This was basically the same math you see in business administration classes. It's nerd math if you're talking electronics. I can rent a modem from the cable company for $8 a month with free upgrades as needed or I can buy an $80 modem for myself every few years. If I can use my own modem for more than 10 months, then I've already come out ahead. So this woman would need to sacrifice a $5 of her budget somewhere every week for a year. That's often optimistic fantasy that I think gets a lot of debtors in trouble.