This is a pretty good life pro tip, but I feel like the further I progress in my career, the more I justify spending money lol. "Oh, $10 for lunch? No problem, that's just 15 minutes of work". Then I look at my credit card statement and spent like $500 on food

Take off fixed costs first to calculate your "hourly income". You still need to pay taxes and stuff anyways.

(Income - Taxes - Housing - Interest - Insurance)/(hours worked)

It may be less than you think.

This is a good tip. I used it in parenting.

I taught the children how many hours of work it would take to pay for things. They learned that well.

All are responsible adults and not in debt.

Excellent LPT 👍

This might be good but… current car repair = 3 full time weeks for me. Sad knowing this.

I have heard this advice multiple times but I don’t think it works well. I think this way you severely overestimate your budget.

If something costs 1 hour or work, it seems like one eight of a day. In your brain, you could think that you can make 8 of those expenses a day.

In reality, you are probably working from 9 to lunch break to pay rent. Then another couple of hours to pay taxes. And one hour to pay insurances. You are left with one or two hours of time when you are working to earn money you can dispose of freely. And part of it should go to savings for your old age.

So effectively the LPT is ok if you think of an expense in terms of time and then you ALSO know how many minutes you are working for fun money per day, but at that point why don’t you just learn how to do your budget in dollars and get an estimate of your weekly budget for shopping/ dining out/ entertainment, etc.?

Maybe it takes some effort, but it seems to a good investment of your time.

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This worked for me, right up until I got a full-time software development job...

My phones 1000 so that means it was 112 hours at 9 an hour or 6 days

I used Discretionary income:

Discretionary income = gross income – taxes – all compelled payments (bills)

It's total personal income after subtracting taxes and minimal survival expenses (such as food, medicine, rent or mortgage, utilities, insurance, transportation, property maintenance, child support, etc.) to maintain a certain standard of living. It is the amount of an individual's income available for spending after the essentials have been taken care of.

If you only have $160 left over after paying all your monthly bills & living expenses then you're working for $1/hour discretionary income.

This motivated me to ruthlessly beat down my recurring expenses.

It's a good financial habit, but it's also a terribly depressing paradigm.

Only if you have a fairly low wage. I make about €100/hour but only work few hours; this system would make me broke in no time.

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Which governments give you credit and debit cards? Don’t banks do that?

This tip gets posted weekly.

Remember kids, mommy worked 10 hours today so you can have eggs for breakfast

Be careful with this, this is why people with high incomes work instead of being with their family. When you're a lawyer and you bill $1000/hr, you start looking at the opportunity cost of your kid's recital.

First time I mentioned this to the new kid at work you could see his brain making new connections.

A better tip would be to just make more money.

This cost a whole day at work.

Me at work the whole day: 🙄😁🤣😴😎🥂🍜🍔🍟💑🙄🤗😎🤔😴😀

This is also how I decide to buy tools/appliances. Will it save me time or money, and how many uses will it take to save me the money that it cost in either time or dollars.

And use your after-tax income to do the calculation. You might earn $30/hr, but after Social Security, State, and Federal taxes you really only get to spend around $20.

This is bad for people who make a high dollar per hour, you end up spending more

laughs and cries at the same time in Salaried

Cries in Nintendo games here on Brazil's close to 300$ BRL so like, 3 days of my worktime. :(

That way of thinking never worked for me only because I worked in a business where a lot of our pay was tips. One week coffee was minutes the next it was almost an hour. And most of the stories about late parties and sleeping all day are true, so money spent at the bar afterwards was therapy and on the worst nights you didn't care as long as you had cash.

I’ve recently started doing this and it really makes you think haha 😂 I’m a cheapie

Unless you’re well paid with a lot of bills.

Money is what we trade our life for.

This only works until you earn enough money to not think about money. After you need to start comparing products and services that are similar price range and think if it's worth the same personal value.

Once you don't really care about $1k-$2k expense at any given time, these questions start to lose meaning.

This is a great tactic until you look at your grocery bill and realize you’ve spent twenty hours on a week’s worth of groceries and that there was nothing you could do to lower that cost because you still have to feed your children, not to mention that your 80-hour rent payment is due at the end of the week and you’re only offered 36 hours of work a week so that your company doesn’t have to offer you benefits.

I understand where the advice is coming from but with inflation how it is I don’t understand how contextualizing all money as hours worked is going to do anything but start a revolution.

Great advice! Now all I need is money…

I like to divide my spendings in 12 and see how much a product would 'cost' over a year.

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I like to break down the price on usage. Let's say I spend 1000 euros in a good quality bed made to my liking and is expected for it to last ~10 years, so price is ~0.27€/day. Can I afford that to sleep comfortable and get a good rest every day? Yes.

On the other hand, let's say I spend 600 euros in a waterproof jacket but I live in a place where it only rains heavy enough to use it twice per year. Even if it lasts me 10 years, why pay 25 euros per usage?

