All of us have spent money we shouldn’t have on a purchase. Whether as the result of calculation or whim, we’ve all looked at something we wanted, done some dodgy mental math, and decided it is somehow within our budgets. But the Time Is Money Chrome extension will help divert you from bad financial decisions by translating the price into the number of hours you need to work to have enough money for it..

Building upon the principle that the key to making wise financial decisions is to think about purchases in terms of hours worked, not dollars spent, Time Is Money easy to set up. After installing the extension, it will ask you to enter either your your annual income, and once that’s set up, all you need to do is click on the ‘Time Is Money’ button in your Chrome toolbar to translate any dollar figures on a given web page to the corresponding number of work hours.





For example, it looks like at my current pay rate, I would need to work 1 hour and 22 minutes to buy this Black and Decker Dustbuster on Amazon (saving 19 minutes in conventional prices!). Given the mess my birds make, that’s probably worth it, even if the Xbox One Assassin’s Creed bundle at 9 hours and 21 minutes is not.





But the extension isn’t limited to just translating money into time: you can also see a hybrid view, balancing an item’s cost in both dollars and time. It might not solve all your financial woes, but in terms of setting budgets, I find it’s easier to think in terms of not wasting time rather than money.

You can install Time Is Money from the Chrome store here.

[h/t: Lifehacker]