The Cost of Things Is More Than Money

One day I was wondering, “What is the worst thing I’ve bought in the last few years?” I’m usually careful about spending money, so I had to think about it. Surprisingly, the answer was one of the cheapest things I own. Let me not mention what exactly it is, but I only used it a few times, and now it sits in a corner collecting dust.

It didn’t cost much money. That’s why it took me so long to think of it as a bad purchase.I was judging my purchases by how many rupees they cost me. But I realized that rupees are not always the best way to measure the cost of something.

Is there a better way to know the real cost?

Yes, I learned this idea from Henry David Thoreau. He once wrote:
“The cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it.” So the real price of something is the amount of your life you had to spend earning the money to buy it.

Think about that for a moment.

Assuming you earn a certain amount of money for every hour you work. If something costs you the equivalent of 40 hours of work, its real price isn't just the amount shown on the price tag. Its real price is five days of your life.

Would you still buy it if the price tag said “5 days of your life” instead of showing the price in rupees?

For some things, the answer would probably be yes.

For example, a comfortable chair that you use every evening for the next ten years might be worth five days of your life. A family holiday that creates memories you keep for the rest of your life might also be worth it.

But many things we buy may not seem worth it if we saw their price in terms of our time. Say, would you really give up a week or even a month of your life for a gadget that you will get bored within a year? Probably not.

But we make these purchases all the time because money hides the real cost. Seeing the price in rupees feels very different from seeing how many hours of our life we had to exchange for it.

But there is a more important thing to remember in this.

Money can come back. Time cannot. You can lose money and earn it again. You can even go broke and eventually become wealthy again.

But the hours you spent earning that money are gone forever. You can never get them back. So, always remember, whenever you exchange your time for money and then use that money to buy something, you are ultimately trading a part of your life for that thing.

What does this really mean to spend, it simply means you should understand what you're really giving up to own it. Instead of asking only, “Can I afford this?”, it can be useful to ask: “Is this worth the amount of my life I have to exchange for it?” That question can change the way you think about almost everything you buy.

Happy spending!