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You can definitely buy time. But should you?
It can be quite nice to think of time as a leveller. To remember that even the rich and famous don’t have a longer life span than us or get more than 24 hours in a day. Except that they do, in a way. I’ve written before about how, in spite of all the memes about it, we don’t all have the same 24 hours as Beyonce. Because time, it turns out, can be bought, quite easily. And that can have a big impact on the decisions you make about your personal finances.
There Are Two Main Ways to Buy Time
You can buy other people’s time by outsourcing anything from cleaning your house to writing your CV, to doing your taxes. You can also buy time by getting someone else to do something while you do something else. For example you can pay someone to drive you to a meeting while you prepare for it in the back seat. And no, I’m not suggesting you employ a full time chauffeur. A taxi or uber will do.
You can buy technology that saves time. This could be an app that budgets for you, or a gadget or appliance that saves time in some way. One of the ways I save a lot of time is by using accounting software that tracks all my business income and expenditure. It charts my monthly profits and makes filing my taxes a breeze. Other people might say the most important time saving device they have is a slow cooker, or an Alexa, or any number of ‘smart home’ gadgets.
Should You Buy Time?
That depends.
The main reason to buy time is so you can spend that time on something else more worthwhile. There are two ways to look at that. You can buy time to make money. The most obvious example is that if you’re freelancing and charging $50 an hour, but you can get someone to clean your house for $10 an hour, you’re probably better off doing a couple of extra hours of freelancing at the weekend rather than cleaning your house.
There are also less obvious examples. If being well-prepared for a meeting will bring in thousands of dollars in new business it’s probably worth springing $20 for an uber so you can prepare on the way. If putting your car through a car wash this morning, rather than washing it yourself, gives you time to apply for a new job that pays a lot more, the car wash is a small price to pay.
Another reason we buy time, of course, is so we have more of it to spend on worthwhile things with no monetary value. That might be fun, hobbies or spending time with our kids. It’s up to you to decide how much you can afford to outsource so you can just goof around and have fun with your kids. But as a parent of now grown kids I’d suggest that as long as you can afford it, it’s almost always worth finding time to spend with them while they’re young.
Only you can decide how much money to invest in buying time, and how you’ll do it. For the purpose of brainstorming, however, here are some of the things you might be doing yourself right now that you could outsource.
- House repairs
- Tax preparation
- CV writing
- Cleaning
- Ironing
- Cooking
- Dog walking
- Party planning
- Decluttering
- Yard work
- Clothes shopping (via a personal shopping service)
- Travel planning (via a travel agent)
- Driving (if you can hand it over to uber, for example)
- Small business tasks such as content creation or advertising (if you run a side hustle)
- Recruitment or accounting (if you run a small business)
Ideally you’ll be outsourcing things that:
- You don’t like to do
- You’re not good at
- Cost less per hour than you earn per hour (if you’re optimising income)
Clearly you don’t want to be outsourcing dog walking if walking your dog is the best part of your day, or travel planning, if planning a trip is as much fun as taking it for you. That’s why it’s important to spend some time planning what you’ll pay to outsource and working that into your overall budget.
Otherwise you can end up outsourcing all the wrong things. If you’ve ever paid for (increasingly expensive) childcare, for example, so you can run errands or do chores you don’t even like doing, then you quite possibly should have outsourced the chores and enjoyed the time with your child.
Look at what you can afford to outsource as part of your overall budgeting strategy, and then put a plan in place, based on your personal priorities.
Karen Banes is a freelance writer specializing in entrepreneurship, parenting and lifestyle. She writes articles, website content, ebooks and the occasional award winning short story. Her work has appeared in a range of publications both online and off, including The Washington Post, Life Info Magazine, Transitions Abroad, Brave New Traveler, Natural Parenting Group, and Copia Magazine. Learn More About Karen
To make Wealthtender free for readers, we earn money from advertisers, including financial professionals and firms that pay to be featured. This creates a conflict of interest when we favor their promotion over others. Read our editorial policy and terms of service to learn more. Wealthtender is not a client of these financial services providers.
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