DecideWorth
The core idea
A price by itself is hard to feel. DecideWorth converts it into things you actually experience — hours of your time, months of saving, a share of your monthly budget — so a decision that used to be one abstract number becomes something you can actually weigh.
Hours of work
We divide your monthly income by a standard 160 working hours per month (40 hours × 4 weeks) to estimate an hourly wage, then divide the price by that wage. It's a simplification that works well for salaried income; if you're paid hourly or irregularly, treat it as a rough guide rather than an exact figure.
Months of saving
If you tell us your monthly savings rate, we simply divide the price by that rate. This assumes you'd dedicate all of your current savings pace to this one purchase, which is rarely exactly true — it's meant as an upper-bound estimate, not a plan.
The Comfortable / Tight / High Risk read
This looks mainly at what share of your available monthly money (income minus fixed expenses) the purchase, or its first payment, would consume, plus how much of your current savings it would use if paid from savings. Rough thresholds: under ~35% of available money reads as Comfortable, 35–75% as Tight, and above that — or a purchase that would use most of your savings — as High Risk. These thresholds are a starting point for judgment, not a rule any lender or advisor would apply to you.
Financing and real cost
When you choose to finance a purchase, we use a standard loan amortization formula with your down payment, term and interest rate (APR) to estimate your monthly payment and total interest. The “real cost” is the total of everything you'd actually pay — principal plus interest — not just the sticker price.
Opportunity cost
The “what else could this become” estimate compounds the purchase price annually at an illustrative 7% average return, which is a commonly cited long-run average for diversified equity markets — not a guarantee, a prediction, or investment advice. Real returns vary and can be negative in any given year.
Real cost of recurring expenses
For the What Is It Really Costing Me? tool, we convert whatever frequency you enter into a monthly figure using calendar-accurate averages (30.44 days per month, 365.24 days per year), then scale that monthly figure up to yearly, 5-year and 10-year totals. No interest or investment growth is assumed — it's a straight sum of what you'd spend.
What this is not
DecideWorth is an educational tool, not a financial advisor, lender, or accountant. It doesn't know your full financial picture, your goals, your debts, or your risk tolerance. Every result is an estimate based only on what you type in, meant to inform your thinking — not replace it.