My Framework for Buying Stuff
By: George Creasy
Tags: Money, Life, Money Management, Framework, WFH

A couple of weeks ago I talked about what is effectively my framework for how I spend my money, this week I’m doing what is effectively the inverse: talking about the framework I apply for when I spend money.

The good news? It’s a pretty simple framework, which many people would say is just common sense. The bad news? It’ll still take >500 words of me rambling for me to finish this blog. Let’s get into it.

The framework is this: For any purchase big or small, compare the cost of the thing to the value that you’ll get from the thing multiplied by the number of uses of the thing that you will get. IF the value is bigger than the cost, then buy the thing. Simple, right?

And as much as this isn’t supposed to be exact math, let’s do some. I pay $69.99 a year for Disney Plus (aside: whether you pay annually or not, you should always consider subscriptions by their annual fee, as it weirdly seems like a lot more than just “6.99 a month” or whatever, and you can think of value more accurately). If I think that I’ll end up watching old Star Wars/Marvel/Pixar/Disney movies that I’ve seen before 25 times in a year, and the cost of doing that is roughly 3 bucks per film to rent on Amazon/iTunes, then it is already worth it to pay for Disney plus. Likewise, if I’d pay $15 to go see the new Pixar film in cinemas (remember cinemas?), but it also comes out on D+, then that also counts. In this example, Disney Plus is extremely good value and regardless of how I attempt to calculate the value, it always comes out more than the cost. Thanks Disney ❤

But you can apply this framework to anything. Say you’re thinking of buying a new toaster for $100. How long will the toaster last, 5 years or so? do you have toast more than twice a week? Okay, so 100 dollars divided by 5 years, divided by 52 weeks divided by 2 times a week. Is each time you would use this toaster worth more than $0.19? Put another way: If you’d pay more than 20 cents to have a piece of bread toasted, then it’s worth buying. You can also see how the toaster becomes more justifiable the more you use it. Say you had toast 5 times a week, or your roommate has toast as well, or you buy one that will last 10 years, all of these things make the investment more worthwhile.

And it’s that idea of high use items which I will now use to convince you to upgrade your Work From Home setup.

So you spend 8 hours a day working at home these days, and odds are you will forever spend between 8 and 40 hours working from home in perpetuity for the rest of your life. That effectively makes any investment in your desk setup incredible value add. When you consider the numbers of hours you stare at that monitor, or use that keyboard/mouse, or sit at that desk. It’s worth using good shit. Again, life’s too short to drink bad wine.

You should buy that new 1440p ultra wide monitor you’ve been thinking about. Buy that better webcam. Buy those AirPods because you’re on 8 hours of zooms every day anyway. It’s all worth it because you get so much god damn use out of them!

Like my mum always said to me: you should spend good money on your bed and your shoes, because you’re always in one or the other. And she was right! You spend a third of your life in bed, so don’t sleep on a shit mattress! And you wear shoes every day, so get good ones that a) you like and b) that last! Don’t be afraid of spending good money where you get good value. And right now, we’re all getting a lot of value from our WFH setups.

The longer that this pandemic goes on the longer it seems it will go on, and then the less likely it seems that we’ll ever go back to being in an office full time. Embrace the likelihood of the WFH future by investing in your setup today. Trust the framework.

You owe it to yourself.