The correct way to evaluate a 1000$ phone, a mechanical keyboard with custom keycaps, fantastic coffee machines and barbecues and car parts and designer handbags is to put them in relation to "how many hours do I have to work for this purchase".
If my hourly rate is $20, I might think that a $200 phone is worth 10 hours.
The thing is, the majority of those $20 I make are probably already allocated to things like rent, food, transportation and so on. If those things account for 50% of my expenses, for example, the $200 phone is actually worth 20 hours of my time. (That is, unless all my necessities are already accounted for, and I'm working 10 hours on top of what I usually work to buy the phone.)
It's important for freelancers to account for what is essentially their "operating expenses" when making purchasing decisions.
You could also say your rent et al. are X hours, and watch you don't 'spend more hours' than you work.
So surely it's important to account for the marginal cost of spending money, but not operating expenses?
Even today, I think about the cost of money in my time, since I value doing thinks over owning things. I typically justify buying nice laptops with a three year amortiziation, but cell phones, I buy cheaper ones because I've broken so many....
(And that mechanical keyboard, surely a $100 for something that will last several years while performing your job 10 hours/day is a worthy investment, if you're into that.)
These days, most people, most of the time, can't decide to work 20 hours more in order to afford a new thingy.
If you're on salary, that's it.
If you're an hourly worker with your hours assigned by management, that's it. They are unlikely to assign you overtime, too.
If you're a freelancer with jobs coming in, you might get paid per hour -- but there will be a cap on your hours. Or you get paid per job, in which case there is a cap on the money available, and working faster will enable you to have more free time but not more money.
Very few people always have extra work available for them to do when they decide that they want to work more; those who do tend to either be financially secure or in dire circumstances.
Equating time to money is just a small start for 'feeling' the true cost of an expense, and is just a small part of understanding and managing one's finances.
It's an entire month of work at minimum wage in the USA after taxes.
It's about two weeks of minimum wage work in Australia.
It's a year of minimum wage work for the government in Afghanistan.
It's less than a week of after-tax wages for an average US welder or a Massachusetts high school teacher.
It's two weeks of after-tax wages for a high school teacher in Oklahoma.
It's the monthly rent of a two bedroom apartment in Phoenix. It's less than two weeks' rent of a one bedroom in New York City, and less than one week of a one bedroom in Manhattan.
And that's why we use money to account for these things.
Why would a football player care that he earns in a day yearly wage?
People buy things based on whether they themselves can afford it, not others. It's nice to appreciate your wealth compared to others but i doubt if anyone makes purchase decisions based on other people salary.
I feel like that has a really poor ROI when you look at from a time spent perspective. The amount of extra hours/effort you have to put in to get a small increase chance of a promotion seems a very bad trade. Obviously I don’t have any data to back that up, but I feel that a lot of people invest a lot of effort for a minuscule chance of improved future income.
Another thing about time vs. money: I found that it feels really empowering to turn down jobs that are not a good fit: consciously giving up money when I wouldn't learn from or enjoy a project and allocate the time to spend with friends and family or learning new things.
But people who see everything through the lens of consumption have a long way to go I guess.
"When economic necessity is replaced by the necessity for boundless economic development, >>> the satisfaction of primary human needs is replaced by an uninterrupted fabrication of pseudo-needs <<< which are reduced to the single pseudo-need of maintaining the reign of the autonomous economy." - The society of spectacle
1. https://www.quora.com/Do-most-people-spend-more-when-they-ma...
I rather think that the causality is the other way... if you don't spend money just because you have it, you're going to be wealthier.