25 January 2008 3 Comments Print This Post  Email This Post

At what point does it make sense to start hiring out little tasks? These days, you can hire someone to pick up your laundry, schedule a doctor’s appointment and pick out birthday cards for your kids! But how much money is it worth to save that sort of time?

My frugal tendencies tell me that paying people to do my errands is a waste of my money. But I have seen some figures that have made me waver a little bit. Consider the following example:

Jane is a lawyer. If she works for an hour, let’s say that she’ll bring home $50. If she runs errands for an hour, she doesn’t bring home anything. But she can pay someone $15 to run her errands and work that hour — she’ll still have $35 and be ahead of the game.

In this case, it’s worthwhile for Jane to farm out her errands, as long as she can be sure they’ll be done correctly and she won’t have to go back and redo them.  But what if Jane was going to use time she wouldn’t be paid for anyhow? If she ran her errands on her lunch hour, she wouldn’t be losing money by not working. The only other argument I really see is that Jane might have a non-monetary use for her time that she considers more valuable that her earning power. Maybe Jane wants to meet a friend for lunch or spend time with her kids.

The important question has to be ‘how much is your time worth?’ Is there something more lucrative you can be doing than cleaning your house or picking out a birthday present? It isn’t the only question, though. You have to be sure you’ll actually spend that hour you gain doing something worthwhile.

While I’m wavering, at least for some errands that I really don’t enjoy doing, I’m still not convinced. After all, with a lot of errands, you can multi-task. You can spend time with your kids while grocery shopping. You can set your own appointments while waiting in line at the bank. I don’t think someone that you hire out of the blue is going to make the effort to multi-task, making the entire system less efficient.

Can you think of any reasons that hiring someone to do your errands and small tasks is really beneficial? I’d love to be convinced one way or the other.