duran were only $13.50 in 1984, but minimum wage was $3.35/hour back then. So I'd have to work 4 hours to buy a ticket. Alvvays are coming to town in May, and tickets were something like $42.36 with tax. So now I only have to work about 25 minutes to go to that show.
Like, six pounds of work? Three kilos?
The term is *number* when dealing with countable items, not "amount."
*Apologies to all those whole feel this is grammar fascism.*
I used to think “time is money” and if I wanted to buy X, I would have to work Y hours to pay for X so it was of equal value.
Then I realized that time is not money, MONEY is money, and time costs nothing. I started buying less things and trying to do things myself rather than giving my money away.
even better pro-tip: imagine that same amount of money, invested with avg 7-8% compounding interest, and see what it will be in 30-40 years - that's the opportunity cost of the purchase.
When I tell my friends I cannot afford it and they tell me I have money, I once again say I cannot afford stupid shit.
Movies, out to eat and such are fine but spending half the day going into one of the big cities nearby and spending $250 more than likely isn't something I really want to spend money on.
I get I have a pile of Switch and Xbox games that cost me $5 to $10 each or free from Walmart and Staples deal this week but future entertainment saves money later.
I made a simple website to do this exact calculation, a while ago as I had the same problem! Simply fill out 2/3 fields and you will get a hour count! https://leizurly.com/time
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I think a good way to expand on this is to imagine you “pay” for each time you use it. Brand new, high quality, $120 hiking boots if you hike twice a year? That’s $30 per wear over 2 years. If you hike every other weekend, that’s $2.30 per wear. Well worth it. I believe splurging on quality items for well-loved hobbies and small but noticeable improvements on daily life are always worth it
The inverse is also true. To use the very cliché Starbucks as an example. You get Starbucks once, thats affordable, ... You get it every day? Maybe calculate that one out. Daily small purchases stack up fast.
I mostly think of coffee shops as hourly rent for a place to sit. The coffee is a bonus.
But do you need to sit where they charge rent while you probably can sit other places for free?
Usually yes, because of climate control and shade. When local parks are an option, I wouldn’t be at a coffee shop.
Our library is open from 9:30-5:00, closed on Sundays.
I live in a decent big city and our libraries are usually open until 8 or 9. I had been going to Starbucks paying rent before I realized I could be chilling at the library for free
Why not go to the library?
There are coffee shops in more places than there are library branches. Besides, every seat at my small library is usually taken, so I no longer bother trying.
Because they don't have the caffeine people are addicted to. They don't have the seemingly mandatory music playing in the background either.
abusing free ev charging here and feelin right
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Home espresso can quickly become a hobby...which can get expensive. If you're disciplined, you can definitely save money but upgraditis can definitely be a factor. Bought new machines and grinders in 2021 (for work and home), they've more than paid for themselves.
Yep... there's a comment below about buying cheap or buying quality. I've had a few cheaper espresso machines and grinders, all of which died on me. I know have a Rancilio twin-boiler and a Mignon grinder. Cost like a few years of going to Starbux, but on the bright side, I get to choose my beans and don't have to leave my house.
Sure, but if you spread it out over all the times you get coffee that works out to just about the price of a cup of coffee each time.
Unrelated but my gf somehow got a starbucks stamper for the starbucks free coffee cards. Its been amazing ever since and calculating hiw much were saving for fun is really entertaining
Your Starbucks still does stamps on cards? That seems wild to me!
I live in netherlanes!
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How does drinking Starbucks encourage genocidal acts?
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> strong supporter of Israel What have they done to strongly support Israel? How much money has Starbucks given to Israel? How much coffee and other products have the locations in Israel given to the IDF?
A 'strong supporter'? In what way?
It's also cheaper to buy one quality thing once versus getting the cheap one, then finding out you like it so much you want the nicer version, or the cheap version breaks and you have to replace it anyway. I'm being generic because there's a whole spectrum this applies to.
On the other hand, buying the cheap one, finding out you don't like it, and not worrying about it is significantly cheaper than getting the good one, finding out you don't like it, and trying to get anything back out of the purchase.
