I was driving home from the gym this morning when I passed a sign that said, “We hang Christmas lights.” My very first thought was, why don’t people just hang their own lights?
I mean, come on. You climb a ladder, you clip some lights to the gutter, you plug them in. People have been doing this themselves for about a hundred years.
Then I got home, and a few hours later my trees were delivered. A crew of three guys came with them to dig the holes. I stood in my driveway and watched them work, and somewhere around the second hole it hit me that I’d just judged a total stranger for paying a company to do a job they could do themselves.
I didn’t offer to help. I didn’t even think about offering to help.
So now I’ve got a question I can’t shake. Why is it okay to hire out some projects and not others? When we pay for outsourcing household tasks, are we being smart with our time, or are we being lazy and calling it something nicer?
I suspect a lot of people in the FI community wrestle with this, because many of us got where we are by doing stuff ourselves. We change our own oil. We cut our own hair. We refuse to pay anybody for anything we could learn on YouTube in 20 minutes. Writing a check to a guy with a truck can feel like breaking some unwritten rule.
About Those Christmas Lights
In fairness to the light people, let me think through what hanging lights actually involves.
First you have to find the lights, which are in a bin in the garage, under another bin. They’re tangled even though you know you put them away neatly last year. You plug them in and half the strand is dead because of one bad bulb, and good luck figuring out which one. You need new clips because the old ones disappeared. Then you’re up on a ladder in the cold, reaching a little farther than you should because you don’t want to climb down and move it again.
And in January you get to take it all down.
The ladder part is no joke, either. Thousands of people end up in the emergency room every holiday season from decorating injuries, and a lot of those are falls. I’d bet most of them thought it was an easy job too. A broken wrist is going to cost a lot more than whatever the light company charges.
So maybe that sign isn’t so ridiculous after all.
And my trees? Colorado clay is brutal. It’s dense, it’s heavy, and the hole is supposed to be two to three times as wide as the root ball. I had six trees. If I’d done it myself, I’d have lost a whole weekend and probably spent the next week walking like a question mark.
The crew was in and out fast. They had the right equipment, and they do this all day long.
What bugs me is how similar the two jobs are. Someone comes to your house and does physical labor you technically could do yourself. I paid for one without a second thought and side-eyed the other. The difference was only in my head. Lights looked easy to me, so hiring someone for them looked silly. Digging looked hard, so hiring someone looked sensible.
Why It Feels Like Cheating
I’ve been trying to figure out why outsourcing household tasks comes with so much guilt, and I think a few things are going on.
A lot of us were raised to believe that doing your own chores says something about who you are. Paying somebody to mow your lawn was for rich people, or for people who thought they were too good to do it.
Then there’s the FI piece. Frugality is a point of pride in this community. Post in a forum that you pay for a lawn service and somebody will reply within the hour with a calculation of what that money would grow to in 30 years. (I’ll do that calculation in a minute, because it’s actually pretty interesting.)
I also think we mostly judge the stuff we can picture ourselves doing. You’d never feel guilty about paying a dentist. Nobody’s out there asking why you don’t just do your own fillings. The guilt shows up with the in-between stuff, the jobs we’re capable of doing but don’t feel like doing. Cleaning, mowing, shoveling snow, hanging lights.
“Capable of” is a pretty generous standard, though. I’m capable of a lot of things I probably shouldn’t do.
The Hourly Rate Rule
The usual advice on outsourcing household tasks goes like this. Figure out what you make per hour, and if hiring someone costs less than that, hire them.
I’ve always thought that rule was a little off, for a couple of reasons.
Most people can’t turn free time into more money. If you’re on salary and you skip mowing this weekend, your paycheck is exactly the same. Unless you freelance or own a business where extra hours turn into extra income, “my time is worth $X an hour” is more theory than reality.
The other problem is taxes. Say you make $50 an hour and around 30% goes to taxes. You’re really taking home about $35. So a $35 service eats a full hour of your work, not most of one.
Okay, here’s that forum math I promised.
Let’s say a lawn service charges $50 a week and the season runs about 26 weeks. That’s $1,300 a year. Invest that every year for 20 years at 7% and you’d have roughly $53,000. That’s a lot of money, and I’m not going to pretend it isn’t.
