Real Wage

Turn any price into hours of your life — see your true after-tax wage and what purchases really cost you.

Converting a price into working hours comes from Your Money or Your Life, and its point is that the sticker price understates the cost. The honest hourly figure is take-home pay divided by all the hours the job actually consumes, including commuting and the time spent recovering from it.

That number is usually well below the nominal wage, sometimes by a third. Reframing a purchase as hours works because it makes the tradeoff concrete — a specific number of hours of your life against a specific object — where currency is abstract enough to slide past.