housework

We Do the Math: When Is It Worth Hiring Household Help?

Annie Mueller — Wed, 20 Sep 2017 08:30:12 +0000

How much is your happiness worth? Turns out, it may be available for a very reasonable hourly rate. A recent study shows that using money to buy yourself free time — by outsourcing household chores, for example — can lead to higher life satisfaction. Here are six common household chores that might be worth the investment to have someone else handle.

1. House cleaning

What's the average amount of time you spend keeping your house clean? A small apartment might require only an hour of focused cleaning a week. However, if you live in a bigger home, or have multiple family members making messes around you, the time you save on hiring someone to do the cleaning can be significant.

According to the American Time Use Survey, women spend about 30 minutes daily — or 3.5 hours weekly — on interior cleaning; men average spend about 10 minutes a day, or just over an hour per week. Think about where you fall in that time spectrum. I spend more time cleaning up on a daily basis, but my husband (and kids) all pitch in two to three hours to clean up on the weekends. The average cost of having a typical single-family home cleaned is $130, or you can arrange it by the hour, typically from $25 to $35.

Verdict: Worth it? My money says yes, if you have a house that takes you more than an hour per week to clean. Having a clean house is a morale booster, and not having to spend three or more hours cleaning it is an even bigger bump in life satisfaction. (See also: 4 Ways Outsourcing Chores Can Save You Time and Money)

2. Laundry service

I have four kids, so I spend a lot of time doing laundry. And I had no idea that laundry services are as available, or cheap, as they are. There are about 35,000 laundry service companies in the U.S. Laundry service is generally billed per pound (of laundry), ranging from about $1 to $3 per pound. The variation in price is mostly due to regional location and the service.

Some people love doing laundry. I do not understand these people. I do an average two loads of laundry (about 15 to 20 pounds) per day to keep up with my family's unreasonable clothes-wearing habits. It's about 20 minutes of my day to gather, wash, and dry that laundry, and another 15 to 20 minutes to fold and put it away. I'm spending over four hours a week taking care of clothes.

Verdict: Outsourcing the laundry for under $1 per pound sounds like a great trade for more time and happiness. If your local rates are over $1 per pound, however, the service costs would add up quickly. For an individual or couple, the price would probably still be worth the time saved. However, when you factor in a couple of kids who dirty clothes at an alarming rate, the volume of laundry would create a service cost too high to justify.

3. Food preparation

Food preparation may be one of the household chores that takes the most time. However, since it's typically handled in three separate tasks a day, you may not notice how much time you spend on it.

Meal delivery services offer an alternative to spending all your time in the kitchen. With a meal prep service, you save the time you'd spend planning the meal, shopping for ingredients, and preparing the ingredients.

These meal services often cater to specific dietary needs, and prices vary accordingly. Single meals cost anywhere from $6 for a kid's meal, to $16 each. Packages or subscriptions are the best value, but expect to pay anywhere from $70 for six meals to $152 for 10 meals delivered weekly.

Verdict: I'd love to justify this cost, but for my family, I can't. I'd need to pay the equivalent of what it costs us to eat at a restaurant for every single meal. I spend much less by buying what we like in bulk and cooking our favorites at home. However, for individuals or couples, or those with specific dietary requirements, a meal prep kit or ready-to-eat package could be a great value. Calculate what you spend on groceries each week, then compare with the cost of a meal service. (See also: Are Meal Prep Subscription Boxes Worth It?)

4. Yard work

The average American family spends 70 hours per year on yard work, according to the American Time Use Survey. Plus there's the cost of owning and maintaining the equipment needed to do the yard work. If you outsource, however, you don't need to worry about any of it: hire a service or an individual with their own equipment, and it's one less thing on your time/money cost. (See also: We Do the Math: Will an Electric Mower Trim Lawn Care Costs?)

The average cost of a yard care service varies, but a typical suburban lawn will run about $60 per mowing. Many services offer a monthly plan, which average $100 to $200. The bigger your yard, the more it will cost to have it maintained; of course, that's also more time you're saving when you don't do it yourself.

Verdict: For most people, a yard care service is a worthy investment. You save time on the yard work itself, save on the cost of owning and maintaining equipment; and, if you contract with a service for the whole season, you'll often get extra services (such as end-of-year leaf collection) included for little or no additional charge.

5. Odd jobs

What about the odd jobs, like cleaning the kitchen appliances (bleh!) or assembling that new desk you bought from IKEA? Organizing, deep cleaning, assembling, and installing stuff you've bought can take hours of your life. Fortunately, there are people who will do that for you. Faster. And probably better. Outsourcing services like TaskRabbit make finding these amazing people much easier. Create an account, and scan for a service provider who has the skills you need. But first you need to know what you're willing to spend.

Start by clearly defining the task that needs to be accomplished. "Deep cleaning" is too vague; instead, list the specific tasks that need to be done. Next, estimate the time you'd spend completing each task.

Now you can compare your estimated time cost to the hourly or project cost of hiring someone to do the job for you. If you can pay someone an hourly rate of $35 to do in a couple hours what might've taken you a full day, you've made a wise investment.

Expect to pay $15 to $35 an hour for basic jobs that don't require special skills. Odd jobs that require lots of muscle (moving) or a specialized skill (carpentry) will range from $75 to $150 per hour.

Verdict: Absolutely worth it for jobs you hate or aren't good at doing. I'll move into a new house before I clean the stove; hiring someone to do it for me at $20 per hour is a win.

6. Car washing

Having a clean, sparkling car is a great feeling. Doing it yourself, however, is not so great. It can take a good chunk of your Saturday afternoon to wash, wax, vacuum, and so on. The cheapest way to outsource the car washing errand is to hire a neighborhood kid (or your own kid) to do the work instead. While you can charge a small amount for this task to be completed, the work might not be all that thorough.

A car wash service can provide a fabulous car wash, even detailing, for a fraction of the time required to do it yourself. Waterway, for example, provides a $35 car wash that includes "attention to detail, sparkle and shine, inside and out." That's not exactly detailing, but for $35, it's worth the two to three hours you'd save doing it yourself.

Most car wash services offer subscriptions or packages which can lower the cost per wash, or give you unlimited washes per month for a single monthly cost (from $22.99 to $49.99, for Mister Car Wash).

Verdict: With a monthly package or subscription, it's a good purchase. Find out what's available in your area. If you'd spend an afternoon cleaning your car, you can save that time — and wash your care more often — for a very reasonable price.

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This article is from Annie Mueller of Wise Bread, an award-winning personal finance and credit card comparison website. Read more great articles from Wise Bread:

Three Products That Rock My World

Andrea Karim — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 18:00:02 +0000

In a consumer world, I am among the least savvy of consumers. I buy stuff on a whim, often without doing my research, and am frequently disappointed in what I end up buying. But every now and again, I find a product or service that is so incredibly awesome, so life-changingly helpful, that I can't stop telling people about it. Here are three of my awesome finds of the past year. Have you found a product that you think is the bomb? Tell us about it in the comments before Sunday, February 21 at 12:00PM Pacific Time, and you'll be entered into a drawing for an Amazon gift certificate for $25!

The ChicoBag - $5 each

The world is full of reusable shopping bags. Heck, my car is full of reusable shopping bags, which ironically, I never use, much less re-use. While I care about the environment, I suffer from a medical condition known as hyperpneumo craniosis (air headedness), which means that I will end up at the front of the grocery line, only to realize that all of my reusable shopping bags are still in the trunk of my car, or in the front seat, where I put them so that I wouldn't forget them in the trunk when I went inside the store.

This is why I love the ChicoBag: it's a sturdy nylon shopping bag that can hold lots of groceries (or anything else you need to buy), but that folds away into its attached pouch. When all closed up, the ChicoBag is no larger than a Yukon potato, which is small enough for me to fit three of them into the front pocket of my purse. Thus, I am never forced to run out to my car to fetch a mess of folded shopping bags. I just whip the ChicoBag out of my purse and unfold it, impressing cashiers and baggers with my organizational skills.

I bought my ChicoBags at Whole Foods, and thus, my bags are emblazoned with the Whole Foods logo, but the upside was that I spent approximately $3 for each of them, since Whole Foods orders them in bulk and resells them. I can't stress just how much plastic I have avoided using since I bought my ChicoBags (and yes, I know that nylon is a synthetic polymer).