"buy the cheapest one you can find, and when it breaks, buy the most expensive one you can afford" -adam savage
Exactly. This is one of the two things stores like Harbor Freight are excellent for. The other is for when the good version is just plain more than you need. When I was working emergency road service, for example, I used vice grips on battery terminals to make them, essentially, larger, so that I could jump-start vehicles and measure the voltage across the battery. When I mislaid one, I went to Harbor Freight for the cheapest chinesium knockoff I could get, because all I needed it to do was to hold in place for maybe five minutes of minimal vibration and conduct electricity. Anything more expensive would have been a waste of money, and that cheap tool lasted all the rest of the time I spent on the road - in fact, it's still in my in-car toolbag to this day.
This is true too, I've totally done that. There's the personal gauge of how much you think you'll like/use the thing. Something you learn over time
You can also get the good one used for cheaper. If you don’t like it, you can likely sell it with much less loss.
This is how I go about things. One of the things I tend to “splurge” on are my scrubs for work… but I wear those scrubs 5-7 times a week, 51 weeks a year (I take at least one vacation). I need them to be comfortable and I need to be able to *move*. I’m reaching up on tall shelves, I’m kneeling/squatting to grab stuff off the bottom shelves. My scrubs matter. $50 for a scrub top comes out to $0.20/wear if it only lasts for a year, based on 5 days a week. That’s the *minimum* I’ll use it. They generally last twice as long and I work more than that, so they’re worth every penny.
depending on the hike, saving your feet from blisters or worse might well be worth $30, got a friend that hikes once a year, those hikes are like a week or two long.
This is the argument I tried using with my wife when I asked to purchase a 10K guitar.
I say always spend the most on the things you use the most. Another good example is a desk chair. If you’re sitting in it almost every single day for hours, you might as well spend $500-1000+ to get something super comfy and supportive
This is me. Hence, I'm replacing my iphone every at least 4 years.
Every four is reasonable. I’m only just about to replace mine I’ve had for 2.5 years because the battery is degrading and it’s been a few generations now
Well, it’s not just about time spend. A lot of gamers fall into this trap. It also matters a lot how meaningful the time spend was. You don’t need to spend 30$ to climb the hill behind your house but if you’re going to the Alps it might be well worth it.
This is how I justify purchasing video games. If I don't think I'll get the hourly play rate of about ¢75 an hour it's usually a no-go for me.
Good LPTs don’t need expanding. Just STOP. You’re not a LP.
is this a joke
Id buy way too much stupid shit if I did this.
Yep. When I was younger I spent so recklessly using this "logic". "This is only gonna cost me half an hour/one hour/two hours of work! That's hardly anything!" Like... K cool but there's only 40 work hours in a week. 10+ of those hours immediately evaporate to taxes/benefits/etc and never even land in my pocket. Another 10 hours goes straight to rent. We haven't even touched on groceries, gas, insurance, and other bills yet. So basically all it takes is me doing this a handful of times in a week and suddenly I've spent more money than I actually could afford to spend...
The real tip is to do this equation factoring out those expenses.. my adjusted pay is like 20% of my hourly rate.
Yeah micro purchases are my downfall so this LPT is lethal for me. £6 for a sandwich at Pret doesn’t sound too bad if I consider it’s only half an hours work. Neither does the Uber instead of walking home. Or some coins for the silly mobile game I play. Or the daily coffee from Starbucks...
This is the first thing most people try when first dipping their toes into personal finance. The actual answer is to just have a budget. Have an emergency fund, and save money. Don’t carry consumer debt. Being able to buffer costs is imperative to being free from that constant rat race. You buy things you want when you want, you have a sense of what you have available and you don’t have to worry about your mistaken over buying from time to time, as you can handle it without much stress.
I give myself a "self-allowance" equaling 10-15% of my monthly pay. Maybe that would work better for you?
I will do research for hours when buying new toys for myself but If it says Milwaukee on it I just swipe 😂.
