Getting ready to shop the upcoming holiday weekend sales? Maybe you’ve already been busy with back to school shopping. Have you ever thought to calculate how many hours of work those dollars spent just cost you? It’s a powerful tool that might make you step back and reevaluate how you shop and what you buy. I’m sure you have an idea of your gross salary, but lets look at what you actually take home after Uncle Sam, health insurance, and your 401k among other things take their share. Go and get your most recent pay stub. It’s in your organized file cabinet, right? Divide your take home pay by the number of hours the paycheck covers. What did you come up with?
Lets say your result is $20 per working hour. So now we’ll apply that to your purchasing power. Your $6 a weekday morning coffee and muffin habit means you have to work an hour and a half to pay for it. The $60 video game, 3 hours. Those must have designer jeans at $200 a pair cost you 10 hours at work. $460 car payment is 23 hours in the office. That one payment is over half a week of a standard 40 hour work week and we still need a place to live and food to eat.
Want another view? Include the hours you spend commuting to and from work and any other work related activities you do outside of the hours that paycheck covers. Sadly, that $20 just dropped even lower. This isn’t a way to shame you into not spending your money, just a tool that might make you think about how hard you really work to make that purchase. Remember it’s not just a dollar amount, but your precious time spent working to earn that dollar.
Photo: Time Card by flickr user TheGoogly, used under CC license
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My wife and I were in Bed, Bath & Beyond last weekend for a particular set of cups we’ve had our eye on for a while. The place was crawling with people (which usually bothers me – I don’t like to shop with 800 new friends), but I found myself observing them like little mice in a social experiment.