Another good tip from Dave Ramsey: Pay cash for things. You're far less likely to hand over a physical 10$ bill at a restaurant for some worthless appetizer than you would be to just put it on the card.

Important step here is to know how many hours of work it takes you to get that much "disposable income". Not gross.

I have never even bothered to work out my effective hourly rate.

Funny. I have taken some form of this approach my entire life. Of course today I have a more complex version safety stored in my head but as a kid I used the tic tac scale. The price of something compared to a packet of tic tacs.

In my head now driving to work is more efficient becuase traveling to work in public transportation takes like an hour. Cost me like 10$ give or take. Driving to work and I can park cost me 10$ for parking and a few dollars for fuel each day and 30 mins. I save an hour of my time, back and forth, and I work for 30$ and hour. The savings for public transport is not worth the money.

It is not always raw dollar amount saved that matter but time as well. My mom is obsessed with saving cans and bottles and stuff to recycle for the 10c they give. I did the math and it is more costly for me, and time consuming, to physically haul it all to the place and dump it in the machine one at a time. It is more efficient to acutally work an extra hour. I still give her cans and stuff but and she does it with my brother every few months

Me putting more gas into the car on my way to work than actually getting there on this day

Hours of work = hours of your life. Life is not a dress rehearsal and how much of your life do you trade for money and the things you think you want? Most people seem to live their lives mortgaging the future, and it seems many of our hardships are of our own doing. Try to think of it as doing little things today because you owe it to your future self.

Male sure you note the hours it takes to pay bills and rent. My husband would do this, but forget about how something that only cost 1/2 an hr or 1hrs wage can add up when you only have so many hours of work to spend and over half is life necessities.

I did this when I worked and it made me quit my job. Cause I’d want a drink and I’d think “This is a whole hour of work 🙂”. Only recommend if you have a mid range salary.

I’ve always done this and it really works.

What is better than "how many hours of work something would take if you buy it". Is "how many hours of work would it take you to save enough money to buy it.

Because even with a high salary, your ability to buy stuff drops as your debt load rises. (i. E. Being house poor)

If this works for you then that's great but it doesn't work for me. The biggest thing that's worked for me, that would hopefully help someone else too, is to not be so emotional over your money but instead look at it as numbers. Each dollar needs a job and a place to be (basically a budget) and the key to sticking with this is to not tie emotions with your money.

My friend added a little to this. If your a DIY kind of person and you have an ability to work overtime at your job, consider this, too:

Could I work a few days overtime doing something I'm already trained to do and am comfortable doing to pay someone else who knows what they're doing to do this properly for me?

It doesn't stand well for all circumstances (maybe you're also good at what you're looking into doing, maybe you want to learn something new, maybe you just want the satisfaction of doing it yourself, whatever), but it is a way of looking at it.

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Seriously. The harder you work for it the harder you should save it. Now if only people would do this with calories.

This also worked for calories in and calories out, a candy bar was less appealing when I knew it would take me at least an hour on the treadmill to work it off.

Wow this would help with my disposable income… IF I HAD ANY.

This puts the beef jerky companies out of business

If I did this I would be fucking miserable

Absolutely and all those X$ worth of groceries in Y city should X number of work hours worth of groceries instead

The problem is I can very easily convince myself that I can do 150 hours of work for that thing that I want to buy for my PC

i have been doing this my whole working life without knowing it was an actual concept someone thought of

here's another LPT in the same vein...

delay your purchase.

you might see a thingy and think "wow, it ain't cheap but i just gotta buy that thingy!"

hold up. wait a few days and cool down. think about whether you really need it and whether you can really afford it, and, like this LPT says, how many hours of work it will cost.

i've avoided the purchase of many thingies by delaying a few days, and it's surprising how i soon forget about the thingy

This outdated tip gets posted every month now.

Yep you’re not trading money for stuff you’re trading your time via money

This works. In my retirement I drove a school bus. Started wondering if that that thing I was going to buy was worth getting up at 4 am to crawl into a frozen school bus or not.

as a student, I used to measure things in "units of meals at the cantina".

Or you know what you want to buy and if you can buy it. This is easier than "that vacation costs me 40 hours of work". This LPT isn't good unless you want to convert money into hours all the time.

It's also incredibly depressing. Especially if you start looking at real estate and generally expensive things, like a car or electronics.

Another good trick in the same vein is to look at things in cost per minute/use.

A nice bottle of liquor or a nice shower head might both cost $80, but you'll use the shower head every day while the bottle might last you a few occasions, depending on how much you drink and if you're sharing.

They cost the same in terms of hours worked, but the per use cost of the shower head is pennies while the liquor is dollars.

So equating cost with effort/$... Also may I add, adding on additional expense by paying with credit to satisfy need for immediate gratification to consume is a double (or more) whammy!

Also the other way around for services: repairing a flat tire might be expensive, but it saves me two hours of work and being angry and frustrated

I first started using this when I was debating on buying a video game. Tried it out with a friend and decided $60 isn't so bad if I'm going to get 20-40 hours of time out of it

I came here to say that no, this is a bad bit of financial advice.

