Let's be honest ,
We want nice things. We've earned it.
Years of school. Boards. Residency. Student loans that felt like a second mortgage. Long hours on your feet doing work that is genuinely hard on your body and your brain. You got here the hard way, and you make a good living because of it.
You deserve to splurge every now and then. I'm not here to argue that.
But here's a question nobody asked you when you signed that lease or walked out of the dealership:
How many hours did you just agree to work?
Not in dollars. Not on a credit card statement. In hours — the actual time you'll spend in a chair, on your feet, seeing patients, just to pay that thing back.
Here's how the first hit works. You're earning $300K. After taxes, you're clearing around $16K a month. You work 35 hours a week, smartly kept Fridays for yourself.
Your real after-tax hourly rate: about $106.
Now look at your car payment.
Gross income | $300,000/yr |
After-tax take-home | ~$195,000/yr |
Monthly take-home | ~$16,250 |
Weekly hours worked | 35 |
After-tax hourly rate | ~$106/hr |
$1,500/mo car payment | 14.2 hours of work |
Over 14 hours. Every single month. For the length of the lease.
That's the first hit.
Now here comes the second hit.
Those 14 hours aren't just money you spent. They're 14 hours you'll never spend anywhere else.
That's your kid's Saturday baseball game you picked up an extra patient block to cover. That's the Friday you didn't take off because bills are pilling up. That's the late Tuesday you stayed to fit in one more crown.
The car didn't just cost you $1,500 a month.
It cost you 14 hours of your actual life. On repeat.
Now let’s see what this looks like over a 3-year lease
36 months × 14.2 hours = 511 hours of your life.
That's nearly 15 full work weeks. Just for the car.
How many baseball games is that? How many weekends are spent at the office now? How many Sunday nights are spent with the dread of a long week?
You don't think about it that way because nobody quotes it that way.
The dealership shows you $1,500/month and your brain files it as a money problem. Clean, manageable, solvable.
But it's not a money problem. It's a time problem. And time doesn't have a payment plan.
I'm not telling you not to buy nice things. You earned it. The degree, the debt, the decade of early mornings.
But before you sign anything — car, renovation, second home, whatever — run both numbers.
What does it cost in dollars? And what does it cost in hours?
A $700/month lease on a Non-German luxury car still drives very well. But it’s also about 6.5 hours instead of 14.
You just bought 7 and a half hours of your life back. Every month. For 3 years. That's 270 hours, nearly 8 full work weeks back in your pocket.
Sometimes you run the numbers and it's still worth it. Great. Sign it and enjoy every mile.
But a lot of the time, if you're honest about it, you weren't buying the car.
You were buying the feeling the car was supposed to give you.
And that feeling has never required 14 hours a month.
💊 This week's prescription: Pick one monthly expense.
Divide it by your after-tax hourly rate. Now ask yourself how many hours of your life is it costing you every month?
And more importantly: what are those hours actually worth to you?
Reply and tell me what you found. I'll share the most surprising ones next week.
(If you need help seeing where your expenses go, check out my free budget template if you have not already.)
See you next Sunday.
Dr. Mike
P.S. If you missed last weeks articles: