I spend a lot of time fixing things, for myself and others. (Computers, electrical, plumbing, etc). While I learn a lot, I wonder sometimes if it would be better to pay a professional and do something else for which I am more ‘valuable’. Do you do the same, and do you find it worthwhile?
Generally speaking I do things myself because it’s cheaper, in that it lets me allocate cash in higher quality versions of things than I would otherwise be able to afford. I grew up pretty poor and that was how my family did things. Car breaks, that’s why you buy a Chilton’s. Appliance isn’t working? You can always order the part for a tenth of what it costs to have the appliance guy tell you what’s wrong. AC quit working? Those capacitors are super easy to replace and only cost $7.
Now I could pay people to do more things for me, but it’s only under certain circumstances.
Sometimes it just boils down to something my Dad told me underneath a car (or a house maybe) like 30 years ago: “Nobody is gonna care about your shit more than you do.”
I always think in terms of time, and I have a spreadsheet to track my “actual hourly” i get from work and side hustles so I can know which are working best for me. When evaluating items to buy, I think about how much time it would take me to buy the item instead of the amount in dollar or whatever since the dollar’s value changes with time. This also helps me because I generally try to not think in USD to begin with since I mostly use Bitcoin. At first, I tried thinking in BTC but it’s volatile enough that this is not much any better than thinking in USD. Tying things to hours makes more sense. If you know your “average hourly” it’s easy to determine whether or not to fix something yourself or hire somebody else to do it.
The answer is it depends on a lot of things, my answer comes from my current financial situation which is stable but not anything crazy.
If I have been working a lot and have money to use, I value my free time at ~2-3x my equivalent hourly wage. If the task is something I enjoy and I have time, I’d rather do it myself than pay someone else. If it is something messy, something I don’t want to do, or something I am bad at or might screw up, that is a problem that money can solve.
It shouldn’t be controversial to say this but humans deserve free time, we should have leisure and hobbies. You should not have to constantly fight/work to survive. We as a species are past that point and it is sad that society has not figured that out. Instead society chooses to keep the status quo where some people have to work 60-80hrs a week to exist.
No, I don’t have the answer on how to change that.
Ol pap was like this also, mainly with electrical or automotive issues. He always said instead of him possibly doing a bad job and wasting his whole Saturday, he’d rather just pay a pro to do it right and in a timely manner, and go do some work on the weekend.
I said this to my uncle once “me and my dad bought stuff at auction then probably spent more fixing it up than it was worth”. He said “but it helped you didn’t it?”, yeah it definitely did. Fixing stuff definitely helps the soul, if it helps you, do it and don’t worry about the cost.
If it’s something I don’t really want to do then it’s 1.5x my current salary assuming 8 hours of work per day.
Twenty bucks, same as in town.
More than I can afford, unfortunately
Sometimes having the problem removed is worth a lot.
Sometimes the time waiting for the professional is not worth it.
If it can be done for less than $200, I pay and move on.
I haved fixed several appliances which stayed working for years after.
$45/hr
$150 for weekends. We pay for house cleaning and lawn mowing so that we can have weekends free, and it’s absolutely worth it to me. We don’t actually get these done every week but together that is what we’d pay to be able to not spend the weekend cleaning and mowing.
My work? If I was providing what I do professionally to someone, I would say $50 an hour, for actual productive hours. But I’ve done odds and ends work for less, and very occasionally for more.
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you should see my YT. I’m not even american!
I have not been paid for my time in a long time. My value is not derived in hours or seconds, but what I can deliver in satisfaction for a job well done. Sometimes I need more time to do a good job and sometimes I need very little time to do a good job. The amount of time is irrelevant to the excellence of the work. That’s not to say that time is not a factor, but it’s a factor I use for myself, not for an external entity.
