Up In Smoke

Driving home last night from my folks' house, I quickly lost count of how many fireworks exploded within my field of vision, or how many cracking reports I heard from behind me.  After a minute or two of this, my mind invariably turned to money, and I realized something truly mystifying -- I wasn't seeing and hearing fireworks; I was seeing and hearing money going up in smoke.

Now I'm not a huge fan of fireworks so that does prejudice me just a bit.  I haven't set foot in a fireworks store or looked at a fireworks display in the local supermarket in years.  But it still occurred to me that what I was seeing was a tremendous waste of money and resources.

Math time -- Even with some of these outlets offering buy-one-get-six-free deals, you have to figure that for the sort of up-in-the-air cloud-burst fireworks I was seeing, we're talking minimum $.50 to $1.00, probably more.  Again, I'm making assumptions here because I have no idea, but I think that's a conservative estimate.  For each firework, figure that to light the fuse, run like mad to get out of the way, watch it fly in the air, then explode, we're talking ten seconds.  That means that, for an hour's worth of continuous firework excitement, we're talking ten seconds a shell, six shells a minute, 360 shells for an hour, at a cost of somewhere around $180 to $360 an hour.

Again, this is hideously rough math: if the shells are more expensive, the cost goes up.  If you take longer to fire a shell, the cost goes down.  I also realize that nobody is going to fire off these shells one after another after another for an hour straight -- the number is just a per-hour cost, nothing more.

Now, let's look at some other per-hour costs:

Dinner - Meal for two, nice restaurant, figure an hour's worth of time and, with drinks and dessert, perhaps $60 or so.  That makes the hourly cost about $30 a person.

Movie - Ah yes, that cheapest of pleasures (he said sarcastically).  Figure $9 for a ticket and another $12 for a vat o' popcorn with drink, you're talking $21 for a two-hour movie, or just over $10 an hour.  Your costs may go down if you share the popcorn, up if you go for a 3-D movie.

Video Games - This is one I'm gravitating to more and more.  My wife just bought me a Nintendo DSiXL for my birthday (a few months early, but who's complaining?), at a cost of about $190.  In that time, we've bought a handful of games, at a cost of maybe another $130 or so.  Total of $320 on a new video game system.  However, the longer we play it, the less our per-hour cost runs.  Even if we only used the system for an hour, we're still only near the high end of our fireworks example.  In the month we've had it, however, we've probably spent, between us, a good forty or fifty hours playing it, at a per-hour cost around $7.  The key is to get a system you'll actually use, and then buy games with lasting play and re-play value.  Our most frequently-played games?  Mario Kart DS (even after you've competed the Grand Prix mode, you can still play online for free with people from around the world), and the EA Sudoku game (which we downloaded for $2.00 from the DS online store).  Even factoring in recharging costs, it won't be long before playing this gets as low as a buck or two an hour.

There are so many more examples I don't have time to go into here, but you get the drift: fireworks may be fun, but the per-hour cost is a killer.  My family and I stood in their driveway for ten minutes and just watched the shells exploding in the sky all around us.  Cost to us?  Nothing.  When it comes to celebrating independence, seems to me that getting that much bang for your buck is right on the road to financial independence.