Its a neat extension but i think it sort of falls short of illustrating what the affordability/cost in relative proportion to income plus a person’s cost of living or monthly expenses, ie: Can you afford it and if so what’s the proportion of your spendable money does it represent? Presenting cost in a few different ratios would give a better idea of affordability vs income.
Display in units of month’s worth of disposable income, rather than hourly wage?
Couldn’t you just input your disposable income as your income into the extension? So if you make 50k/year, but have 38k/year worth of fixed expenses, then you put in 1k/month as your income.
I was hoping from the title that this was some record of how long an item bought will work, on average. Currently, 80% of my small appliances are broken in some way and I hate the may most manufacturers make these items more costly to repair than to buy again.
That would be much better.
I feel like this, as it is now, actually has the opposite effect of the intended one.
$599 for an espresso machine looks to me like a pretty big expenditure, and one that I’d have to think hard about.
“19 hours” sounds like “oh, that’s just three days of work. I’m working anyway, so I’ll just buy it in three days and I’ve basically earned it.”
If your disposable income is just $60/day, though, then the sign could say “This costs 10 days of not buying any other unnecessary goods, cups of coffee, etc.”
I want your working hours. 5 hours a day?
As @jandrese points out, nothing to stop you hacking your income to get it to do that, anyway.
This is pretty much what i was talking about, obviously your post is much more to the point and eloquent. It’s not really just what your wage is but what you shouldn’t spend (or save) within a certain time frame after taking every other expense into consideration.
but it’s just ONE CLICK to my CREDIT CARD
This is what I used to do to justify buying stuff back in the days before a house and kids… of course, I was also getting paid overtime, so it was more a question of much extra overtime I would need to work to pay it off…
disposable income
And taxes.
Huh. Right. Somehow I conflated 5 day weeks with 5 hour days in my head…
Although if you subtract the time I read BoingBoing and Reddit…
I convert it into beer money. What would I rather have a $1000 expresso machine or $1000 worth of beer?
Hey, I’m retired and don’t earn anything! (you insensitive clod^H^H^H^H browser plug-in)
This would be a very bad thing for me to try. Most of the things I like and buy online (games, music, movies) don’t cost much at all, but require hours and hours to absorb and enjoy. I already have an enormous backlog as it is. I don’t need GOG, Steam, and Gold Box sales telling me that 100-hour role-playing games only cost a few minutes of work.
This topic was automatically closed after 5 days. New replies are no longer allowed.
