I remember feeling totally dislocated when a few thousand dollars here and there suddenly felt like rounding error when we bought the house.
And that's part of why this worries me: situations where people are spending way out of their comfort zone are just begging for abuse by the unscrupulous. (Why wouldn't home inspectors raise their prices by a hundred bucks or so, when the home buyers are in the process of spending 1000 times that much?) I've seen this very clearly with weddings, and I'm sure it's an issue with home purchases as well. It's just not clear how to avoid it.
On a related note, I'm reasonably convinced that the human brain can only really grasp about three significant figures in any number, and even that sometimes feels like a stretch. (I would have felt really, really uncomfortable trying to bargain over the next sig. fig. of my salary, for example.) So on a large purchase, the smallest increments of reasonable negotiation are still well above the dollar ranges that I'm actually familiar with.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
no subject
And that's part of why this worries me: situations where people are spending way out of their comfort zone are just begging for abuse by the unscrupulous. (Why wouldn't home inspectors raise their prices by a hundred bucks or so, when the home buyers are in the process of spending 1000 times that much?) I've seen this very clearly with weddings, and I'm sure it's an issue with home purchases as well. It's just not clear how to avoid it.
On a related note, I'm reasonably convinced that the human brain can only really grasp about three significant figures in any number, and even that sometimes feels like a stretch. (I would have felt really, really uncomfortable trying to bargain over the next sig. fig. of my salary, for example.) So on a large purchase, the smallest increments of reasonable negotiation are still well above the dollar ranges that I'm actually familiar with.