How many hours of work does this purchase cost you?
Reframe every spending decision in the currency that actually matters: your time.
How the math works
After-tax hourly rate = annual salary × (1 − effective tax rate) ÷ hours worked per year. At a $75,000 salary, 22% effective tax rate, and 2,000 work hours/year, that comes to roughly $29.25/hour — so a $1,200 purchase represents about 41 hours of work, close to a full standard work week. Using after-tax income rather than gross salary matters: the tax portion was never available to spend on the item in the first place, so gross-based rates overstate what a purchase actually costs in real, spendable terms.
"It's only $1,200" and "that's a full work week of my life" are the same fact, stated two different ways — the reframing tends to prompt a more genuine gut-check on discretionary purchases than the dollar figure alone.
Where this doesn't apply
- Highly variable freelance or commission income complicates the clean hours-worked-per-year assumption.
- Non-discretionary purchases (emergency repairs, essential medical care) aren't really what this reframing is for.
- A purchase or tool that itself generates income isn't well captured by a pure cost-in-hours framing alone.