How many hours of work does that purchase cost? | Hacker News Reader

How many hours of work does that purchase cost?

bargaineering.com

14 pointswangarific21 comments

This is actually a more dangerous way to think about purchases because it presumes that all of one's income is disposable. If one makes $40,000 a year but have $18,000 a year in rent and $6,000 a year in food and other expenses then I can't really just say "well, this $3,000 flatscreen is expensive but it's only really three or four weeks worth of work."

Agreed.

Further, how much would that $20 purchase net you over an invested lifetime, at whatever reasonable rate of return you care to estimate with?

Further, if you buy it with a credit card that you never pay off (so common), how much more are you really paying with essentially a lifetime of credit card interest? And how much would that net you over an invested lifetime?

how much would that $20 purchase net you over an invested lifetime

$27

(Assumptions: You save it at age 20, it grows at 5%, and you spend it when you're 80.)

$373.58? $27 assumes a 0.5% return.

Ugh, you're right. That was embarrassing.

Where do you get a five percent return on investment?

I think the way my grandparents did it is still best: Set aside a certain amount of money from each paycheck that is designated for non-essential purchases. Money from that can be spent however you want. But that's the only account you can dip into, so it doesn't come into conflict with essentials or the rainy day fund. All you have to worry about losing by jackpotting the account is the ability to buy more toys for a while.

If you were to modify the calculator to account for this, the fixed costs should be deducted from salary and divided among all the hours worked?

So if you made $40,000 a year and had $10,000 in fixed costs, you deduct taxes & whatnot, the $10k, and then divide by 2000 hours. This gives you a true "net income after expenses" per hour. Yes?

Sure, but as someone on salary I tend to find disposable income and then calculate that spread evenly over time. AKA I have 1,000$ this month to spend however I like that's 1000/31 = 32$ a day or 1.30$ an hour.

I do this because I can't work more hours to make up for extra spending I can only wait till more money shows up.

I have always thought about my purchases this way, but consider it an additive labour cost. i.e. Do I really want to work an additional four weeks worth of work on top of what I am already doing for this TV? The answer is almost always no. Even for small items, where I could realistically work it off in minutes, the answer is still often no.

Also, whenever possible, I try to employ the two year rule: If I still want something after two years, it is probably worth purchasing. If I have forgotten about it, I would have forgotten about it in my possession as well.

We saw a huge jump in conversions at work when I compared our product's price to a cup of latte on the landing page.

I believe that we make most purchasing decisions based on comparison to another product or a default no product state when even spending a dollar mentally seems like a lot of money. One way to counter the default state is to compare your product to another product the person is very likely to have purchased recently or does not consider expensive.

So many hosting companies compete on price between a buck/month to $9.99/month. Honestly, I think you destroy the price argument for vast majority of users if you just get 'em to think about the $5.99 grande coffee purchase every morning.

Can you tell us what you said exactly on the landing page to make the comparison?

I can't talk much about the latte experiment.

But another one I did was display a dollar bill to really drive home the point that our service is less than one dollar a day. Something about seeing a picture of a dollar bill (versus just reading about it) must make it more real.

More precisely it said "Less than $1/day {small pic of dollar bill} {big equal to sign} Access to xx,xxx potential clients"

"The cost of a thing is the amount of what I call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run." - Henry David Thoreau

Related, an article from the Journal of Consumer Psychology, "If money doesn't make you happy, then you probably aren't spending it right": http://dunn.psych.ubc.ca/files/2011/04/Journal-of-consumer-p...

I applaud the notion of examining the way you spend your money and thinking about whether the stuff you spend money on is really adding value to your life or whether it's just a habit that you've fallen into.

But:

You can save more in one call to a cable company than skipping your morning coffee, even though skipping morning coffee takes more work.

What could possibly be less work than not buying something? Not buying something usually saves both money and time.

And I don't know about his cable company, but getting a human being from any of my utilities on the phone is something I'd count as work.

When we pitch our product to potential customers, one of our big selling points is engineering time savings. It's easier to compare hours of work to purchasing something when:

a.) It's a necessity for a business and

b.) Each hour costs you real money (like engineering time).

The coffee comparison is helpful in day to day life, but it's more about quality than cost. Like hiring someone to clean your house, or paying for a restaurant to make you dinner. You could do it yourself, but you choose to increase your quality of life by paying more to have someone else do it for you.

And when you get a professional, they're often better at it than you are. It's a little like comparative advantage.

Dan Ariely has made an app that does something like this, although instead of looking at the number of hours it takes to pay for something he compares it to what alternatives you could buy, so if you like coffee and you want to book a book you see how many coffees you would have to give up to get the book, similar but equally interesting concept. You can see his app here, its the first one Oranges2Apples http://danariely.com/apps-tools/

I think two important metrics are being left out of the author's perspective:

1. What value do I assign to my personal free time?

2. Does my purchase have the ability to save me time?

For instance, a cup of coffee will cost me 15 minutes of my salaried time PLUS 15 minutes of my personal time (to drive, order, pay, etc). However, perhaps I am a writer and the coffee and coffeeshop environment will help me accomplish 2 hours of writing in 90 minutes. Then the whole thing is a wash.

An intelligent man once told me to evaluate purchases in terms of Mars bars.

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