Goo Gone - $5 for 8 oz

I recently had a near-mental breakdown over the state of my toaster oven. Covered in crumbs and melted cheese, and displaying prominent smoke stains, its very existence filled me with anxiety. It just sat there on my kitchen counter, flaunting its filthiness. Latent OCD gripped me and shook me to the core, and I attacked the toaster with a bottle of Windex, some scouring pads, rubber gloves, the Dyson, and a look of utter madness. My boyfriend and dogs cowered in the next room, wondering from whence this crazed cleaning beast had appeared.

After approximately a half hour of scrubbing, vacuuming, and sweating, the toaster looked only marginally better, still displaying signs of smoke stains and fingerprints. Desperate to remove a sticky droplet of some disgusting substance on the front door of the toaster, I broke out my bottle of Goo Gone and applied a few drops. Presto, the blob of mystery goo disappeared. Emboldened, I began drenching paper towels with Goo Gone, polishing the toaster to a brilliant sheen. Cheese smoke, grease, oil — all were smote by the power of Goo Gone, which left behind nothing. No streaks, no marks, just a citrusy scent lingering in the air.

In a full-fledged cleaning frenzy, I cleaned the stove top, the oven, the microwave, the counters — everything was left shiny and beautiful, with minimal elbow grease involved. My kitchen was sparkling and brand-new (for approximately 24 hours, anyway), and I was newly converted to the citrus cleansing power of Goo Gone.

Sally Hansen Insta-Dri Nail Polish - $4.99 at Walgreen's

I love a good manicure, but I don't think I've ever had one in which I didn't almost immediately ruin the job by slamming my newly-painted fingernails into the closest table, car door, or wallet. As someone who doesn't like spending $20 to get my nails done, anyway, I've tried time and time again to DIY my nails at home. Usually, this involves meticulous painting of several coats of O.P.I. nail polish right before bedtime, with some frantic hand-waving and blowing to attempt to dry the polish before falling asleep. It's never fully dry by the time my eyelids finally droop closed, and I inevitably wake up to find that at least one of the nail's coat is smooshed into my pillowcase.

Honestly, who has time to do their nails?

Enter Sally Hansen's Insta-Dri Nail Color. It goes on thick, dries fast, and I never need more than two coats (unlike the O.P.I. colors). Pre-bedtime manicures take 10 minutes from start to finish, and by the time I've finally given into the Sandman, my nails look awesome.

It's true that the color choices are fairly limited compared to some other brands (you can see the available colors on the product home page), but the palette is enough to satisfy my needs. Pronto Purple is exceptionally pretty, actually.

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Because somebody always asks, I will state for the record that I have received no compensation from the producers of any of the products mentioned here. They're just products that I like and recommend. Similarly, please don't plug your own products in the comments. Of course, I'll have no way of double-checking this, so it'll just be an honor code thing.

So, what products totally rock your world? Make sure to include your email in the email field when you leave a comment! The drawing will take place on Sunday, February 21 at 12:00PM, so let us know your product(s) before then!

This article is from Andrea Karim of Wise Bread, an award-winning personal finance and credit card comparison website. Read more great articles from Wise Bread:

Germ Killin' Machine

Andrea Karim — Tue, 17 Apr 2007 22:33:11 +0000

Guarding against germs doesn't have to be a chemical-filled experience. To get rid of germs in your kitchen sponge (and there ARE germs in you kitchen sponge), do the following:

Soak the sponge with water (this is key - not doing so poses a significant fire risk).
Place the sponge on a microwave-safe plate.
Stick it in the microwave on HIGH for 2 minutes.
Don't even TRY to pick it up with your fingers. Use a pair of tongs to remove it from the microwave and leave it to cool or soak it in cold water before using.

*Make sure the sponge doesn't contain metal, even though lots of modern microwaves don't mind metal.*

If nuking the sponge kind of creeps you out or creates so nasty smells (if it does, stop the heating immediately), try boiling it in a little clean water instead. I don't keep a sponge for more than three weeks anyway, but I boil it at least twice a week to kill germs.

AND I use a different sponge for my dogs' dishes.

(Photo by dalasie)

This article is from Andrea Karim of Wise Bread, an award-winning personal finance and credit card comparison website. Read more great articles from Wise Bread: