An instrument house for expensive decisions
Purchases, offers, hires, properties, exits. Ballast prices each one the way serious money thinks — in after-tax cash, in opportunity cost, and in hours of your life. No account. No advertising between you and the number. The formula is printed on every page.
Common tonight: · ·
The doctrine
After tax
Gross figures flatter every decision. Ballast works in net: your real income, your real bracket, the cash that actually leaves.
Opportunity cost
The true price of anything is what that capital becomes if left alone for ten years. Every instrument shows it, under three market assumptions — never one.
Your hours
High earners report more time pressure, not less — and most never spend money to buy hours back. So every result is also priced in hours of your working life.
No instrument holds that yet. Twelve are live across six desks. Start with the True Cost of a Purchase — most decisions pass through it.
The desks
Money already earned, and what it should be doing. Purchases weighed against compounding, positions weighed against concentration, financing weighed against the market you'd otherwise be in.
Open the desk → 3 instrumentsThe only asset on the sheet that never replenishes. These instruments put a printed price on an hour of your life, then hold delegation, meetings and workload against it.
Open the desk → 1 instrumentPay is a bundle — cash, paper, hours, and what the hours do to you. This desk unbundles it, for offers you receive and offers you make.
Open the desk → 2 instrumentsBuildings are the most emotional line on any balance sheet. The desk holds them to the same arithmetic as everything else: carry, opportunity, and cost per night actually used.
Open the desk → 1 instrumentThe big movable objects — aircraft, boats, machines. Owning is a business; the question is whether you want to be in it, and at what utilisation it starts paying.
Open the desk → 2 instrumentsThe business itself: what it pays you per hour of your presence, what a key hire truly costs, and what selling, holding or stepping back does to the ten-year number.
Open the desk →Night desk
Big decisions get weighed after the office goes quiet. The night setting is drawn for it — low glare, brass and phosphor on green-black, the same instruments.