Paying for household services
My wife and I have periodic, non-scheduled financial planning get-togethers. They’re not the easiest things to do because they often involve resolving conflicting priorities. A case in point occurred at our latest one. We were tweaking our spending plan to account for her new job and our second child, who is due in Sep/Oct.
The issue that came up was whether we should hire someone to cut our grass and/or clean our house. I seriously never believed I’d be considering having a housecleaner. It seems like a thing only ‘wealthy’ people do and we don’t consider ourselves wealthy.
The decision hinges on only one factor: deciding if our time is more valuable than the cost to have these services ’subcontracted out.’ We don’t have a huge house and probably combined spend somewhere around 2-3 hours per week cleaning. Needless to say, it’s not an activity either of us enjoys, so getting any pleasure out of the activity is out of the equation (unlike, say, cooking). It’s a purely economic decision.
It being a purely economic decision, however, doesn’t mean it is an easy one. Fundamentally, how do you put a value on your time? To me, it’s not simply your hourly work rate since that assumes I’d be working additional hours if I wasn’t cleaning the house which is clearly untrue. Besides, I’m of the mind that your hourly rate at work doesn’t capture anything close to your actual all-in wage. Not all costs nor benefits are included.
Right now we’re in a ‘wait and see’ holding pattern. We have a vacation and baby-related expenses coming up, so the final decision will have to wait until after those are done. I’d love feedback from anybody if they have any experience outsourcing some household job.
May 8th, 2007 at 10:28 am
[…] up the inverse: Money is time. Advanced Personal Finance brought this up today with an entry about paying for household services. This is not quite as popular a maxim with personal finance, as it implies spending money instead […]
May 8th, 2007 at 3:19 pm
We used to have a cleaning lady - it rocked! Had to get rid of her to save money. If my wife ever goes back to full time, we’ll probably hire her back.
I pay a kid $12 to cut the lawn at my apartment building. I used to do it myself, but just hate cutting two lawns during the summer. So I at least still do the lawn at our house.
I don’t mind paying for such services - it improves my quality of life and helps me maintain sanity.
June 1st, 2007 at 10:46 pm
This might depend on your personality characteristics. I tend to perfectionism and control. Though I’ve not hired house cleaners or lawn caretakers, it seems when I hire others to do pet care, car care, carpets, etc., I’m usually frustrated that they don’t do a very good job. Sometimes I end up going behind and finishing up. Needless to say, this changes the calculus somewhat.
June 20th, 2007 at 7:52 am
[…] Personal Finance, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed.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 […]