Time vs Money
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Time vs Money
| Sun, 02-13-2005 - 2:26pm |
Do you sometimes pay extra for a service or item because it is closer to home or work than to drive and spend the extra time saving money on that service or item?
I do. Sometimes time is worth more to me than the money I could save. It really depends on the item or service. Maybe it's just laziness LMBO! I was just curious if anyone does the same thing.

Yes, I do this occasionally, but I always calculate my actual savings and translate it to an hourly wage, as well as calculate whether getting the cheaper item would in fact have been a savings. For instance, driving home one night I forgot to get in the left lane to get gas at the station I know is always cheapest. I thought, heck, I'll pay a penny or two extra and get it at the station up the road. Turns out, the gas at the station up the road was 15 cents more expensive. In this case, I turned around and went back the way I had come for the cheaper gasoline. During the extra five minutes or so it added to my trip, I first calculated how much extra gasoline I burned. Then I calculated my savings, minus the cost of the extra gasoline. Then I calculated my "hourly wage" based on how long it took me to save the extra $1 and change. It turned out my hourly wage was more than $12/hr. Considering that it was tax-free and low stress, I thought it was worth it. However, had the kids been in the car with me with one or both of them unhappy and crying, and the traffic had been bad, and the trip had taken ten minutes and the savings had come out to something more like $3 per hour or less, I probably would have decided it wasn't worth it and not done it the next time.
By the same token, if I'm going to WalMart but I know an item is a few cents cheaper at Aldi, but I'm not planning to go there for a week or more and it would be out of my way and I'd have to haul the kids over there and back again, then I might skip it and just buy the item at WalMart.
But I try to plan trips so that that doesn't happen. I know what is cheapest at Aldi, and so I plan to buy enough of each item to last until the next planned trip. If I run out, I just try to make do. Same goes for the items I know are cheaper at WalMart, and so on.
Time can definitely be worth more than money, but I think it's important to know just exactly how much that time is costing in terms of money, and vice versa, so we can make educated choices.
Another thing I am careful about is to calculate based on actual time savings. For instance, it may seem like a time savings to go buy a pre-made meal rather than cooking some spaghetti or other simple meal, but once you calculate the time in the car, browsing the menu, standing in line, etc., you may discover that your actual time savings is pretty minimal. Same goes for buying pre-packaged foods (especially microwave popcorn, which is ridiculously expensive when compared to the same weight of regular popcorn), which often provide only a perceived time savings but when compared to actual experience, turn out not to save much time at all.
Anyway, that's my book of an answer. :)
Blessings,
Heather
Here is a link to a thread we had on this topic recently:
All my best,
Danni
I am guitly of this. I go to a dry cleaner that's on my way home, and they are a little pricier. But the way I see it if I drove out of my way to the cheaper (and not as good, IMO) dry cleaner, sure I'll save a few cents but I'll waste that in gas anyway. YKWIM?
I try not to let myself feel too guilty about it though ;)
If it's something though that I know I can get WAAAY cheaper somewhere else, I will go the extra mile though.
I very rarely save time or convenience over money. As far as gas goes, I'm pretty lucky that I have a few very cheap stations near both my house and my job. I live about 5 minutes away from 6 different grocery stores, so I will usually scan sale flyers and paln my trip around what's on sale where. For me this doesn't take too much extra time or waste much gas, since everything is so close. I actually learned this from my mother. When I was a kid we lived 30 minutes away from the nearest grocery store. My mom would sale hunt, but since everything was so far away it would take all day....I couldn't do that now.
That's not to say that I don't pay money for some conveniences. I get my hair cut and highlighted every 8 weeks....I don't have the time or diligence to attempt this myself. And lately I've been paying to have my car serviced instead of just doing it myself. I figure I'll spend 15$ to buy oil and a filter for my car, only to come home and lay on the cold, sometimes wet ground to change it. I'd rather pay someone the extra 10$ to do it for me. I still change my own air filters though. The place I go to charges 40$ to put a 10$ air filter on my car. The process takes about 5 minutes and doesn't require laying on the ground.....Ok you can call me cheap now if you want....
Sarah