Many people think that buying a new bed is a huge cost and in a cash flow sense, it can be. A new, quality queen sized mattress and box spring is likely to run you upwards of $2000 and unless you have lots of money stored up this can be quite a bit to cough up when the time comes due. However, if you analyze the way a mattress is used, it just might be the most economical way to increase the quality of life.
When valuating items in your house, a good method of break down is to put it into a per unit basis. For example, you might want to know how much per wear, per day, or per hour. Groceries for example could be valued somewhere in the $10 per day for an average adult, while a mortgage or rent might break down to $40 per day or so. For clothing, this is a good method for deciding whether you should actually buy that party dress. If you think you’ll wear it ten times throughout the course of its lifetime, a $130 dollar dress is worth about $13 per wear. Depending on your income level and the importance of these events, that price may or may not be worth it to you. Of course, everything you own could be valuated in a similar way, be it cars, phones, etc.
A mattress is something you will spend a great deal of time on. With Americans averaging around 7 hours per night, over a ten year period a mattress will see around 25,000 hours of use per inhabitant. Considering the mattress costs $2000; that would be approximately $0.08 per combined hour, or around $0.50 per night. For the improvement in sleep quality for that price, it is surprising why more people aren’t buying beds that meet their needs.
Coughing up $2000 every ten years can be a bit of a blow. It is the difference between getting to go for a trip to Mexico or not for vacation, and many times people pick the trip. Fortunately, most mattress retailers offer payment plans to make it easier to get into a mattress sooner rather than later. However some of us do not have sufficient credit ratings to be approved for these plans. In those cases, it is a good idea to compare the benefit of a new mattress against the pack of cigarettes or that daily latte and start to prioritize just where we should be spending our money.
You can’t get a lot for a quarter, but a good sleep is one of them. Good luck and happy hunting!
Being an engineer by trade, Vladmir Skillet is constantly analyzing the cost benefit relationships to everything. For more information on a waterbed mattress or on a futon beds information guide visit his website.
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