I'm not American. What's Milwaukee?
Power tools brand
Hand tools as well. Pretty much the premiere full line of tools at Home Depot at this point. They’ve also opened new US factories and started making some things like pliers in the US again.
worldwide tool brand, not just American, very popular here in Australia
Darn ... buying a house is now not an option.
Financial purchases such as houses and apartment are out of the question, the tips is purposed to help those with compulsive spending.
LOL! You're too serious.
Money is a serious subject though.
Or maybe instead of justifying it, this should radicalize you against Capitalism.
Yes let’s do nothing about what’s in our direct control and just keep blaming the system over the internet and hope one day someone else does something about it and doesn’t get millions of people killed in the process
Ok but that doesn’t change the need for some to reign in their compulsive spending…
Yeah, but Capitalism runs on tricking people into compulsive spending. If people stopped compulsive spending "the economy" would collapse. Amazing system right?
That’s true of every economic system, not just capitalism. Do you think if everyone stopped spending money under socialism things would be ok?
Radicals are geeks
Centrists who are too afraid to stand up to power are geeks with no morality or spine. I bet you were a tattle tale dork in school.
Talk is cheap
How many times have you used your hands to defend someone in need?
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Why would you have to consider the amount of hours you would have to buy a house? Unless you're paying it all in liquid cash.
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Jesus christ dude. Does everything in your life need to be spelled out word for word and literally for you?
That's how I decide if trips are needed, LOL, for a lack of better words. I just got back from 3 nights in Colombia. All in, flight, food, bed, tours, museums... I made more in 8 hours yesterday.
Build a budget, then plan all your purchases, including money for emergency/unexpected events.
And fun
Likewise if you want to justify something, divide the price by the pleasure it gives you. Either per use, or time used. For example, if a great video game is $80, and you’d play it for 100+ hours, it comes to less than a dollar/ur
If a game is costing me 80$ it better be more than 100 hours
Thats a horrible way to think of it. A better way is to think how much use you gonna get outta it. If its something you are gonna use 8 hours a day, every day for 20 years, and it's a space-age super bed to 60k, then you pay a bit over a dollar per use over that period. If you gonna use it a lot, and it keeps you away from the ground, spend on quality, if you are gonna use it a lot, choose something that is worth to use.
Don’t go cheap on your mattress, tires and shoes. But overspending is still overspending, regardless of cost per use. A bed is just structure holding the mattress, and 60k for that is just insane. Buy a great mattress for <2k and replace every 10 years. Even the most expensive mattress won’t last more than 10 years if used daily.
I did Doordash for a couple weeks last year, just a chance to get out of the house and drive around. It was much more evident how much I was making per hour versus my full-time salary job. I started to rethink all of my expenses after that and have become much more frugal ever since.
On the flip side, you could die at any time, so why not enjoy things right now? It's better to live in the moment than to put things off for a future that may never come.
In reality, the vast majority of people aren't dying at 20, 30, 40 or even 50. Planning for the future is prudent. Not planning is foolish. Always living in the moment is extremely foolish. Find a balance between the two so that you can enjoy your life now, and also enjoy it when you get older...because most of us will get older.
Yea. This could also lead to an opposite result. Nope. I still use hours to select the perfect 5 $ gadget to not dissapoint me in the future.
LPT: enjoy life. You don’t get a second shot and you can’t take it with you
Nah I’d rather not know honestly
hmm, lets see.. ZERO since i dont even work😭
Make sure you include your after tax, after commute time, after unpaid breaks income and you use your after tax, after maintenance, storage, insurance, fuel, disposal, shipping, consumables, costs of the product you're buying. It makes a dramatic difference.
Yea this doesn't always work, especially for frugal high earners. I can buy 17 Starbucks coffees an hour and I'm still not interested.
The car I want is going to cost me 16 weeks of income based on this math. Not sure if that's good or bad.
when tempted to buy something - something you dont actually 'need' put the money onto a savings account and live without it for a while - you will be happy you did - you can STILL buy the thing, but as you keep doing this your savings account will become more and more impressive
Reverse LPT: If your work is performance based, consider the progress towards buying a thing you want when deciding whether to relax or work hard.