I'm also surprised to see your source. The book itself has a LOT more detail going into it.

For example, it's easy to justify eating a $20 lunch because that's just 1 hour of work. So you can justify it every day because you're working 7.5 or 10 hours a day or whatever.

That's not how it works.

That $20, you pay taxes on it.

Then you have your mandatory expenses -- rent, utilities, food. Childcare. Healthcare and medications. There might be lots of mandatory things.

After removing all of that, you might be making $5 an hour from that $20/h that was in your contract.

THAT is the figure that you need to be using for these "This $X is worth Y of my time". Not your gross income!

Using your gross income really only works for a PT job in high school when you have no expenses. A lot of people hear or come up with this when they're in that position, but it doesn't hold water when you're an adult with living expenses.

For most men this logic will leave you broke as soon as you enter a strip club

What I try to do is take it as a whole week pay, so if I make 1,000 for 40 hours and something costs $10 that would be 5.9 hours of my life since there are 168 hours in a week

Combine with the opportunity cost way of thinking for maximum effectiveness.

Imagine if Americans applied this concept to calories.

Oh good, only two hours of work for this stupid expensive hunting vest that I'll use maybe 5 times a year.

Make sure to adjust the hourly amount you make to take out for your cost of living situation

Your Money or Your Life.

alvin hall?

Also remember that 1 hour of work also has the extra time you need to feed yourself (so 1 hour lunch for 8 hours work), and you need to add the sleep time (you sleep about 1-1 so 8 hours sleep for 8 hours of work) and the down time. A better approximation is just taking the time and multiplying it by 3 or 4, since we work 1/3 of the time, and you can look at the other time in your day as simply supporting and recovering for your work time. Unless you have flexible hours, then you can literally pick up another hour of work to pay for a meal out.

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I read this book in high school, and it actually helped me learn that sometimes it's ok to spend money instead of doing everything the hard way. My family was insanely frugal (hence why this book was on our shelf) and it gave me a whole complex around spending money. Like as a teenager in 2012 I was making shirts out of pillowcases from goodwill kind of a complex.

Equating money with time helped me actually break through the guilt I felt and allow myself to spend.

Also, deduct your fix cost like rent, mortgage, utilities, debt payments etc. So if you make 5k / month, but have fix cost of 4k / month, you need to divide your hourly pay by 5.

I have the opposite problem of this now that I make more money. I spent like 1.5 hours making a shelf yesterday in my free time when I could have probably bought one off of Amazon for like half an hour of work.

Its also helpful to realize that "hours of work" are really "hours of you're life you're selling to someone else".

Eating out for lunch is just 20 minutes of being on my phone.

I do the same thing with calories… “did I really run 6 miles so I can throw it away with two IPAs ?”

Only problem is when you make substantial amount of money 20$ anything is nun the less a hour,look up at my receipts door dash 4-5 times filled up the tank oz and some clothes business the rest the month I find myself excessively spending on this idealogy I reckon 40 dollars a day keep the demons away life's to short in my opinion out of a 5 day week. Treat yourself without pulling the credit card out.

Take your monthly take home pay. Subtract your expenses like rent/mortgage/, car payment and insurance, utilities, 401k, etc. Then divide by the number of hours you work monthly.

This will help you make much wiser decisions.

That just makes life fucking depressing. It's har, for example, to understand the true value of a cup of coffee or a jug of milk.

You're work may also be overvalued or undervalued

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This is a great tip. But honestly I just fucking wing it.

I give equivalent of one MacBook Pro each month to my landlord. So an upgrade of my MacBook is not that important.

I clean for a living & my whole adult life I’ve always been like how many toilets 🚽 do I have to clean 🧼 to buy this ???it really does help 🥰

Hmm I look at it a bit different and think avout how much money I'd need to invest in order to gain that back (:

I'm in a lot of credit card debt right now and will probably just cry if I think about this too hard.

I think about this every time I feel the urge to speed or run a yellow/red light when late for work etc. 5 minutes late or 3 days pay… I’m always late!!

This LPT works well when using Cocaine. Ive heard.

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So my last bottle of whiskey was 14 hours of work.

And it's still in the box!

I often use this when I'm contemplating spending money, from going out to eat to something bigger. As I've gotten older, the hours required are fewer. Sometimes the purchase is only a few minutes of work. So then I weigh that time versus the time I would enjoy the expense. If it seems like a good deal, I'll often take it.

You only live once, and as long as I can afford it, I'd rather enjoy my life. That doesn't mean I'm irresponsible with money. But I'm not just living for the future. I don't want to get there and regret not enjoying this time now.

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Better strategy, get a job working so much that you don't have time to spend it. You save even more and often forget to stop and think about how poor you really are. Win-win!

This only works if you make a low hourly.

You can earn your living with 1 finger. For the Nature and humanity, it is much better to consume less material goods and invest more time into evolving as human. The earth needs some regeneration.