Not familiar with the theory, going to look it up now.
Yeah, I heard of some people on the forums complaining that they could hardly afford the service in their country.
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Yeah I see. Read the theory and it totally makes sense. Lots of people on here in different situations and different countries. With my teaching job in Japan this is only a fraction of a paycheck but for others (especially in other countries) they may have to save up all year to make this happen so it seems more feasible to pay installments and go hard at learning.
I should have known since I have friends in the Philippines and Brasil that complain about this type of factor.
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From my perspective ability to withdraw anytime is more valuable than the discount. Besides, it’s worth to consider the future value of money. Keeping your money (and investing it) could be more beneficial than paying a discounted price right now.
And anyway the monthly amount is fairly small for an employed adult in a developed country, around a cost of a single meal at a restaurant.
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In a lot of people’s cases, they can scrounge up 9 dollars a month, but can’t scrounge up enough for buying the subscription all at one time. Then at some point it feels like you’re too far in for the deals to be really worth it.
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@cpitman and @Kumirei, can I steal your graphics and add them to the guide? I’ll give credits of course 
A lifetime without discount is half of the minimum (monthly) wage in Portugal. This is the reality on a lot of other European countries… and this is Europe we’re talking about. So yeah 
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Go ahead! If you want to make your own (nicer) graphs, you can grab the data from the spreadsheet.
I am currently collecting data for @ctmf’s request, if you’re interested in that as well.
It’s going to take a good while, though, since I have to query Discourse for every single user
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hmm.
- data collection for tens of thousands users…
- ddos on discourse servers few hours ago…
coincidence? 
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HMM
Actually, yes 
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Their rate limit isn’t very high 
Takes me about 35 seconds per 100 users 
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ouch. for 66822 users… like ~7 hours, or so…
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Yep… And during that time the forums will be giving me 429 errors (too many requests) as I browse. Just got one when liking your post.
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Sure, sounds good
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Of course, being surrounded by kanji is better than not for anyone trying to learn them, but I was responding to someone who was suggesting that being in Japan was an effective substitute to actually using WK (or similar).
It’s kind of like taking on debt, yeah, you’ll get interest from your investments, but if you decided to pay installments on say a couch the vendor is earning interest on you I think your first point is good but the rest goes against everything I remember from the personal finance class I took.
It’s only at 26,000/68,000 D:
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Well, I studied business finance and economics, not personal finance. Advice for individuals may of course differ from the advice for businesses.
But the basic concept in finance is the discount rate, that is the future value of money needs to be discounted to compare it to the present value of money.
If the amount is the same it is always better to pay it later. If the amount is different it will depend on your discount rate.
Personally, I don’t think there’s a big difference between annual and monthly subscription, while lifetime seems of lower value because you need to use the service for over 3 years to even beat the monthly price.
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Well that’s true but I’m kinda going for the discount price…
I did some calcs comparing monthly to annual subscription. You need to be able to keep your money under 30% yearly interest to make monthly payments of $9 equal to one time $89.
And even assuming you can invest under 30% you probably aren’t going to because in reality you won’t be able to take the money out each month.
So, you are right that annual is cheaper in practice 