Sweating In An Infrared Sauna Made Me Think About Finances
I went for a visit to use an infrared sauna earlier in the week. It’s not the sort of thing I would usually do, this was a gift.
Something seems to come over me when I experience new enjoyable hobbies or activities for the first time. I start working out how I can go from zero straight to a million miles an hour, with an aim of immersing myself to the extreme. How can I buy everything I need and quickly become an expert to make this my new life?
Why take things slowly? Maybe this is signs of an addictive personality. But I digress.
This luxurious day spa sauna visit was valued at just under $50, so quite pricey for what it was; sitting inside a private wooden box with a heater on.
Would it just be cheaper to buy my own sauna?
Let’s explore that thought!
The Price Of A Luxury Sauna Visit
It was a touch under $50 for this single visit.
But let’s imagine that as you step out of the sauna you feel as though you have found your calling, you plan to come back as much as possible. And you want to find the cheapest price possible, of course.
A bulk-visit pack was available, bringing the price down considerably, to around $30 per visit.
That makes $30 our all-inclusive base price that we’ll work with.
And yes, you can find cheaper saunas out there. But this was the sauna experience that I enjoyed, so this is what I wanted to replicate at home.
The Financial Cost Of A Sauna
Straight numbers are easy. They are easy. They don’t change their opinion. Maybe that is why I love them so much.
The infrared sauna I was in was the Clearlight Sanctuary 3, a premium sauna, complete with bells and whistles including fancy lighting and the ability to connect up your phone or tablet to audio. Audio and special lighting are features that honestly don’t interest me much, as I was there purely just for the heat to relax in silence …and I like to close my eyes. A 3 person sauna is also bigger than what I would need for home use.
From what I can find online, I believe that this particular Clearlight infrared sauna model sells for somewhere in the $10,000-$15,000 range. Ouch!
Having a look on Amazon, it seems as though $5,000 would buy something perfectly reasonable. It’s not cheap by any means, but sounds much better than the former Clearlight Sanctuary option.
$5,000 will buy 167 day spa infrared sauna visits.
We’ll completely forget here the cost of electricity, as it will vary, however that will likely end up as $1 or less per use.
The Cost Of Space For A Sauna
I had been sitting in the sauna for all of about three minutes when I started to take careful notes of the infrared sauna dimensions.
Maybe if I shuffle around a bookshelf, move a few chairs, I could make this work.
Saunas aren’t tiny, but they aren’t as big as you may expect either. A small one or two person sauna can fit inside half of a normal sized bedroom. Although we must keep in mind that it will absolutely dominate the room.
Housing is one of the most expensive costs when it comes to living. Half a room may equate to 10% or more of the price of your house.
With a sauna in place I may then not have space for something else in the future, it might be a guest bed, a writing desk, or an inversion table. There is an opportunity cost.
Of course, if you have a large outdoor space available, your outcomes may be quite different.
The Cost of Time and Accessibility
How much do you value your free time?
It takes 15 minutes to drive to the day spa sauna. Then a few minutes waiting around for my assigned timeslot. That’s an additional 30 minutes minimum for each sauna visit.
Having a sauna in the comfort of your home makes it extremely accessible. You don’t need to make a booking. It is always open. It doesn’t matter if your kids are asleep in bed.
As far as saving time, the at-home option comes out miles ahead.
The home-sauna owner will have maintenance and cleaning to think about, but overall, this is a net gain for home use.
What If I Get Sick Of A Sauna?
For those first few minutes in the sauna there was nothing that I wanted more than my own sauna. It was a new experience. But I know how these sorts of scenarios usually play out for me.
That first week or two of sauna ownership, i’ll be sitting in there every damn day. Maybe even a few times on some days. I’ll read the user manual end-to-end, join a few “sauna owner” message boards online in an effort to determine how to extract every ounce of benefit from the body heating sessions. It will be the highlight of my day.
But then, a couple of weeks in, a day will be skipped. Maybe something new has come out on Netflix or YouTube, the sauna briefly slips from my mind.
Then a week or two later I hit a 3 day streak of missed days.
If I reach a point where I am no longer using it at all, and that point just happens to be less than 167 sweat-inducing uses, I haven’t hit my financial breakeven.
167 sounds easily achievable. “It’s less than half a year!”. And it is, if you use it every day.
But that number quickly blows out to several years if on average an available slot can be found once a week to escape.
When I was a kid I loved McDonald’s Chicken McNuggets. I swore that I would eat only Chicken McNuggets for every meal. When I was old enough to get a job I spent every lunchbreak eating Chicken McNuggets. At least, every lunchbreak for a few weeks. Chicken McNuggets were ruined for me. Some things in life are best left as “sometimes foods”.
Is a sauna a “sometimes food”, or the healthy vegetable that you are going to put on every plate for life? Every person will have a different answer.
167 is a daunting number.
The Luxury Spa Sauna Experience
For people who love calculations and making the best use of their money, it’s easy to gloss over benefits which don’t have an easily-calculable number.
Having a sauna at home allows you to check the box of utilising a sauna, but it is not quite the same. The actual sauna, the heating up of the body and sweating it all out over the floor in a soppy mess, is just one part. Don’t get me wrong, it is the critical part, but not the only part.
When you enter the spa facility you are entering a different space. A space dedicated to relaxation. You are greeted. Soothing music plays lightly from the speakers. That generic relaxation smell found in every spa and massage place that has ever existed wafts through the air. Your mindset changes on arrival.
Your body prepares to relax.
It’s delivered as an end-to-end service.
I don’t need to worry about bringing my own towel, or cleaning up.
I’m in the big high-end Clearlight Sanctuary infrared sauna, coming in at a higher price point than anything I would have purchased for myself for home use.
I’m not one for mumbo jumbo. I like to talk in hard numbers, but there is a value in this experience that isn’t replicated when doing it yourself at home.
“More relaxation” contributes to a better sauna session.
The Mental Cost Of A Sauna
Quote: “The things that you own, end up owning you”. It’s a brilliant quote, from the movie Fight Club.
How do we put a price on the mental stress caused by owning things?
We often want more, but that brings more things into our lives that we need to think about.
Things need to be cleaned. Things break. Things take up space.
And if I get sick of it and stop using it, every time I see it in the room I will let out a sigh of regret.
If I am packing for a long holiday I will spend days, or weeks, creating lists of everything that I need to pack, worried that I will forget something. But my dream way to travel? It would be with nothing but a passport, a phone, and a wallet. Buying whatever I need along the way. No packing lists, no chance of damaged or lost luggage, no need to consider how much it weighs and whether or not I will be hit by additional airline fees. I haven’t managed to do this yet, and financially it would be rather wasteful, but stress free and invigorating!
Things are liabilities.
Don’t underestimate the stress caused from owning “stuff”.
To Buy or Not To Buy: That’s The Question
Let’s mention one elephant in the room, the human multiplier. If you are a family of sauna lovers, that 167 breakeven visitation number spread across 2, or even 4, can be hit in months.
But for me, as one sauna lover, the overall value doesn’t yet add up for me.
With enough extra money and space, I would likely be buying the home sauna without a second thought. The decisions we make in life are rarely completely rational. But I would be cheating myself out of the experience, as well as permanently ruining the novelty factor.
Are We Talking About Saunas?
And this story isn’t just about buying a sauna. It’s about analytically thinking through potential purchases from multiple angles.
The money factor, the time factor, the experience factor, the often missed mental factor. Any and every factor that you can think of.
Your answer may not be what you first thought.
Time to book in another sauna session, I need some more thinking time.
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