Bills are a once a month thing, I rent so maybe it's different but my student loans should make up for that. In total? 15 minutes tops.
I dry clean my clothes myself, so yeah I agree clothes _can_ take up to 2 hrs. But picking out what to wear and polishing your shoes shouldn't count as an extra 10.5 hours a week.
Most people enjoy buying stuff, especially if it requires research because then they get psyched about it. Who doesn't like a new car? Other than that, it should be pretty rare to need to research for window cleaning products. You just buy what looks alright on the shelf and if it sucks don't buy it again.
The rest I'll agree with. Most people I see that "waste" their time are doing things like, marathoning Game of Thrones, drinking or celebrating something.
Here are some real wastes:
- Going after companies to get your money back for either incorrectly or over charging you, or charging you for services not rendered.
- "Market forces" raising prices, causing you to move right freaking next door so your rent can stay the same, or even lower.
- How about those Dr. appointments that you scheduled, only so you can wait an extra hour to actually be seen.
- Warranty covered oil changes that take an hour or even two (last time it happened to me).
- Standing in a 40 minute long line at the store because despite having 30 register's, they only have 2 cashiers. There is self checkout but of course it's already full of people struggling to understand how the machine works, or they're just generally slow moving.
- Holiday traffic/parking, where do all these vehicles come from? Even small towns get congested it's a real mystery to me.
- Spontaneously waking up in the middle of the night for a few hours, then oversleeping the next morning. Also, you need to go to bed early now to make it up.
- Paperwork for just about any government related activity. I just listed my SSN on three different pages why do I still have to fill this in again?
People fail to correctly value (1) the cost of these time saving services and (2) their own time.
It's similar to how people will drive around to save 5 cents per gallon on gasoline. Usually, they will only end up saving a dollar. Or someone will make multiple trips to their car to unload all groceries (which can add significant time in apartment buildings) because they wanted to save 20 cents and not buy a paper/plastic bag during checkout. These little things add up in time.
The real problem is the wasted time. You may save $20 bucks a week shopping around, but if it costs you 45 minutes and you make $40/hour after taxes, you are spending 45 minutes to save 30 minutes.
It's true, the less money you have the more time you have to spend on the basics. As much as I love laundry and housekeeping services, if I'm not making income they're gone and there's 4 hours a week I now have to spend to be clean. No credit card? No Amazon Prime delivery, needs more time to go to the market +1hr/day. No money for quality restaurant food? Time to start going to farmers' markets and learning to cook, +2hr/day... etc. Car service? LOL. No cash to load Clipper? Hours of travel time. Medical care? I pity the fool.
If you use the extra time to do those quality things like playing with your dog or reading then you're benefiting from the on-demand economy. You've figured out how to make it work for you. That's great.
But... Lots of other people don't use that time well. They 'save' lots of time by having things brought to them, and spend that time watching TV or browsing the net despite not really enjoying those things. They're exchanging money for time to do passive activities they don't like and don't make them feel good. That is not a benefit. People apparently forget that saving time is a two-fold activity. There is the act of doing something to save the time, but there is also the act of using the time you saved to do something that doesn't make you feel awful. Unless you can do both things spending money to save time actually makes your situation worse.
I feel that most of the time, my time is worth more than the money saved doing monotonous things to save money. Sure, getting the Sunday paper and clipping a few coupons saves money and doesn't cost time, but taken to the extreme it does.
I have friends that drive an extra 30 minutes to save off a few cents in gas or ones that endure the hoards on craigslist to sell an item for 50$.
I'd rather take the craigslist item to a goodwill, donate it, and take the $50 off on my taxes later.
Some people shop at 3-4 different stores on sunday to optimize their costs, but I'd rather shop at 1 store and spend an extra 20$ to avoid doing that. It all comes down to preference but time spent at home on a project or with family is worth the small amount of money I'd lose doing things optimally.
This is all valid and a good point. An interesting observation to make is that all of these time-savers relate to paying someone else to maintain a possession of yours (house, car, lawn). In this sense, minimalism saves time too (no possessions = no time spent maintaining them). It also saves money (from buying the possessions in the first place and paying for their maintenance thereafter). So then the question is are there other ways you can use money to get more time? Good argument for better healthcare all else equal, but yes, the larger point still stands.
Okay we should spend more time wasting more time. But how to pay your bills in that time? As long as this question is not answered all this discussion is meaningless in my eyes.
> unlike businesses where labor time is expensive, many consumers don't think of their free time as particularly valuable.
