Can I Afford It?

Understanding what you can really afford

A price tag tells you what something costs. It doesn't tell you what it costs you — how many hours you'd need to work for it, how long you'd need to save, or how much room it leaves in your budget afterward. Can I Afford It? was built to answer that second, more useful question.

The calculator starts simple: your income, your fixed expenses, and the price of the thing you're considering. From there it estimates the share of your available monthly money the purchase would use, converts the price into hours of work at your effective hourly wage, and — if you're saving toward it — how many months that would take.

If you're financing the purchase, add the down payment, term and interest rate under Advanced options. We'll estimate your monthly payment and the total interest you'd pay over the life of the loan, so the “real cost” reflects what actually leaves your account, not just the sticker price.

A common rule of thumb in personal finance is to keep any single discretionary purchase under roughly 5–10% of monthly take-home pay, and to avoid letting any one expense category consume more than a third of your budget. DecideWorth's Comfortable / Tight / High Risk read is built around similar thresholds — not as a hard rule, but as a fast, honest gut-check before you buy.

Nothing you type here leaves your device. There's no account, no email, and no financial data stored on our end — just a calculation that runs in your browser and disappears when you close the tab.