How Much is Your Time Worth?

Is it worth your time to attempt that home improvement project, or should you pay the professional to come in and do the job? Is it worth the personal time cost and hassle to do it yourself? At what point is the financial cost so great that it makes the personal time cost worth it? How about volunteering for that "good cause?" Do you want to use precious personal time for volunteerism? These are questions I find myself asking more and more lately.

I had a recent example of weighing financial cost with personal time cost. I was looking to put up a small fence section to keep the dog in the yard. When I say small, I mean small -- it was less than twenty feet of fence anchored on four fence posts. A handyman quoted six hundred dollars for the job (not including the four hundred dollars for materials). For less than twenty feet of fencing on four fence posts, that quote seemed high to me. I opted to install the fence on my own.

I don't really have a formula for deciding what the cost/benefit ratio should be, I just wing it. If my gut tells me the cost is too expensive, and the project looks like fun and is something I may be able to handle myself, then I'll do it myself. But, if you like the empirical approach, a simple formula would be to ask yourself how much you think your time is worth and multiply that by your estimate of how long the job will take, then compare it to the professional quote.

The volunteering question is slightly more problematic. Volunteering for a good cause is a wonderfully enriching experience. Your efforts are helping someone/something, which makes you feel great, but you can't volunteer for everything. There has to be a limit to what you freely give of your time.

Many financial planners will tell you to first pay yourself -- make sure to first set aside money for you. I categorize personal time the same way. If you don't set aside personal time for yourself, nobody else will. In fact, people will have no problem finding things to do with your personal time.

If you are not ruthlessly protective of your personal time, you will soon find you won't have any.

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