But you also didn’t mow for 20 years. If mowing, edging, and cleanup take about two hours a week, you got back 52 hours a year, or about 1,040 hours total. Divide the $53,000 by 1,040 and you’re paying around $51 an hour to not mow your lawn.
I find that way more useful than the big scary number. Would you pay $51 an hour to never mow again? Some people love mowing. They throw on a podcast and it’s the most peaceful two hours of their week. Those people should keep mowing. Other people would pay twice that without blinking. At least now they know what they’re actually buying.
The Research on Buying Time
There’s a study on this I keep coming back to. In 2017, Harvard Business School professor Ashley Whillans and her colleagues published research in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that looked at thousands of people in several countries. The name of the paper is “Buying Time Promotes Happiness.” People who spent money to get out of tasks they didn’t like reported being more satisfied with their lives, and that held true across income levels, not just for wealthy people.
They also ran an experiment where they gave working adults money on two separate weekends. One weekend they spent it on something material, and the other on something that saved them time. People felt better and less rushed after the time-saving purchase.
What surprised me was how few people in the study actually spent money that way, including plenty who could easily afford to. Apparently we feel better buying things than buying time, which is backwards when you think about it. Time is the one you can’t get more of.
So if you’ve been feeling guilty about outsourcing household tasks, there’s at least some science saying you can relax a little.
How I’m Going to Decide From Now On
I don’t think there’s a perfect rule, but I came up with a few questions I’m going to ask myself before I either judge someone or pull out my wallet.
First, do I like doing it? I like to cook, so I’m not paying anybody to make my dinner. If you hate cooking, a meal service might be the best money you spend all month. If you enjoy a task, it isn’t really a cost.
Second, could I get hurt or screw it up badly? Roofs, ladders, chainsaws, big trees. If doing it wrong means a hospital visit or water in the basement, the money you save doing it yourself can vanish fast. I don’t consider that lazy at all.
Third, do I have the tools? If I’d have to buy or rent a $300 piece of equipment I’ll use once, I’m probably hiring it out. The tree crew showed up with real equipment. I would’ve shown up with a shovel and a bad attitude.
Fourth, how often does it come up? A one-time job that takes special skills or tools is usually an easy call. Recurring jobs are trickier, because the cost adds up over the years, but so does the time you’d get back. That’s when it’s worth running numbers like the lawn example.
Fifth, and this is the one I have to be honest about: what am I going to do with the time? If paying a house cleaner means I get a Saturday with my family or a few hours to finally finish something I’ve been putting off, great. If it means I spend the afternoon on my phone and feel kind of blah about it, the cleaning wasn’t the problem.
When It Really Is Lazy
I’m not letting everybody off the hook completely, myself included. Sometimes outsourcing household tasks really is just avoiding stuff.
If you’re paying for a bunch of conveniences and can’t figure out why you aren’t saving anything, those two things might be connected.
If you’re hiring out things you actually care about, like teaching your kids how to do chores, you’re kind of missing the point.
And the one that gets most of us is the stuff we never really decided on. A grocery delivery fee here, a car wash membership there, the dog poop pickup service you signed up for during a muddy spring and never canceled. (That’s a real business, by the way, and I have nothing but respect for them.)
For me, what separates smart from lazy is whether you thought about it. If you looked at the job, did the math, thought about what you’d do with the extra time, and decided it was worth it, that’s not lazy. That’s pretty much what FI is supposed to let you do. Spend on what matters to you and stop spending on what doesn’t.
If you’re paying for it because you never stopped to think about it, that’s just money slipping out the door.
So Am I Hanging My Own Lights This Year?
Probably. I don’t mind doing it, and my roofline isn’t especially scary.
But I do owe the Christmas light company an apology. Not in person, because that would be strange. They aren’t selling laziness. They’re selling the same thing the tree guys sold me this morning: the right equipment, a lot of experience, a smaller chance of somebody getting hurt, and a few hours back for people who have better things to do with them. Some of their customers probably shouldn’t be on ladders anymore. Some are swamped. Some just really hate untangling lights. I get it.
And if I’m ever standing at the bottom of that ladder thinking I’d happily pay $51 an hour to never do this again, I know where to find the sign.
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