Wednesday, 2nd May 2007 (by J.D.)
This article is about
Spare Change
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Nickel is giving away some big prizes (including two iPods) in celebration of his site’s second anniversary. It’s easy to enter! While you’re there, check out his site.
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A blog about simplicity, sustainability, and reducing consumption. This is a collaborative site from a group of 14 craftbloggers. It covers a wide range of topics from gardening to greenhouse gases. I love it.
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Golbguru discovers the Your Money or Your Life approach: “Whenever you want to buy something, [think] of the number of hours you will have to work in order to earn money [to pay for it].”
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The slight problem with the last strategy (thinking of purchases in terms of hours worked) is that it doesn’t even take into consideration taxes. You may work for $10/hour, but you take home even less than that. So for all those hours in the chart, they should actually be even higher, when you consider taxes.
Additionally, if you can truly save $10 on a purchase you otherwise would have made, you have saved yourself more than an hour’s of worth, because of taxes. (Even more so if you would have had to pay sales tax on that item!)
I’m a member of Weight Watchers (haze away, down 17 lbs since December), and we do this with food too. My membership is about $10/week, and I always add $10 to something I want in a restaurant versus eating healthfully at home. It has to be REALLY good to warrant another $10 and a meeting for me.
“The slight problem with the last strategy (thinking of purchases in terms of hours worked) is that it doesn’t even take into consideration taxes.”
The real problem is, my “work”, like many office workers, basically boils down to sitting in a room all day thinking really hard about stuff. Its not like i’m out there digging ditches or something, which is where that tactic would really pay off (How many feet of ditches would I have to dig to afford that plasma tv?). Right now I just think “All I have to do is sit in my office for one day day, half the time surfing the internet anyway, to buy that wii? …coolletsdoit!!”.