A few months ago, I found myself asking a question that most people would probably consider ridiculous.
How many toothbrushes will I use before I die?
At first, it seemed like a pointless thing to calculate. A toothbrush costs a few dollars and gets replaced every few months. It’s not exactly a life-changing purchase.
But once I started doing the math, I couldn’t stop.
One question led to another.
How many rolls of toilet paper will I use?
How many coffee filters?
How many razor cartridges?
How many cotton swabs?
How many trash bags?
Before long, I realized I had stumbled into something surprisingly interesting.
The products we barely think about are often the ones we buy thousands of times throughout our lives.
And when you add it all up, the numbers can get surprisingly large.
The Problem With Small Purchases
Most people pay attention to major expenses.
We compare mortgage rates.
We research cars.
We shop around for insurance.
But very few of us spend any time thinking about the things we buy over and over again for decades.
That’s understandable.
A package of coffee filters isn’t expensive.
Neither is a toothbrush.
A roll of aluminum foil barely registers on most household budgets.
Because the purchases are small and spread out over time, they become almost invisible.
But invisible doesn’t mean insignificant.
The Toothbrush That Started It All
Let’s go back to the toothbrush.
Dentists generally recommend replacing toothbrushes every three to four months.
That means most people will use roughly four toothbrushes per year.
Over a 60-year adult lifetime, that’s around 240 toothbrushes.
Two hundred and forty.
For an item most of us never think about.
That was the first moment I realized lifetime consumption might be more interesting than I expected.
Then I Calculated Razors
The next surprise was razors.
Someone who shaves regularly could easily go through more than 1,000 razor cartridges over a lifetime.
Daily shavers may use far more.
When I started calculating the total cost, the numbers became even more surprising.
A product that seems inexpensive on a weekly basis can quietly consume thousands of dollars over several decades.
That’s enough money to fund vacations, major purchases, or years of other household necessities.
The Real Surprise Was Toilet Paper
Toilet paper may be one of the most overlooked products in the average household.
Most people buy it without thinking.
But over a lifetime, we’re talking about thousands of rolls.
Thousands.
It’s one of those products that’s so ordinary that nobody notices how much of it they actually consume.
Until they do the math.
Why This Matters
This isn’t really about toothbrushes.
Or razors.
Or coffee filters.
It’s about perspective.
We naturally focus on big expenses because they’re obvious.
But many of the costs that shape our financial lives happen quietly in the background.
The goal isn’t to obsess over every dollar.
The goal is to understand where your money goes over the long run.
Once you see the numbers, you start asking different questions.
Could buying in bulk save money?
Are there lower-cost alternatives?
How much waste do these products generate?
How much will inflation increase these costs over the next few decades?
These are questions most people never ask.
Building Set for Life
The idea for Set for Life came directly from this curiosity.
I wanted a way to estimate how much of a product I would use over my lifetime.
Not next month.
Not next year.
My entire lifetime.
So I started building calculators.
One calculator became several.
Then dozens of ideas followed.
Each one answers a simple question:
“How much of this product will I actually use before I’m done buying it?”
Some of the answers are predictable.
Others are genuinely surprising.
Try the Calculators Yourself
Your results may be very different from mine.
Everyone has different habits, different routines, and different consumption patterns.
That’s why I built calculators for products such as:
You may discover that some products cost far more than you expected.
Or that buying in bulk makes more sense than you realized.
Or maybe you’ll simply satisfy your curiosity.
The Bigger Lesson
The biggest thing I’ve learned from all of this is that small decisions compound.
A few dollars here.
A few dollars there.
A product replaced every month.
A household item purchased every year.
Individually, they don’t seem important.
Over a lifetime, they’re often much larger than we imagine.
That’s what Set for Life is really about.
Not just calculating products.
Understanding the long-term impact of everyday choices.
And sometimes discovering that the things we rarely think about can tell us the most.