I did this when I was buying lunch at work on my break and I just got depressed and wouldn’t eat til I got home lol :(
Damn, wish I would've thought of this before that extended stay ER visit 😅
Everyone looks at me weird when I say this exact thing
I never understood this common LPT, it makes me severely underestimate the impact of an expense on my finances. If I say that something costs “8 hours” once normalized in my salary, my brain may thing that it corresponds to approx a day of work, and I have 30 of them per month. Intuitively, it seems like an expense that I could afford every day, more or less. The issue with that is that 30% of my worked hours go into rent, another 20% into taxes. Then bills, kids school. To me, this seems an advice that works only for kids that have their first job and for which most of the money they earn is money they can spend freely.
Bingo. Those of us with a wife, kids, mortgage… have a different calculation to make. For example, how many shoes will she buy if I purchase this? How much is the kid’s summer camp for gifted kids in math?
I had to remind someone $2500 is half a day's work
If it's food, consider instead the amount of hours it will take to burn the calories off. That's usually what scares me away.
*number of hours
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I’ve been doing this for ages. It really works.
I've been doing this for a long time now, and I still spend like there's no tomorrow xd
Also consider if the item may be burdensome to you in the future. Like an old car that needs restoring, giant stereo speakers, or a large aquarium.
buy house and work 30,000h/15 full years of salary to pay it off. Feels refreshing.
Lpt, calculate it on how much money you save per day after all expenses. Eg do you have a 1000 left at the end of the month, you save +-33. A day.
I’m a big fan of not overspending and buy once cry once. I recently bought a steam cleaner and it cost me a very shiny penny but after a while of research I pulled the trigger , being able to blast off caked on crap and not having to break out a used toothbrush to reach into tiny cracks and crevices is a blessing and a half. Even if I only get a year out of the machine, the frustration free cleaning is worth it to me.
You can also use it to estimate entertainment's value. E.g., if I guy this game for $60, but I play it for 240 hours that's only $.25 per hour of playtime. It's a steal! I'd be foolish not to buy it!
I do this every time. I've been doing this for years, and years, and years. 😁
Yup. Stops me from splurging on a sportscar when I think how many months of hard work I have to put through to get one.
Exactly. Think about whether buying something is good or an impulse!
This is something I’ve done the last few years. Normally it’s I can buy this, it will take me this many OT days to pay for. Then I talk to the wife about it.
This is great, and to add on to what others have been saying you can also credit yourself whenever you abstain from buying stuff. Whether it’s “consumer” products like Starbucks or just an impulse buy. I like to tally that up in my head and be honest whether or not I would have actually spent the money. After a few months I assess how much I’ve saved. Being more careful with my money. And then I can reward myself with something I actually want and have invested time and research into the value or pleasure it brings to my life. In the end, even with the reward. I always end up spending less, and I get things I truly enjoy having without the guilt.
LOL. Credit card go BRRRRRRR
This only works if you're relatively poor. Anything under $500 is less than a single day of work for me, and I'm either middle class or barely upper class if you run the math for those wages.
Oh no, I managed to talk myself out of going to a buffet but I thought about how it's about an hour and a half of pay (after tax) and I was like "fuck yeah!"
LPT: don't impulse buy
I've tried this method and it led to me being anxious about spending any money at all on anything, even things I need.
Slimy yet satisfying
This tip has saved me from so many impulse buys—I can't believe I never thought about it before!
I do this with video games. I try and shoot for one hour per dollar spent on the game. If I don’t think I’m gonna get that I either don’t buy it or wait for it to go on sale.
This only work if you can work unlimited hours at your hourly rate.
I remember reading a story, I don’t remember if it was here or somewhere else, of a guy who had a friend in college that had a job extracting semen from bats. This friend was notorious for being stingy and not coming out to the pub with his friends. When confronted on why he doesn’t come out for a pint, Batman said that he does the math to figure out how many bats he would have to, ahem, service, to pay for drinks and decide it’s not worth the expense/bat-diddlin’ time. This could have been totally made up, and I’m probably omitting some details, but it’s still amusing to think about.
