What is a pound really worth?
Joseph Sarvary · 18 June 2026
Think about the last few pounds you spent today.
Maybe you picked the £14 lunch instead of the £10 one. Maybe you grabbed a soda from the fridge, or a cookie at the checkout counter — the small impulse buy that lives right next to the till precisely because nobody decides to want it until they see it. None of these were considered choices. You didn’t sit down and weigh them. They just happened, the way most of our spending happens: on a quiet current of habit, preference and the vague sense that this is roughly what things cost.
I want to do something we almost never do, which is to stop and actually ask: did that get me my money’s worth?
Did the £14 sandwich generate four pounds more happiness, fullness or nourishment than the £10 one would have? Did the checkout cookie deliver an amount of joy proportional to its price — or did you finish it half-noticing, already thinking about something else? Be honest. A surprising share of our small indulgences quietly fail to live up to the expectation that made us reach for them. We pay for a feeling and receive a fraction of it.
I’m not saying this to make anyone feel guilty about lunch. I’m saying it because we have lost our sense of what a pound is worth — and there is another column in that ledger we almost never look at.
The other thing a pound can buy
Here is what those same few pounds can do, in the hands of organisations on EveryDrop whose entire job has been measured and re-measured by independent evaluators:
- Around £1 delivers roughly six months of vitamin A to a child — two high-dose capsules a year, costing about a dollar each to deliver, protect against one of the leading causes of preventable child death. (Helen Keller Intl reached 47 million children this way in 2025.)
- Around 10p buys a hot school meal, cooked by a village volunteer — and a whole school year of them costs £19.15, an audited figure. (Mary’s Meals feeds over 2.5 million children every school day.)
- Around 50p is a year of deworming treatment for a child, which measurably keeps them in school and raises what they’ll earn for life. (Deworm the World has delivered over 2 billion treatments.)
- Under £1.50 gives a person a year of safe, chlorinated drinking water. (Dispensers for Safe Water reaches around 2.8 million people this way.)
And beyond the organisations we currently list, the same exchange rate holds everywhere you look: a few pounds is an insecticide-treated bed net against malaria; twenty-five or so helps a woman through a safe childbirth — the difference, in too many places, between a routine delivery and a tragedy.
I’ve kept these deliberately rounded, because precise cost-per-outcome figures shift with conditions and honest evaluators argue about them. (Every organisation we list has a public research summary showing the evidence and the open questions, rather than a tidy marketing number.) But the order of magnitude is not in doubt, and the order of magnitude is the whole point.
The cookie was a pound. So was six months of a child’s eyesight.
Repricing the daily indulgence
Once you have seen those two columns side by side, the £14 lunch starts to look different. Not wrong — you are allowed to enjoy your life — but priced. You begin to notice that the four-pound upgrade you barely tasted was, in another frame, a malaria net. That the soda you didn’t really need was a fortnight of a child’s protected vision.
This isn’t an argument that you should never buy the nicer lunch. It’s an argument that you should know what you are choosing, because right now most of us don’t. We agonise over a £40 difference on a flight and wave through a hundred small £4 decisions a month without a flicker of reflection. The small ones add up to far more, and they are the ones we never examine.
So the question I’ve started asking myself is simply: would I still choose this indulgence if I held it honestly against what the same money could do? Sometimes the answer is yes — a good meal with someone I love is worth it, easily. But often the answer is no, and the no is freeing rather than guilt-ridden. It turns out a lot of my small spending was never buying me much happiness in the first place. Rerouting some of it doesn’t feel like deprivation. It feels like finally getting fair value. (There’s good evidence for why it feels that way, which I wrote about here.)
A tool for repricing
This is, in a sense, what EveryDrop is for. It is a thirty-day giving journey where each day you give a small amount — about the size of one of those unexamined indulgences — to a rigorously vetted organisation, and spend five quiet minutes learning exactly what that money does.
Do that for a month and something recalibrates. You start carrying the second column around with you. The next time your hand reaches for the checkout cookie, you’ll have a clearer sense of what a pound is really worth — and you get to decide, on purpose, which column you’d rather it went into.
You don’t have to give up the things you love. You just have to stop spending on autopilot. Try the thirty days and let the new exchange rate sink in.