Can Laser Eye Surgery save you money?

You don’t want to be the person who goes to India and haggles the homeless lady on the street down from 1000 rupees to 80 for a sari. Or the crazy lady who pushes everyone out of the way to rampage through the bargain basket at Primark and get that last pair of socks.

You do, however, care about getting good value for money. And that means, no matter whether it’s eye surgery or a sari, you take due time and consideration to make sure you always come away with a good deal.

The key word here is value. As you can see from the examples above, there are many cases in which lower cost is in exact opposition to quality. And this is only truer when purchasing a high-bracket item or experience like Laser Eye Surgery.

Rather than seeking a good deal on such purchases, it’s best to find out what the thing in question is actually worth. That means doing your research and discovering the sari is handmade and worth the asking price, or, in the case of Laser Eye Surgery, finding out it costs at least £4000 to perform a procedure. Anything lower than that and the clinic must be cutting corners or compromising, most likely by focusing on quantity, not quality.

With a rough figure in mind, you can work out whether Laser Eye Surgery is a cost-effective option when compared to wearing glasses and/or contact lenses. Sure, the sari is well-made and cheaper than the equivalent back home, but will you get your monies worth out of it?

In a comprehensive analysis, we calculated the costs of contact lenses over 10 years to be £3,514.37 on the low side, and £7,935.67 on the high side (assuming a yearly inflation rate of 4.5%). As Laser Eye Surgery is a permanent procedure that has no expiration date — lasting 20, 30, or even 40 years — that means even the highest cost treatments work out a considerable sum cheaper than contact lenses.

Now that’s been established, you can finally get down to what’s really important. After all, what’s the point of a silk sari if you don’t feel like a royal Indian princess wearing it?

Money isn’t everything

As the financial benefits of Laser Eye Surgery take some effort to arrive at, they normally come as a welcome surprise further on down the line — months or years later when you realise you’re not throwing money down the drain on your vision.

The greatest benefits of Laser Eye Surgery, however, are subtler still. They’re something you can gather an impression of by reading the accounts of others, but really, to be truly believed and understood, they need to be experienced themselves.

It’s the mornings of waking up and not having to fumble around in the bathroom before being able to see the sunrise. The times of rolling around in the mud with the kids, or your partner. It’s taking an impromptu swim after work, the hours of putting on makeup, the joys of going out to your favourite restaurant — all without worrying for a second about where you put your glasses or how soon you’re eyes are going to dry out.

These are the experiences that money can’t buy. The ones that most people struggle to put into words, settling for statements like “It’s the best thing I’ve ever done”, or, “Believe me, you won’t regret it”. They’re incredibly personal and yet everyone can relate when they hear them — thinking about similar times in their lives where they were awe-stricken or felt an inexplicable and profound change in their experience of reality.

Yet this is what Laser Eye Surgery is to many people. It’s not a way to save money; not even a way to get rid of the constant annoyances of glasses and contacts. It’s a way to see the world in a new light; a way to be with their loved ones on a more intimate level, and a way to feel what can only be felt by living day-to-day with clear, unhindered vision.