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Comment by mattmanser | Hacker News Reader

I'm not sure whether you really spend so little on clothes, or have misunderstood the term 'order of magnitude'. If it were 3 orders of magnitude less you would be spending €3.50 on clothes per year. Even 2 orders less is €35, which I find doubtful a grown person can do (in America/Europe at least).

Did you actually mean that? As I'm surprised your socks/underwear don't cost at least €35 per year, eventually they get holes in them. Are you darning?

1 order of magnitude less means dividing a figure by 10. 3 orders of magnitude is diving it by 1,000.

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> As I'm surprised your socks/underwear don't cost at least €35 per year, eventually they get holes in them. Are you darning?

I don't know if there's so much difference between countries in Europe but this year I spent about 6€ on socks at Decathlon and one pair of trousers on sale at JBC for about 10€. That's in Belgium, which is not the least expensive country of Europe. I'm not planning on buying anything else this year.

> As I'm surprised your socks/underwear don't cost at least €35 per year, eventually they get holes in them.

I figure holes in socks are heavily dependent on slipper use. I wear slippers 95% of the time indoors, and my regular-rotation socks that I wear every couple weeks seem to be lasting 15-20 years (so, say, 200-250 days/washes since I wear different socks seasonally) before their elastics fail.

The average is a bit of a weird number... e.g. I buy a couple weeks' worth of underwear at a time, and they last a decade or so. So 9 out of 10 years my cost is $0, but my yearly cost is in the $30 range.

edit: And as noted by another comenter, I hang dry my socks/underwear, which presumably contributes to longevity.

I've had years where I definitely spend less than £100 on clothing, and many years where I've spent almost £0 (I'm not counting running shoes here, or climbing shoes), those are kinda specialist, but day to day clothing definitely very very little.

I loathe clothes shopping.

I'm in the UK but socks cost what, £1 per pair? And boxer briefs maybe £2 per pair.

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