But It's Only 50 Cents a Day!

Problem:

People trying to sell you something will tell you how many cents a day it is.  Or how it's only a dollar a day.  Or only $20 a week.  Either way, they try to trivialize an amount of money by saying it's a small amount of money for that length of time.

Solution:

Completely ignore people that use this under-handed tactic.  At the time, I am always tempted to strangle them for a) their underhanded tactics and b) waste of my time.  But I don't recommend it as a real solution.

Musings:

Maybe this tactic is so obviously bad that no one discusses it?  But when I'm in crowds that this is used on, everyone is quiet at the time, a few people seem to nod, and no one discusses it afterwards.  I always wonder how this works out.  Maybe everyone else is so intelligent and immune to sales talks that I'm the only one even truly listening in the audience.  And it's just silly for me to even waste my breath debunking it.  But since it still goes on, I want to put in my short two cents.

It's a fun exercise to find out how much you make per day and then take off taxes to see what your take-home pay is.  Start dividing it up by food/shelter/insurance/electricity/water/cell phone/entertainment and you'll quickly see why you don't have much money at the end of your pay period.  Stuff is expensive, even cheap stuff, when you start adding it up like this.  It always frightens me how seemingly small numbers manage to get pretty big with taxes and fees.  For instance, my gas bill has a base fee of about $12 no matter what my usage is.  So when I was out of town for a little less than a month, my gas bill was still about $15.  Per day?  That's $0.50.  That's not a lot of money until you see how large a percentage that is of my days considering I was just paying for the privilege of having gas piped to my house in case I needed it.

And $0.50 cents per day isn't much compared to my hourly salary * 8 hours.  But subtract off all your bills and you will find how much discretionary money you have.  It's usually tiny.  For instance, this value for me is about $13 per day after I take off taxes and bills.  This has to cover savings, car payments, vacations, house maintenance, furniture, clothing, giving to charity, entertainment, eating out, electronics, hobbys for two people.  That's not much money to go around and I'm college educated and relatively successful.  I'm not buying cocaine with my "bills" either, it's all going to reasonable expenses like insurance, food, electricity, gas, water, sewer, internet, floodwater, trash, and cell phone payments that I try to keep as low as reasonably possible.  I know that the obvious solution is to have both my wife and I work and we are working on this, but not there yet.

So then let's calculate it out for ourselves:

$1/day        =    $ 365/year
$0.50/day   =    $ 183/year
$0.25/day   =    $  91/year
$40/week   =    $2080/year
$20/week   =    $1040/year
$10/week   =    $ 520/year

Context is important here for the exact service that you're paying for, but the basic idea here is that even $91/year seems like a lot of money when you put it that way.  And as an aside, this works in reverse too.  Look out for people telling you how much money you can make on an investment if you put a small amount in.  Usually their interest rates and timescales are wildly biased to make you see big dollars when in reality it's not much at all.