By Alaina Trivax, WCI Columnist
If you have kids, you know that toddlers are not to be trusted. What’s that? A moment of quiet? Oh, wait. Your little guy is taking a marker to the new dining room chairs. Cool.
My husband, Brandon, and I try to tag-team the toddler supervision duties, but sometimes our 2-year-old still sneaks past us. Brandon is employed in a Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation private practice while I work as a middle school teacher. With baby No. 2 on the way, we knew we needed to toddler-proof my older son’s room to prevent at least some of these “you did what?!” moments.
As I imagined corralling a toddler and an infant, I knew there would be times when I couldn’t have eyes on them both, and I wanted to be sure my son (and my chairs!) were as safe as possible. I hoped to tackle this toddler-proofing project before our new baby arrived. My husband was in the middle of a stretch of long workdays and extra weekend coverage, but I figured I could handle it myself. I’m the handier one in our house, anyway!
That’s where I went wrong. Sure, I probably could do it. But I failed to consider the time that I would have to invest in researching a solution, purchasing the supplies, and actually completing the task—all while wrangling a toddler. What is the value of my time as a wife, mother, household manager, teacher, and more, especially when at least one person in the household earns a doctor's salary?
When to Outsource Household Chores
Of course, hindsight is 20/20, and at the time, I thought this would be a straightforward task. Secure the furniture so our son can’t knock things over; contain the cords so he can’t pull stuff down. Easy peasy. Anchoring the furniture to the walls turned out to be simple enough, but securing the cords for his sound machine and baby monitor proved to be more difficult.
I bought a cord containment kit on Amazon—wrong size. Ordered another one—it couldn’t turn corners the way I needed. Picked out a new kit at Home Depot and brought in my incredibly handy mom to help–we still couldn’t get it to work. At this point, I’d spent at least $100 on supplies and wasted a good five hours of my time. I spent hours and hours trying to get different cord containment products to work but never wanted to ask Brandon to take a look. He only had a few hours of free time each evening–he needed that time to relax, right? Instead, I finally called in my friendly neighborhood handyman. It took him a half-hour to accomplish the task, and it cost $100 for time and supplies.
After writing that check, I began to wonder: why was I so willing to spend hours and hours on this task but considered it to be a waste of my husband’s time? How are we assigning value to our time? And, thinking beyond this project, at what point should I just go ahead and outsource some of these household chores?
Keeping a household running requires the completion of so many tasks like this–grocery shopping, cleaning, lawn care, home repairs, pet care, and more. As a teacher, my schedule is quite a bit lighter than my husband’s. I’m off work by mid-afternoon each day and have a few extended breaks throughout the year, along with summer vacation. On the other hand, Brandon’s days are pretty long. He typically starts with chart review around 6:30am before heading out to see patients; he aims to be home for dinner around 5:30pm and sometimes has an hour or two of notes to complete later in the evening.
Teaching is not exactly a lucrative profession, and Brandon’s salary and opportunities for additional income are much greater. Even with his long hours, if we calculate our hourly pay at our salaried positions, he earns much more than me. Beyond that, he can work an extra weekend and earn a few thousand dollars over just two days. I’ve earned additional income tutoring middle school students, but at a rate of $60 an hour, it doesn’t quite compare.
When we’ve talked about it, Brandon has suggested that our time is equally valuable—that he can take on those extra opportunities because I’m available to care for our kids. It’s a little harder for me to wrap my mind around that, especially when I’m also the one doing most of the spending. After all, someone has to keep the toilet paper and dog food stocked! These are probably my own insecurities showing up here. I earn less, sure. I also get to enjoy a teacher’s schedule—summer vacation forever!—while living a lifestyle made possible by his earnings. Is that fair? How can our time really be equally valuable?
Trading My Time for Money Spent on Convenience
These questions come up when we are calculating the value of hiring out tasks or using different convenience services. Brandon has been earning an attending salary for about two years now, but honestly, we still don’t outsource much. We use grocery convenience services—both delivery and drive-up. We send our dog to a groomer instead of brushing and bathing him ourselves. Despite my doubts about the value of my time, these are both tasks that used to be on my chore list. I used to be the one going to the grocery store or brushing the dog in the backyard. Why is it that we’ve outsourced some of my tasks when he’s clearly the higher earner?
I guess maybe he’s right—my availability to take care of our kids and household enables him to take on those opportunities for extra income. Just last month, after our new baby had arrived and while Brandon was working an extra weekend, I used Instacart to place a much-needed Costco order. The Instacart prices are higher than they are in the store, and it charges a number of service fees. But my groceries were delivered right to the front door.
