Our Little Outsourcing Experiment
A couple of months ago, I posted about paying for household services. My wife had brought up the idea of ‘outsourcing’ some of our domestic jobs. She suggested we hire someone to cut the grass and someone to clean the house (presumably different people - I don’t know a lot of housekeepers who mow lawns).
Everybody’s heard the saw “Time is money.” My wife was turning it around on me and saying “Money is time.” She argued (successfully) that she’d rather have me spend an hour with her and our daughter on the weekend than spend it cutting the grass.
We actually implemented part of the plan.
For over a month now we’ve had a guy coming by once a week to cut the grass for $31 per week. We decided to do three times per month and it would be on a ‘trial basis.’ I initially balked at a new monthly bill of $93. Who needs that?
I’m here to tell you it’s working great. (How is my wife right so often? Dammit!) I’m not one of those guys who loves his yard. As a matter of fact, if it were up to me I’d install Astroturf over the entire property (If you click the link, you’ll see people actually do this! I had no idea). But the yard looks good. And I love not sweating my ass off every weekend doing it.
Is it worth it?
To me, yes. Golbguru from Money, Matter, and More Musings wrote about a technique I’ve used for years about looking at the cost of things in terms of hours you need to work to get them. Here’s how it works out:
Time it takes me to cut grass: 1 hour
Price to have grass cut: $31
Time it takes me to earn $31 after tax: about 1 1/2 hours
Net cost to me: 1/2 hour
The way I figure it, roughly speaking, it’s costing me 1/2 hour of labor (in a nice air conditioned office) to cut the grass. I can live with that.
June 20th, 2007 at 11:09 am
That astroturf looks pretty wicked. $3.50-$3.75 per square foot though… even a small lot would be about $35k - not sure if I ever would make back that investment.
They also make a product called a Robomower that is a little rechargeable battery powered machine that mows your lawn. From what I’ve read you still need to do things like small touchups and weedwacking but they work pretty well. Unfortunately it doesn’t do well with hills and i have a rather large one on my property.
June 21st, 2007 at 1:45 pm
[…] Personal Finance has a post about “Outsourcing” His Lawn Work. I personally like the idea of laying down astroturf on the entire […]
June 21st, 2007 at 7:46 pm
We’re removing all of the lawn (OK, it’s not that much) in the backyard. The dogs have pretty much killed it anyway. We are going to install two small raised beds that we will plant with herbs and such, and will mulch the rest. It’ll make it much easier to clean up after the dogs, and much neater looking than dead patches. No mowing, either.
July 28th, 2007 at 8:04 am