Thanks! For what it's worth, I was missing the part where everyone has a personal discount rate. If I'm allowed to assume that, then everything becomes obvious, of course.
If you don't mind, I have edited the finance part to say "make a buy vs rent calculation, using prices appropriate for your area and your current standard of living". That sounds more crisp to me than "be able to do something".
Thanks, that probably made it much clearer.
I just got this random idea that people who want to become better at life could benefit from a common scale of "leveling". No, I don't mean vague Lesswrongey things like "changing your mind". I mean a set of concrete criteria like "you qualify for level 2 if you can do 5 pull-ups, have solved 30 Project Euler problems, and did 10 cold approaches". Obviously there would be separate ladders for different character classes, but not too many. Also obviously, my example was a bit too high for level 2. So I guess I really want to ask some meta questions here:
1) Do you think agreeing on a common leveling scale would be a good thing for a substantial subset of LW users? Would you feel good about leveling up and telling other people about it on LW?
2) Is there some good way to determine leveling criteria that are neither too high nor too low? Maybe make an intermediate scale of "experience points"?