I also like this way of calculating or tracking your progress!
What I have done in the past and is a bit similar was to calculate how much time I needed to spend in the office to buy something. Like, hmm a new tablet would cost XXX euro, which would mean working X days, is it really worth that? A lot of times it stopped me from making the purchase. Or have me looking for cheaper alternatives.
Another guy who was into dividend investing matched dividend income from individual stocks to regular expenses he had. Example: ‘the amount of dividends I will receive from company X are enough to pay for my annual Spotify subscription’; starting small with the Spotify subscription of 8 eur a month and then going up: internet subscription of 35 eur, car insurance, food, .. Stuff like that.
Ok, the math might have been fuzzy on some things (dividends can go up or down in time, costs will also vary from year to year). But I think it motivating him a lot to save because in a – strange way- he was not saving by buying X amount of stock but he was actually buying future Spotify subscriptions with it … investing 10.000 euro was investing it, but also buying breakfast for the rest of his life … it made it all the more tangible …