If you are busy saving, paying off debt, and investing, you are likely doing many things yourself. In our family, the DIY (do it yourself) personality is strong. Why would you pay someone to do the things you can do on your own?
There are a few situations where you would do well to hire someone else. The first is when you cannot do a particular task. The second is when doing it yourself costs you money, or is cash neutral. The first two are relatively easy to evaluate. The third is more nebulous, but I find equally valuable: hiring someone to meet a large goal, particularly investing in self-development.
When You Cannot Do Something Yourself
Most people confuse not knowing how to do something, with not being able to do something. If it’s a matter of researching, learning a skill, and getting up to speed, you may want to do it yourself. However, some types of expertise cannot be acquired within any reasonable time on your own.
We got into a pickle trying to manage quarterly withholdings related to a nanny a number of years ago. I was in over my head from the beginning, but didn’t want to admit it. I had screwed things up so badly, I didn’t even know where to start to fix the mess. Fortunately, we had a small business we knew through family that we trusted entirely. I laid bare my problem, and after a few months, my nanny tax nightmare was figured out.
This was not an issue related to my intelligence or work ethic. Even though I knew what needed to be fixed, I didn’t know the method to figure out how to manage the late withholdings, nor how to amend our own taxes for the previous year. I could have probably figured it out with enough time and effort, but I needed this figured out absolutely correctly, because it affected someone other than myself. I needed help. Further, the longer I waited to fix my error, the more penalties I would pay. Paying someone else was efficient because it was close to cash-neutral, and I couldn’t afford to have any mistakes.
When It Costs You Money
I asked a friend who runs a successful and growing engineering business when he started to hire help. Without hesitation, he replied, “When it started costing me money.” He explained that he handled most accounting and contract matters for the first few years. Then, after he had started to grow his staff, he found that they were experiencing problems in recovering some billable expenses at the end of the year, because he wasn’t processing travel and expense reports in a timely enough fashion to submit to a client. When he started noticing around $5,000 missing on multiple reports, he decided to bring someone on.
I have applied this logic to my home life and business life. If I can hire someone to help with something at a quarter of my billable rate, and I know that doing that task cuts into billable time, I consider hiring the task out. Both pieces must apply for me to consider hiring help. One area I hired out was grocery shopping. I use our local Peapod delivery service. I despise grocery shopping, and was lacking time to work on a couple side projects that could bring in solid income. I pay an annual fee, and my weekly delivery cost works out to $2.50. That $2.50 saves me two hours of frustration that I channel into getting up early and doing some writing or analytics work.
When You Need To Reach A Specific Goal
A few years ago, I began decluttering my house, and ended with removing nearly 30% of the possessions we were housing. I wasn’t trying to be a minimalist, though aspects of minimalism appealed to me. I wanted to spend more time on things that mattered to me like exercise, reading, spending time with my kids and friends. I was tired of toy clean-up taking 30 minutes each evening, and still never looking cleaned up. And I wanted my house to be dusted a few times a month, but hated having to move 184 objects every time I wanted to do so. Removing items helped me with those areas and many others.
To make this priority fit into my weekly routine, I usually did an hour or two at at time each week while I paid someone to play with my kids. Two hours of decluttering cost me about $30, depending on who I was paying. The irony of paying someone to help me dispose of items, many of which I had paid for already, was not lost on me. But my objective was clear, and I never regret that money.
Granted, this was within a larger plan of saving and investing. If we had been particularly cash poor, I’m not sure I would have hired someone. I did have that money, and investing a relatively small amount of money and time over a few years, has given back countless evenings and days spent on what matters to me. If I have the money to put towards investing in myself, I never hesitate to hire someone to help me.
Comments
One response to “When To Hire Help”
Well-written and organized, Ariel! Your three points all relate to your thesis and your conclusion sentence wraps it up nicely. Most of us have a bias against paying for something we could do ourselves, but do we really want to spend hours “spinning our wheels” when somebody else can do it faster and better? Sometimes thrift isn’t thrift, but rather, an expression of pride. Your illustration about the business owner whose inability to turn around reimbursements is right on target. It seems that he realized, too, that his business growth had made it impossible to be hands on with everything.
I have some situations coming up where I’m going to pay somebody else to do “what I can’t” and I don’t feel bad about it at all!