Formula: hours of life = price ÷ real hourly wage
| Example 1 | Real wage: net pay ÷ total job hours |
|---|---|
| Example 2 | FIRE target: annual spending × 25 |
| Example 3 | Cost per use: price ÷ uses |
Long-form, research-backed guides on pricing your life in hours: real net wages, the FIRE movement, product analyses and the psychology of spending.
Every price tag is written in the wrong currency. Dollars are abstract, replaceable and easy to borrow. Hours of your life are none of those things. This guide…
Read the guide →FIRE stands for Financial Independence, Retire Early. Strip away the forum jargon and it is one idea: build a pot of invested money large enough that its return…
Read the guide →Your payslip shows one number. Your job is actually moving far more money than that in both directions, and almost none of it is labelled. That invisible flow i…
Read the guide →Impulse buying is not a character flaw. It is the predictable outcome of a system engineered by people who profit from your speed. Understanding the mechanism i…
Read the guide →A job does not pay you a salary. It pays you a salary minus everything the job requires you to buy, and minus the hours it consumes without paying for them. For…
Read the guide →When you look at your paycheck, you see your nominal hourly rate or base salary. However, that figure is a dangerous illusion. If you make $30 an hour, every si…
Read the guide →The Financial Independence, Retire Early movement has one core insight and endless variations. The insight: once your invested assets can fund your annual spend…
Read the guide →Every purchase has two prices. The first is the one on the tag. The second is everything that money could have become, and it is invisible at the checkout becau…
Read the guide →Financial freedom is not a feeling or a vague ambition. It is a number: the size of the invested portfolio that can fund your life without requiring you to sell…
Read the guide →The four-hour workweek is usually discussed as a philosophy. It is far more useful as arithmetic. Four hours a week is a fixed input; once you fix it, everythin…
Read the guide →Impulse spending is rarely a maths problem. Almost nobody adds up a shopping cart, concludes it is unaffordable, and buys it anyway. What actually happens is fa…
Read the guide →Flagship phones now land between $1,000 and $1,700, and almost nobody experiences that number directly. Carrier financing splits it into $42 a month, trade-in c…
Read the guide →Ask most people what they earn and they will quote a gross annual figure. Ask what they keep per hour of life committed to the job, and the answer is usually a…
Read the guide →Emotional spending is not a character flaw and it does not respond to being told to try harder. It is a loop: a trigger produces discomfort, buying produces rel…
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