Is it frugal to pay others for a service?
Posted
Jan 09 2009, 08:41 AM
by
Karen Datko
Rating:
This post comes from Trent Hamm at partner blog The Simple Dollar.
For a long time, my wife and I have discussed hiring a local housecleaning service, but never pulled the trigger, mostly because of our "cheap" sensibilities. For a pretty low rate (about $14 an hour), a local woman or her assistant will perform some housecleaning tasks like mopping the floors, dusting and vacuuming.
Obviously, these are things we are easily handling for ourselves. The sole reason we would even consider hiring someone to perform these tasks is to free up more family time on the weekends, and on weeknights, to a certain extent.
Take a typical weeknight. It's a regular event for one of us to play with the kids while the other is doing dishes, cleaning up after supper -- with a 1-year-old just learning how to feed herself, a fair amount of food winds up on the table and on the floor -- and other tasks.
On weekends, we're often involved with a lot of leftover cleaning from the week. Some of this is done while the kids are napping, but often it's done when one parent takes the kids out of the house for a while.
In both cases, cleaning takes away from time spent together as a family -- time we value quite a lot. I'd far rather spend an hour reading a book to my daughter or playing with my son's collection of toy trains than cleaning, and I think the time spent with my kids has a ton of long-term value for them as well, cementing a parent-child bond.
On the table
The first question is whether paying for such a service is even realistic or sensible. Should it be on the table at all?
When I examine my life, I realize that I'm paying for a lot of services -- some of them useful, some of them not so useful. In some of those cases, I'm paying solely for convenience. I'm paying someone to take care of a task I'd rather not do for the cost.
Take trash pickup, for example. We pay $17 a month for trash pickup as long as the volume of trash fits inside our trash can each week. Instead of paying that $17 a month, I could load two or three weeks' worth of trash into the back of my truck and haul it to the landfill, paying just a dollar or two for them to take it. This could save me about $10 a month, but also cause me to waste an hour or so a month. So, effectively, trash service is the equivalent of paying someone roughly $10 an hour to haul away trash.
The real question is how much do we value that additional time together as a family -- and how much additional time would we really get from having a person clean for us? Let's say this person would spend four hours a week -- at $14 an hour -- to clean our house.
What would we do with those extra four hours? Ideally, we would enjoy family time together or engage in personally fulfilling activities.
Would we actually use that time effectively? I believe we would. We tend to stack almost every free minute with something productive in terms of family or personal growth (reading, watching documentaries, etc.).
Is that time worth $14 an hour? Here's where the difficult question comes into play. I believe that time is worth $14 an hour to me, but only if it's used in an effective fashion. If I wind up doing something less useful with my time -- like watching television or playing a mindless video game -- then this would be a very poor move.
Could we afford the cost of hiring that person to clean? Obviously, all of this is a moot question if we can't afford it. Luckily, because we manage our money well, we could afford this kind of service. Unfortunately, not everyone is in that situation.
For me, the litmus test is this: How much is an hour of your time worth? A good way to judge that is to calculate how much income you earn from each hour of work -- your true hourly wage. That number can be a great benchmark for comparison.
Wouldn't it be better to just save that money instead? Yes, it probably would. I tend to look at things like this as an investment. Will I get more out of those four hours doing the cleaning and putting that $56 in the bank, or giving that $56 to a cleaning service and spending those hours investing in the positive emotional and mental growth of my children -- and myself?
This is not quite the black-and-white question that one might expect it to be because the human factor of personal finance is a huge factor. It is basically impossible to put an accurate dollar value on quality family time -- or to estimate how much additional family time is actually worth.
Thoughts and ideas are definitely encouraged here.
Related reading at The Simple Dollar:
Dream small?
When your financial state improves, do your frugal standards change?
Do children really cause financial burdens?
