Can you afford minced Garlic?
Revisiting a 20-year-old Wall Street Journal worksheet on the economics of chores
I first read Jane Spencer's "How Much Is Your Time Worth?" in the Wall Street Journal years ago, and it's stuck with me ever since. The premise is simple: most of us make snap decisions about which chores to do ourselves and which to pay someone else for, and we're usually doing the math wrong. Spencer pulled together economists who study "household production" — the idea that a home is basically a small firm, one that employs labor, buys technology, and constantly decides what to outsource.
The article was full of examples that still make me smile. A time-starved Manhattan executive who ate out six nights a week and had groceries delivered, yet burned nearly an hour of billable time fighting her cell phone company over a $9 late fee. A couple who did a full financial teardown of whether to eat in or order out, and found that home cooking was actually costing them money once they counted the lost freelance hours. The paper even ran a little chart estimating the annual income at which it starts making sense to hire out mowing the lawn, chopping garlic, doing your own taxes, or tackling the pile on your desk.
What I liked most, though, wasn't the trivia — it was the worksheet buried on the inside page: "Whose Chore Is It, Anyway?" It turns a fuzzy feeling ("I should probably just pay someone to do this") into an actual calculation. Whose Chore is it, Anyway? – How Much Is Your Time Worth? The Economics of Garlic - Jane Spencer WSJ
