The Dollar Rule vs. iPods
Let's say you bought a new iPod Nano for $149. To apply the Dollar Rule to this purchase we of course want to know if you're getting at least 149 hours of (person-hours) of benefit from it? So if you use it an hour a day, that works out to around 21 weeks (say 5 months) if you use it 7 days a week.
Do you get a new iPod each time Apples releases an update to your model or do you use your existing one until it breaks? The longest Apple has gone between updates of a specific iPod model seems to be around 2 years, although more typically they have released updates of at least one iPod model every 6-8 months or so (see the iPod timeline).
If we suppose that the average use of an iPod is just 1 hour per day, it would seem like Apple has timed it just right for you to be ready for the next iPod just when you've likely reach DRR of 1.0 on your current model.
If you use your iPod Nano 3 hours a day, instead of 5 months to reach DRR of 1.0 it's only 7 weeks or ~2 months (at 3hrs/day). And of course for every use thereafter your DRR would keep going up and beyond 1.0 But if you then got a new game console in the middle of that time period, or maybe football season started and you're watching more TV, these would all reduce the rate at which your DRR improves.
If you always stick to the Dollar Rule, the fact that you only have 24 hours in a day automatically makes you self-budgeting in a way, since you or your family can't use your stuff more than 24 hours a day, right?
However, it's not exactly zero-sum because it's possible for you to use more than one item at a time (i.e., wearing shoes and clothes while sitting on your couch, talking on a phone and watching TV all at the same time). Plus more than one person can use an item, such as the TV, your car or a computer. But there's still a finite limit to how many person-use-hours you can get from a purchase.
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