The convenience of this can not be overstated. Taking a 2-year-old, a 3-week-old, and my post C-section self to the store just wasn’t an option, and my husband couldn’t get there either. Looking at the bigger picture, though, we still came out ahead–we were able to make an extra student loan payment that month and had the groceries and diapers we needed!
On the other hand, we have some landscaping projects that need to be completed soon. A local company quoted us $3,000+ for the work. Right now, though, we’re not just considering the value of our time; we’re also weighing the cost of these services against our student loans. That estimate is equal to one month’s student loan payment! So guess where you’ll find us over the next few weekends? Tag-teaming child care and lawn maintenance. But, while it’s not in the cards for us to outsource this right now, we did decide to spend a little extra to make the maintenance easier. Instead of manually dragging a hose and sprinkler around our yard and gardens, we’re going to set up a timer system.
It’s a decent compromise—we can’t outsource it to a company, but at least we can take watering off our daily to-do list.
I think the way we calculate the value of our time will continue to evolve, and, eventually, I’m sure we’ll start to transition more of these chores off of our plates. As we do, I hope we’ll outsource tasks from both of our lists. Not only is our time valuable in a monetary sense, but even more than that, the hours spent as a new family of four are priceless.
How do you calculate the value of your time? Do you outsource most of your chores, or do you simply do them yourself to save money? How difficult is that decision if you earn decidedly less than your partner? Comment below!
Then add in, the concern / conviction unfortunately reinforced by experience (35% of the time?) that you aren’t smart enough to locate a person to hire who can do the job better than you could actually do it yourself. And I don’t mean picking bananas of the correct ripeness, I mean that if you bring someone in to paint your fence or plant your trees you end up seeing all the errors that you would not have made with or without a few YouTube training videos.
And while I am glad for wage inflation after decades of minimal basic wage growth, we are finding it impossible to hire people for some things. Perhaps because we go through companies not yet paying enough money. I haven’t yet tried bribing the owners of the company to get to our jobs finally; I don’t know if it would do any good.
Then there’s the male female division of labor. We are a two doc couple, and our income was similar, but he had a longer obligation to the military and I was so frustrated at a perceived unequal division of household labor that I opted not to work full time rather than be mad enough to get a divorce.
Totally know what you mean about noticing all the little mistakes in someone else’s work! We hired a local handyman to re-finish our basement after some water damage; there’s one small section of wall where the drywall mud dried with little bubbles. Had I done the work, I absolutely would have noticed and fixed it. But of course, we didn’t catch it until weeks after the project was done and now it just makes us crazy. That’s the trade-off, I guess, of going with the more affordable handyman instead of a professional renovation company…
The household division of labor is tough. Has working part time helped with that?
Yes seeing him do his 10+ hour workdays makes the household duties I covered after 5-6 hours (sometimes less than 5 days per week) much more bearable. Still until I later worked full time at his place I was mad he wouldn’t stop at the (military) commissary for us once a week, after his long day, to save me the trip.
And also made me willing to support his fully retiring several years before I did.
How much is our time worth? A lot.
I outsource many tasks I could do myself because of this truth, especially tasks that risk injury.
As you wrote, I can make thousands of dollars working an extra weekend. I’m doing that this holiday weekend.
My wife, like you, got paid a lot less for her time as an educator. She also got paid nothing when she took care of her mother for up to thirty hours a week after her mother’s devastating stroke.
My kids are grown now and don’t need supervision, but I consider us a team. The fruits of our labor are evenly split.
She runs the social calendar and makes sure the dog gets its nails clipped. She has dozens of household tasks. She tends the friendships. She writes the cards. She does the laundry. She cleans more than I do. I do most of the cooking. I run the occasional parties for friends. I run the grill.
My older kids at home do some cleaning and get paid for it as they do a better job than cleaning services. Another does the shopping when she is home from school. Another took the youngest to school every morning last year. Another cleans and tends our “retirement cabin”. We all work as a team. We all benefit.
We split up the tasks, but it’s understood that I fund the operation. I make more per hour, but my time is only free because of their help. They benefit by avoiding student loans, going on nice vacations, and getting matching funds for their Roth and help building their credit.
I hope they don’t say “all my dad did was work”. I try to be available. I’m home for a lot of holidays. I picked a medical specialty with the best hours (psychiatry). We just took a family trip to Mexico and we are going to Florida for Thanksgiving. Our family trips are simply wonderful.
I do my best and I trust my wife and children to do theirs. Your husband is fortunate to have a wife that is frugal and cares about such. Best to you and he in the balance. It can be a challenge.
