The eternal balance between time and money
Posted on March 5th, 2007 – 1:06 PMBy Kara McGuire
Used to be I came back to work after a weekend feeling refreshed. These days, I feel as if I need another weekend.
The reason: I have a scarcity of time to accomplish everything I need to do.
This problem, which I’ve been mulling over ever since I had my second child, can be solved two ways.
I can make changes to how I spend my time. Or I can make changes to how I spend my money that alleviates the lack of time.
When I was first starting out in my career, the scarce resource was most definitely money. So I worked retail a few evenings a week to afford extras like clothes and eating out while still saving for retirement.
Unfortunately, there’s no way for me to add a few
16 Responses to "The eternal balance between time and money"
That’s a tough one. I don’t think a lot of people think about how much their time costs when they decide to tackle projects themselves. I can’t imagine paying for someone else to do my laundry, but I could see the value of having someone come in and clean my house. I don’t mind laundry, but I hate cleaning bathrooms! I think you need to take the cost of your time plus the desire you have to do that particular chore.
I’m usually pretty good about doing everything myself, but one place I tend to spend the extra is groceries. I hate shopping in grocery stores, especially on Saturday, and living in the city you have to drive a bit to find a store with selection. I’ve got a weakness for ordering the groceries online, saving myself a ton of time. Plus, it may cost a little more, but I assume that I don’t pick up any splurge items like I might if I was actually in the store.
I really, really hate grocery stores. But I like cooking, so it’s still gotto be cheaper than ordering out.
I’m having trouble seeing how paying for a laundry service would effectively save time, unless the service provider is actually coming into your home & puts your clothes away for you. By the time you collect the laundry & spend time dropping it at a service, then retreiving it & hauling it home, how much time is actually saved?
Maybe more to the point, there are certain chores that I’ve tried doing myself that I will pay someone else to do for me next time. Example A is laying carpet. We acquired some nearly-new carpet from a friend of a friend for ‘free.’ I spent about $150 on tool rentals and materials, plus an entire saturday of my time installing the ‘free’ carpeting. The result is a less-than-professional job with a hideously ugly seam (hidden by a throw rug) and ragged edges that are glaring evidence of my inexperience at the job. Next time I will gladly pay for new carpeting & its installation.
My husband and I talk about this same subject frequently. We are very focused on not only saving for retirement, but also having lots of projects (large and small) done around the house. Neither of us likes even to pay an ATM fee, so doing things like the siding, kitchen, and bathrooms on credit is not an option for us. We’ve tossed around the idea many times of “we’ll we could each get jobs at Home Depot to get a discount and have the bits of extra cash coming in” but does that really out-weight for the better our time at home with eachother?Some days, it could go either way and is not an easy one to answer.
It’s a catch-22: outsource and pay more and get more time or do the laundry and other stuff and save money but have less time. Another option is for one person to stay at home saving money from daycare expenses and eating out.
Kara, you might consider that this particular time in your life is short-lived. The kids will only be kids for a few years and you want to have some energy to enjoy them. Maybe it’s ok to cut back on retirement savings for 5-10 years and enjoy these moments more fully.
All of our friends, whether Dual-Career or the Cleavers, bemoan the fact that there is little time in the day with 2 or more children under 6. Outsource your biggest pain points and upgrade technology (e.g. front-loader washer/dryer) wherever possible and in areas that provide a high personal ROI.
Outsourcing house cleaning was the best decision my wife and I ever made. We both have a low tolerance for clutter and dirt, so would spend a significant amount of at least one weekend day cleaning every week. We have, for a nominal expense, bought almost an entire day together every week. Perhaps we save less for retirement this way (though we still max out every qualified plan available), but we gain precious time with one another and our child in the present.
What if I clean my bathroom while my clohtes are in the dryer? Then again, what if I just spend 60 seconds cleaning my bathroom after i use it so I only have to give it a scrub down once or twice a year?
Personally I’m a big fan of outsourcing, unless you really feel like it’s hurting you financially. You’re only going to live once, your kids are only going to be small once, why spend that time cleaning toilets if you are financially sound enough to avoid it?
Of course not everyone is in a position to even have the luxury of considering such a thing.
[…] Got a lot of things to do, but don’t have enough time? Kara McGuire at Ka-Blog asks “How do you manage the balance between time and money?“ […]
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