I have found the old saying, time is money, to be more valid than ever in my retirement.
Here is a recent example from my life.
My son and I needed to get back to our hotel 20 miles away from the football game we had just attended. Ridesharing apps were telling me it would cost $100, which seemed ridiculous to me.
Tickets to the game were that much. So I decided to walk the mile and a half to Union Station to either catch a train (which would require another mile of walking to the hotel) or hopefully grab a cheaper ride further away from the stadium.
A train was leaving in 14 miles for $10 a person. Ridesharing was $70. I just “made” $30 by walking a mile and a half. Therefore if I could make another $49 by walking again, the choice was obvious.
I made my son walk 2.5 miles to save us $80. I bought him McDonald’s on the walk back for $6, a win to me.
Let’s say that walking cost us an extra hour of our lives but saved us $80. Was it worth it?
The Pitch
Calculate how much their time is worth given a person’s age, financial status, and preferences.
It’s All About the Money
I want a service that is simple and dynamic. But where would you even start? How valuable is someone’s time? The two most significant factors are money and age. Life tables are typical in insurance. The tables give us a good sense of how much time someone has left on earth. For example, based on the American Social Security table, as a 39-year-old male, I have about 40 years left or about 350,000 hours. If I have a million dollars of disposable income over those 40 years, my time is worth about $3/hour.
The math is simple and wrong, but it’s the general direction.
Imagine you need to get your house cleaned, but you also got offer a job that pays $200 before the end of the day. If a home cleaning service charges you $100, it’s probably an easy decision to do the job and pay to have your house cleaned. But, on the other hand, if the cleaning costs $300, then you’re going to clean the home yourself. Anything in between those values probably depends on your personal preferences.
These decisions are all about opportunity cost. But, how do you handle all the variables at hand? What is the actual price and benefit of cleaning the house yourself? There’s more than just the cleaning supplies. You may take much longer than the cleaning crew or not do as good of a job. In addition, there can be physical health benefits and mental health benefits of decluttering your own physical space.
Profit
With this app, you can see how much having someone mow your lawn costs in your area and then have that automatically compared to your hourly worth.
We can serve as a middleman for services like Fiverr or Upwork to quickly connect you to someone who can take care of the work that you don’t want to do for you.
