Guide
What small daily buys cost you in work hours a year
A drink, a snack or a subscription costs minutes of work, which is why it never feels like much. Repeat it all year and it can quietly add up to weeks of work.
A milk tea habit, in pesos
Say you buy a ₱150 milk tea every workday, and you earn ₱700 a day for 8 hours. That is ₱87.50 an hour.
- One drink costs about 1 hour 43 minutes of work.
- Over a year of 260 workdays it costs ₱39,000.
- That is about 446 hours, or 56 workdays of work.
Fifty-six workdays is more than two and a half months of your working year.
Common habits, in dollars
This table assumes $20 an hour of take-home pay and an 8-hour workday. Change the numbers to yours in the calculator.
| Habit | Per year | Work hours | Workdays |
|---|---|---|---|
| $5 coffee, every workday | $1,300 | 65.0 | 8.1 |
| $12 lunch out, every workday | $3,120 | 156.0 | 19.5 |
| $3 snack, every day | $1,095 | 54.8 | 6.8 |
| $15 streaming subscription | $180 | 9.0 | 1.1 |
| $40 food delivery, weekly | $2,080 | 104.0 | 13.0 |
This isn't about cutting everything
Some daily habits are worth every hour. The point is to choose them on purpose. A good test: if you had to work an extra week a year to keep this habit, would you?
- Keep the ones you look forward to.
- Cut down the ones you buy out of routine, for example from five days a week to two.
- Cancel subscriptions you haven't opened in a month.
Turn what you save into something you want
Cutting two ₱150 drinks a week saves ₱15,600 a year. Put that toward something on your wishlist, and use the calculator's savings plan to see the date you can buy it.