How to Use the Life-Hours Calculator to Cut Wasteful Spending
Using the Life-Hours Calculator takes three steps: enter your income details, get your true hourly wage, then test any purchase or subscription against it.
Step one is the true hourly wage section. Enter your gross annual income, an estimated effective tax rate, hours worked per week, and total weekly commute time. The calculator subtracts taxes and adds unpaid commute hours to your work week, producing a wage figure that is almost always lower than your nominal hourly rate — often by 15-30%.
Step two is the purchase test. Enter any price — a subscription, a night out, a gadget — and the calculator shows the hours of life it costs at your true wage, plus what that same money would grow to if invested at a chosen average annual return over a chosen number of years.
Step three is the freedom number section, which uses your monthly expenses and a chosen safe withdrawal rate (default 4%) to estimate a long-term financial independence target, tying the day-to-day purchase math back into the bigger picture.
Because everything runs client-side in the browser, results appear instantly with no page reloads, and nothing entered is transmitted or stored — a detail worth knowing before entering income figures into any online tool.
Frequently Asked Questions
Want to see your own numbers? Try the free Life-Hours Calculator.