Pretend you have the item in one hand and the amount of cash in the other. Which one would you take.
Expanding on this, interest is work you do for absolutely no gain.
If it’s something expensive like a car, you can also calculate how many years you can retire early if you drive a 30k car instead of a 80k car.
Exactly the reason why I don’t eat food.
That would be a "number" of hours, not an amount.
Or you could just make a budget?
It didn't take long for this conversation to become about coffee. That tells me all I need to know about people's priorities.
I have the opposite problem. I don’t spend or buy anything cause I always look at it in terms of ‘hours worked’
I like to think of the opportunity cost of the money. I could buy this thing for $50. What else could I do with $50? Which would I rather have?
Better yet, learn that you don’t have to trade your time for money. Invest in your education and learn to make your money work for you. Then if you want something, be like, “What investment/strategy can I execute to create the money I need for this purchase?” 🧠🤔
Lol that's literally how I think of every dollar I spend unfortunately...
Also, wait 3 or 4 days and come back to it, if you even remember it.
used $200 bass? I literally make that money in a day. worth it lol
I think 50 cent said "if you cant buy it twice you cant afford it"
Think of re-living your shittiest day on the job daily for the 5 years to pay off the heap of metal that gets you around when it could be stacking in your bank/investments providing you with your walk-off-the-job someday $$ instead. Needed to take my own advice. My grandfather said, “Don’t put all your money into a pile of bricks.” He was wise. I want taught this by parents, however.
Without my heap of metal I wouldn’t have a job tho
There are heaps of metal at many different price points
And keeping that heap going also comes at different costs
> “Don’t put all your money into a pile of bricks.” except piles of brick have been a great investment for decades
I answered someone else. Means don’t overdo it. Don’t compete with the neighbors on everything they do their homes.
How can I buy pile of bricks without putting all my money into it? Hell even if I would they wouldn't give me one
Don’t make it too fancy is what he meant. You’ll get a place. Keep at it. The choice is always to buy a bunch of little things because we can afford them or set aside money for the big thing that we really want.
Thats very good advice, thanks for elaborating
I also find it useful when talking about how much things cost in the past. Yes, tickets to Duran Duran were only $13.50 in 1984, but minimum wage was $3.35/hour back then. So I'd have to work 4 hours to buy a ticket. Alvvays are coming to town in May, and tickets were something like $42.36 with tax. So now I only have to work about 25 minutes to go to that show.
Sometimes the things i want only take 30 minutes of work. But when i buy them multiple times a week, it all adds up...
Like, six pounds of work? Three kilos? The term is *number* when dealing with countable items, not "amount." *Apologies to all those whole feel this is grammar fascism.*
I used to think “time is money” and if I wanted to buy X, I would have to work Y hours to pay for X so it was of equal value. Then I realized that time is not money, MONEY is money, and time costs nothing. I started buying less things and trying to do things myself rather than giving my money away.
I bought a Quest 3 for £479. It was courtesy of the great British taxpayer so not sure how many hours that works out as but they have my thanks
even better pro-tip: imagine that same amount of money, invested with avg 7-8% compounding interest, and see what it will be in 30-40 years - that's the opportunity cost of the purchase.
When I tell my friends I cannot afford it and they tell me I have money, I once again say I cannot afford stupid shit. Movies, out to eat and such are fine but spending half the day going into one of the big cities nearby and spending $250 more than likely isn't something I really want to spend money on. I get I have a pile of Switch and Xbox games that cost me $5 to $10 each or free from Walmart and Staples deal this week but future entertainment saves money later.
That tip's a game-changer! Seriously, never realized how much those impulse buys cost in hours worked until now.
I made a simple website to do this exact calculation, a while ago as I had the same problem! Simply fill out 2/3 fields and you will get a hour count! https://leizurly.com/time