Yeah, I had the same problem with those holiday shifts my first couple years as an ER attending, or just picking up extra shifts in general.
If I can get 2k for a morning shift, turning that down to go for a walk felt like craziness to me for so long. Especially after having grown up poor and worked a normal paying job for a couple years before med school. Especially when you translate that to real life goods.
One Tuesday shift for two kayaks ? Dope, lets do it.
One Wednesday morning and yeah that’s two tickets to Colombia ? Surely my gf gonna be cool with that, right ?
(And the slippery slope to burnout begins. . . )
But yeah, mental health is worth that. Being available and mentally present for friends and family and significant other is worth that.
It’s noble I guess in someways kinda, or maybe only just in theory, the way some docs try not to think about what their free time means to us or opportunity cost or heck financial stuff in general but I think should def be taught and talked about more.
Economists describe this as utility. In the beginning, the utility of those extra dollars is very high. But as you get more dollars, the utility of more falls and falls and falls. The important thing is to accurately assess the utility of that extra $2K shift at the current time.
Yes! My husband covered shifts the weekend of my birthday and Mother’s Day this year. Before he accepted them, we had that same conversation: “One weekend shift equals an extra month’s worth of a student loan payment? Let’s do it.” Given our priorities right now, it’s hard to say no to the extra work. But thankfully, we’re both on the same page as far as scaling down his workload as soon as we have those loans paid off.
I agree with the above comments that it’s 100% about being a team. If you’re lucky enough to be doing more than just surviving, the health of the team is way more important than the cash flow. Kudos to you both for focusing on what’s most important and sticking to it.
“…the health of the team is way more important than the cash flow.” I love that way of framing it!
Yes to the health of the team! I’ve learned that I’m not just buying convenience but, in some cases, buying stress relief. I’m a non-medical professional who earns much more than my fellow spouse (and will continue to earn at par or more than his attending salary when that day comes). Although my career is extremely demanding, I objectively have much more free time than my husband and therefore take on all household/life management. It took a therapist forcing me to admit that we could easily afford to outsource several tasks that were overwhelming me to embrace outsourcing. We’ve started slowly with occasional landscaping, pet care, regular home cleaning, but we have not yet regretted a single one of those choices. We have regretted a few times when we cheaped out and the projects remain incomplete and stress-inducing.
Alaina awesome post! Happiness research seems to all point to outsourcing tasks that you hate as a great way to maximize happiness with your money. I myself prioritize budgeting for lawn maintenance and other untoward tasks as I definitely agree with the research- I am so happy I don’t do my own lawn!
I’m a DIY junkie. I cut my own hair, groom my dog, change my own brakes, repair my own appliances, manage my own investments, do my own home reno, etc. etc. However, I will not go on my own roof, do my own yard, or do my own pool chemicals. When deciding what to DIY or hire out, I factor in 3 variables:
1. Do I enjoy the task?
2. How likely am I to injure myself? (I’m a surgeon, so even a minor hand injury can make scrubbing in difficult).
3. How much money will I save?
The first variable supersedes the other two. If I don’t enjoy the task, then hiring it out is generally the right answer (I really hate pool maintenance). I avoid most yard work b/c I’d often end up blistering or cutting my hands on something. Plus, I can hire that out very affordably. But each factor is important in helping me decide.
And word of caution to any DIY-er. If you have a day job: don’t go on an extension ladder or your roof, and never do a DIY project where you have to compress a spring (ie. garage door or shocks/struts). I sadly have kept a growing mental list of professionals who ended their lives or careers that way. If you were to end up getting gobbled up in an avalanche while heli-skiing, so be it. At least it was a glamorous ending. But don’t put yourself in a position to slip off your roof and break your neck. It’s just not worth it.
Sadly, I know a plastic surgeon who broke his neck mountain biking and a urologist who broke his surfing. The first is still practicing. The second could not.
I like the 3 variable assessment.
Some think it’s dumb I’ll spend 3 hours doing my lawn. But I enjoy doing it. I enjoy getting a good sweat and just walking the yard with the hum of the motor. I find it peaceful and relaxing and always have since I started mowing lawns as a teenager.
I also like learning how things work and how to fix them. If a 10 minute YouTube video and quick trip to Lowe’s or Autozone will get the job done, I’m not sure I would ever outsource that.
However, I’m a big safety guy. Safety glasses for any power tool operation or yard work. I’m not climbing trees, and I’m probably going to cut back on my chainsaw operating, despite how enjoyable I find that to be.