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Saving Money By Paying Someone?15 03 06 20  19
-------- To do House Work
For the last couple of weeks we have been taking turns watching workers repair one of our rental townhouses. The repairs carry a significant cost, mostly paid by insurance. What the insurance doesn’t pay is for us to watch them (we can’t really leave the tenant’s personal property unattended with strange people).If it wasn’t a tenant occupied property I would have done the work myself. If I have to watch over workers, I might as well do the work myself – I have two able hands that can insulate, put drywall, and paint just as well as they can. Same thing with having someone clean my house: if I have to hide all valuables and things I don’t want people to touch, and I have to watch over the cleaners, I might as well do the cleaning myself – with some background music it may even be a space for meditation. There are some things I have paid people to do, mostly successfully. Anything done on the exterior of the house like gutter cleaning, lawn mowing, seal coating is fair game – if the price is right. No need to supervise them and it is easy to verify if they did the work and send a check. I also gladly pay for those things that are very complex to do and very easy to mess up (at least from my point of view), like installing my central air conditioner, or complex plumbing work. My time is valuable, but only to the extent I invest it in something valuable.If I have to take unpaid time off from work to do a chore that someone else can do without requiring my presence: that is money saved. (Assuming that person’s hourly rate is lower than mine) Things that can be done as weekend projects only produce savings if by contracting the work you do something else with your time: like take a short vacation/trip. If I just watch TV while people do the work – I better value the TV program a lot! Be sure you calculate your use of the time when contracting someone to do work. |
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