Ramit Sethi asks how to decide—numerically—whether you can afford large purchases (example: a $2,000 mattress) and critiques vague, feeling-based justifications (e.g., "my back"). He frames the core problem as the absence of concrete numerical rules for purchases like mattresses, cars, college, or vacations and references his book Money for Couples as the place with detailed methods and numbers.
You know if you can afford a $2,000 mattress? I asked people this question, and I got obsessed with the answers. Because when I ask people, so many people said, of course, your back is the most important thing. It's all about your health. It's your shoes and your mattress. I go, excuse me. The question was, how do you know if you can afford it? An answer like that better have a number in it. Not just my feelings about my back. And people got enraged. In America, it is religion to talk about back pain. The true real question here is, how do you know if you can aff of purchase a car, college, a nice vacation? And most of us have no idea how to decide the answer to this question. I want to show you how to do that, especially with your partner. In my new book, Money for Couples, because there's a numerical answer, whether it's a mattress, a car, a vacation, nice coat, whatever. I'm going to show you how to talk about that and the actual numbers in Money for Couples.
