8 Comments

  1. Great Post Penny 🙂

    We also pay for labour sometimes.
    We recently bought a wall unit from Ikea. 4.8m (16ft) long.
    Made up of 4 units each 4 ft long. Bolted to the wall. No legs.
    Had to be really securely fixed. and look like one continuous unit. Level
    The unit cost $700 (Australian)
    $100 to get all the components from the warehouse and delivered.
    $200 to Install.
    Three People showed up.
    They spent 2.5 hours putting the units together, bolting the units to the wall, instsalling shelves, doors, drawers, self closers, soft closers, etc. That’s 7.5 man hours. A full days work for 1 person. Or probably 4 full days for me, going to the hardware store for new tools probably worth $200. and a ruined relationship with my partner.

    And it would have looked terrible
    and fallen off the wall and broken a vase and 3 plates, at least.

    $200 seemed a lot. Now it seems like the best bargain ever!

    Shaun

  2. Leigh

    Investing really does feel like gambling! Thanks for talking about that – I feel like no one does really. Our net worth really just feels like a random number because of that.

  3. PiC is totally not a money nerd either. He has learned a ton from me since we got together though, and he pulls his weight on the income and side income fronts in addition to not spending all the monies so I don’t need him to be (except for when I think about the possibility of me dying prematurely and him not having me around to handle the money anymore – because THAT’S what’s going to be the real problem, right?)

    I left my Roth IRA invested in treasury funds for a literally stupid long time. It earned NOTHING when you calculate inflation. It went backwards. I finally switched it to more VTSAX this year and it’s earned more in 3 months than it’s earned in seven years. Not a joke.

  4. On outsourcing labor: I’ll be paying for getting my hair cut tomorrow… it’s a $10 dollar Thursday deal, and I can certainly afford it, but after cutting it myself for over 2 years it very much feels like cheating on the frugal tribe. But I’m not very good at it, so it’s 10 bucks well spent.
    On food: we figured out it costs us about 37 cents to make a loaf of bread. The day old discount Walmart bread is 50% bigger and costs 30 cents… I’ve kind of given up on making bread.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.