I earn a , lose of it to tax, and costs
The average worker in
takes home $5.05 an hour,
and costs
I earn a , keep in cash earning , and spend a month.
Type over any underlined word, or drag an amount. Your hour after tax: $18.75.
Switch between per year and per month Change what you are buying Arrow up and down step through round amounts, as dragging sideways does.The car $35,000
1,867How many hours of your life
One square, one working hour.
January to late November.
Guess first: when is the car paid for?
Eleven months of your life. Buy it only if you would work eleven months for it.
Every working hour pays for it. Pick the week it’s paid for, or .
Money is Time mist.huliwood.com
Idle cash melting
40 hours of your life a year
One square, one working hour.
The first week of January, every year.
8.3 months of spending. Six is insurance. The other 2.3 months cost you 11 hours a year for nothing.
Money is Time · idle cash mist.huliwood.com
A fifth of that – 9.3 workweeks – is gone within a year of driving it off the lot.
Take what you earn in a year and take off the tax. Divide what is left by the hours you work: 52 weeks of 40 hours is 2,080. That is your hour. Divide any price by it.
$60,000 a year, less 35% tax, is $39,000. Divided by 2,080 hours: $18.75 an hour.
A $35,000 car ÷ $18.75 = 1,867 hours of your life: a working year filled from January to late November.
At that hour, the things the calculator suggests cost:
Each square is an hour of a working year, filled in the order you would work it: Monday 9 am first, down a column of 40 hours, a column a week. For less than 40 hours a square is a minute of one working week. Past a year the years stack as bands of flat bricks, still an hour each. Past three years a square is a working week and a row a year; the count stops at 45 rows, a working life.
Every dollar represents hours of human life already spent – and every purchase is a decision about how to redeploy that stored life.
Cash that sits still loses what inflation takes, less what it earns. Six months of spending is insurance: the months you could live on if the pay stopped. The rest melts for nothing. With $25,000 in an account paying nothing, 3% inflation and $3,000 of spending a month, the cash loses $750 a year: 40 hours of your life, the first week of January, every year. Eleven of those hours are the $7,000 above six months of spending.
Pick a country and the hour in the sentence is the average worker’s there: what they take home in a year, divided by the same 2,080 hours, converted into your currency and rounded to the cent. Any price divided by it is what the price costs them.
Switzerland: 82,535.56 Swiss francs a year ÷ 2,080 hours ÷ 0.9437 francs to the euro × $1.1298 to the euro = $47.51 an hour. A $1,199 iPhone ÷ $47.51 = 25 hours of work.
Mexico: 190,675.14 pesos ÷ 2,080 ÷ 20.5251 pesos to the euro × $1.1298 = $5.05 an hour. The same iPhone ÷ $5.05 = 237 hours.
The pay is the OECD’s, from Taxing Wages 2026: what a single worker with no children, full time on the national average wage, took home in 2025 after income tax and their own social security contributions (the data). The average wage is the mean for adults working full time in industry and private services, so the typical worker earns less. Compulsory payments that are not taxes, such as a mandatory private pension, are not taken off.
The exchange rates are the European Central Bank’s reference rates of 1 October 2026. The ECB quotes none for the Chilean and Colombian pesos or the Costa Rican colón, so those three of the OECD’s 38 members are left out.
The price stays yours, converted at the exchange rate, as if the thing cost the same everywhere. It holds best for things sold at about one price worldwide, and even those vary: at Apple’s own prices of 29 September 2026, the iPhone 18 Pro took 327 hours of work in Mexico and 487 in Türkiye. A coffee or a home costs what it costs there.
In Türkiye the pay is 2025’s, and Turkish pay moves fast: take-home pay on the average wage rose 39% from 2024 to 2025 (OECD), and the net minimum wage rose another 27% in January 2026 (Ministry of Labour and Social Security). At today’s pay these hours would be fewer; at Turkish prices for phones and cars, more.
Everywhere it counts 52 weeks of 40 hours, whatever people there actually work.
It counts 52 weeks of 40 hours. Holidays, overtime, the commute and money you earn without working, such as dividends, move the real number one way or the other: fewer hours worked for the same pay make each hour worth more, unpaid ones make it worth less.
For idle cash, it counts interest before tax: where interest is taxed, cash that earns as much as inflation still loses what the tax takes.