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Calculator

Life cost calculator

Money is traded time. Enter your pay, your real working hours and the price of something you are thinking of buying, and you will see it in the one currency you never get back.

What lands in your account, not what the contract says.

Include commuting, training and the time it takes to switch off. 168 is roughly a 40-hour week.

The total price, including finance charges if there are any.

Life hours it costs

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Your real hourly rate
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Neither figure is truer than the other. Only one is in the unit you actually pay in.

How it works

Two divisions, and that is the whole idea:

real hourly rate = monthly take-home pay / working hours per month
life hours       = price / real hourly rate

The interesting part is the second input. Count only contracted hours and your rate comes out high, so everything looks cheap. Count the commute, the training, the work clothes and the two Sunday-evening hours it takes to stop thinking about Monday, and the rate falls and the numbers change meaning. The second one is the real one.

Assumptions and limits

  • This is a conversion, not a prediction: there are no market or inflation assumptions that could be wrong.
  • The hourly rate uses your take-home pay, so tax is already out. It does not include indirect costs of employment such as transport or childcare.
  • It excludes the purchase's opportunity cost, which is a second layer: $900 invested at 7% for twenty years would have been about $3,480. To see that part, use the compound interest calculator.
  • It is not trying to tell you not to buy. Plenty of purchases still make sense expressed in hours, and knowing which is exactly the point.

Frequently asked questions

How many hours a month should I enter?

The ones you genuinely give to work. A 40-hour week is about 168 a month, but if you commute an hour a day it is 190, and if you take work home, more. The more honest that figure is, the more useful the result, because that is what turns a price into time out of your life.

Isn’t this just a way to feel guilty about spending?

That is not the goal, and used that way it works badly. The original idea, from "Your Money or Your Life", is to make an ordinarily invisible trade visible so it can be chosen. A seventy-five-hour purchase you care about is a good purchase. A seventy-five-hour one you forget in a month is the one this calculation was looking for.

What about purchases that save time?

There the calculation runs in reverse and is well worth doing. A $400 appliance that gives you back two hours a week pays for itself in hours fairly quickly. It is the same reasoning applied to the other side, and it is why this calculator is not an argument for spending less but for spending on something else.

Is what I enter stored anywhere?

No. The calculation runs entirely in your browser and nothing is sent to any server. Your salary never leaves your screen.