On a tangent, I think it's important to understand "why" is that. Not because most people are stupid, or they don't know the concept of opportunity costs, as popular explanations go. It's because for most individuals, time is illiquid. You can't just turn every 10 minutes you save on some chore into 1/6 of your hourly rate. So, for most people, that $2/month is a pure loss, even if it saves more than 10 minutes a month, so it needs to be (or at least feel) truly worth it.
I think people vastly underestimate the happiness potential that convenience offers. Time is our scarcest asset, and wasting it is extremely distressing. Stress is a big factor in perceived happiness. So yeah, spending money to save time can have a large impact on how happy you are.
Supporting your comment, I've heard the phrase "many people spend a lot of time to save a little money and some people spend a lot of money to save a little time."
How many lawyers/doctors/executives do you know who do handyman work? It is just so much more cost effective to pay someone to fix this or change the oil so that the person can get another billable hour or another patient or another business deal or address client/customer needs? So I won't quite call it frugality, but more efficiency. The question becomes "are you efficient with your money and time?"
"8. When buying things, time and money trade-off against each other. If you’re low on money, take more time to find deals. If you’re low on time, stop looking for great deals and just buy things quickly online."
I'm finding, as I've gotten older, that almost every time I've chosen money over time I've made a bad decision.
And I see this among my family and friends, too. There's a mentality that emerges when exchanging time for money that somehow makes it so you waste your time and you end up spending almost or more money than you originally would have.
I'm known for saying, "There is a professional person for that... Let's get one," instead of trying to fix the water heater ourselves or get transport 2 tons of gravel. Others in my family would have dragged the old trailer out of the barn. Oh, it has a flat. Fix that. Oh, the trailer hitch doesn't fit the new truck, oh, get a new hitch (we'll use it someday again, surely). Or get the old truck working, or the older truck working (cause they keep buying cheap used trucks that break down and sit on the property for eternity). Then go get whatever, and deal with not knowing what they're doing. Me, just get it delivered. Maybe more money, waaaay less hassle. In the saved time I've polished up my CSS skills...
Time really is the most precious resource you have. Think hard before you trade it for anything else.
I disagree completely with the article. It calls it a time tax because he is rich and obsessed with efficient use of time. Rich people have a washer and dryer at home. The poor go to laundromats. They meet others, have a chat, kids play, do their hw there and they left the house. Someone might even meet a future spouse.
The rich efficient people stayed on their computers studying efficiently like the electronics they want to enulate in doing more work. The rich are disconnected from reality, riding Ubers or their cars and getting around efficiently while someone might prefer to portion the time to read instead, hard in a 10 minute Uber. Poor people just do more human things.
The easy way around this problem is to be aware of the value of your time. If it takes you another ten minutes to save 1-2 dollars and it feels like a chore, then it's obviously a bad deal.
Of course, your time isn't always worth the same. You may find yourself on a Sunday morning with time to burn (or retired/unemployed), in which case you might as well look for a better deal as a matter of principle. It also may be the case that going out of your way is enjoyable for other reasons and doesn't feel like a chore.
It's all about being aware of how the price you pay for anything is composed of many variables (time, money, sacrifices, etc) whose relative values are constantly readjusting.
Time. I'm lucky I get to trade some money for time. Instead of spending the weekend cleaning my house I can pay someone fortnightly to do it for me. I can pay for a meal to be delivered to me if I don't want to cook for myself. I can pay for my groceries to be delivered to save me having to wait in line at the store.
I disagree. Putting a dollar amount on your free time is a very smart thing to do. When I hire someone to clean my house I don't do it with the expectation that I am saving money, but that the amount I am spending to steal more time away from something I don't enjoy is 100% worth it.
>A common beginner mistake I see on finance forums is when people calculate some notional hourly wage for their time, usually from their salary divided by working hours in a year, and then use that to justify any time saving purchase they want to make.
I see people talking about "what's your time worth" on hobby forums all the f-ing time. At this point I just assume they're justifying laziness because that's what it is far more often than not.
Interestingly enough, you pretty much never see people who are self employed and could be booking billable hours instead of doing other things invoking the "value of my time" argument for doing or not doing things.
I dry clean my clothes myself, so yeah I agree clothes _can_ take up to 2 hrs. But picking out what to wear and polishing your shoes shouldn't count as an extra 10.5 hours a week.
Most people enjoy buying stuff, especially if it requires research because then they get psyched about it. Who doesn't like a new car? Other than that, it should be pretty rare to need to research for window cleaning products. You just buy what looks alright on the shelf and if it sucks don't buy it again.
The rest I'll agree with. Most people I see that "waste" their time are doing things like, marathoning Game of Thrones, drinking or celebrating something.
Here are some real wastes:
I'm sure there are more I'm not thinking of...reply