An astonishing amount of this list amounts to “spend money”, so while these things may play well here I think it’s worth pointing out that a large majority of the population is not allowed to do those things because they can’t afford to.
The overarching point of the author is that most of his target audience (and those reading HN) are used to being thrifty and not spend money at all, even when they get older. They fail to realize that at some point, it's worth your time to spend the X amount either because the value of investing X down the line is so great, or because the time saved by spending X is now so much greater than before, because of something changing in your life (career has progressed, valuation of free time has changed).
I definitely see this myself daily, ending up wasting few minutes each day on trivial things that add up, while it could be fixed by paying a small amount.
Or for example trying to wade through a free course to learn something, but ultimately just dropping it out of no motivation. Compared to paying for a course, which makes you more responsible s you paid for it and usually also offers more effective training.
For the longest time, I had not encountered a concept of "self-care" but then I started seeing that term pop up around the internet and it seemed quite obvious that it was an important thing. That might seem silly, but if your timeline for these things reaches back to the '90s, like mine does, a notion like self-care is relatively recent on the historical timeline as a familiar concept.
I've also seen this in writing, with how you handle plot and character development. Or even some things that are silly but obvious like the fact that you can just go out and go on hikes if you want, and there are tons and tons of places to do that.
I feel like there's all kinds of hidden mental blocks that you can go your whole life not knowing that you have, and I appreciate this idea of elevating the concept to its own genre and targeting it with articles such as the one posted here.
I'm a bit of a DIY obsessive, so maybe I'm just all the way on the other side of the spectrum, but I don't hire someone to do something unless I feel the task is so far outside of my comfort zone that it poses a danger to me. I usually only do it after I've tried the task myself and utterly failed. You'd be surprised what you can do yourself with just a few YouTube tutorials and a decent collection of tools. As a side effect, I've gotten pretty good at being handy around the house, managing the family's finances, repairing our cars, doing major home improvement projects including building barns and sheds, building furniture, lawn care, tree trimming, electrical, plumbing, etc. I consider developing these skills a better investment than the alternative which is perpetually needing to pay someone to do them.
And all it costs is my time, which is free.
Well my time is definitely not free; people pay lots of money for access to it.
The problem with "muh welcome to upper middle class prosperity" lists like this is it doesn't account for the management time and mental load involved in something like "Hire a researcher or expert consultant." For that matter "Cleaning services" or "Hire a graphic designer to turn your appalling sketches into ..." require significant cognitive overhead and time to hire and manage unless you or your spouse or close friends are already doing such things for your day job. If you're already doing such things for your day job you probably already thought of these things.
Some of them are pretty insane: people who need a maid to chuck their clothes into the washer and dryer, then put them away: if it takes you longer than 15 minutes a week to do this ... I have to wonder at your wardrobe. I mean, I understand some people deeply resent performing such menial tasks, or maybe they have large families, but it's not that big a job compared to feeding yourself and getting some exercise.
For myself, hiring experts to assist with my day to day life has been a fairly mixed bag, and my education, hobbies and lifestyle is such that DiY is usually the win.
Consider a large family with multiple children, a humid environment where towels have to be washed often or they smell, plus the safety precaution of washing outside clothes more often to eliminate any possible coronavirus, then you have the recipe for a full load of laundry almost every day. It easily adds up to way more than 15 minutes a week.
Your working time is worth money, but your free time is free. Your time is only worth money (opportunity cost) if you'd otherwise be working on some money-making opportunity.
If it's 1. Hiring someone for $25/hr to mow the lawn while I work on a contract that's making me $200/hr, I'd choose to hire the gardener. If it's 2. Hiring someone to mow the lawn while I play video games, I'm better off if I mow it myself.
Anyway, maybe that's why I don't see a lot of those things on the list as desirable; if I have to spend two hours managing the graphic designer to make a chart/plot/figure, I may as well fiddle around in xfig or whatever to get it done myself.
Especially when it gets tangled up with moral judgments or self-image: "why order something at restaurant that you can make at home?" "what kind of cyclist can't change a flat" "only a loser has to pay to get dates" etc...
None of those things are absolute right or wrong, but it should be based on a honest assessment of the tradeoffs, not emotional associations or ingrained assumptions.
- Just because my hourly rate is $X, it doesn't follow that I can always work an additional hour to make an additional $X.
- After working 40+ hours/week doing paid work, working an additional hour at my day job to avoid doing something else does not make for a happy life. In fact, it makes life quite dull, and made me a very narrow person.
I can repair my motorcycle any day I choose. Delivering my motorcycle to a mechanic during office hours has a cost. Finding a good mechanic has a cost.
I also find that eating at restaurants is more time-consuming than cooking at home. I have to go there, order and wait, then head back home after.
I make a salary, not hourly, so it really doesn’t make sense for me to hire someone to do a task I can do myself. Just tossing $$$ away.
this is a good point for salaried employees. in any case, your pre-tax hourly rate is sort of a meaningless figure for comparison. if you want to do this kind of comparison at all, you should probably think in terms of disposable income. for example, if you make $30/hr post-tax and half of your budget is fixed costs, a $30 discretionary purchase is two hours worth of work.
I grew up lower middle class instead, so I have other stupid frugal habits. Growing up, my parents never, ever, ever replaced a thing that was working. The only time you were allowed to replace a thing was when it was irredeemably broken.
Took me a while to get rid of that habit.
That just sounds like common sense to me. Why replace a washing machine that still works just fine? For some gimmicky features or a shiny modern industrial design?
I fall firmly in the camp of not replacing stuff that works, clothes that still fit and aren't worn out, anything that still serves its purpose. Obviously I will repair or modify things to the extent of my skills to keep them going, clothes and computers are what I'm best at.
My TV is a 42" LG LCD that I picked up for $20 ages ago when my company was moving to a new office building. It works perfectly, supports 1080p and the picture quality is good after the usual adjustments I would have to do on a new TV anyway. None of the new TVs I can buy offer any real tangible improvements that make them worth the additional cost.
Sure, when this TV eventually breaks, I'll probably replace it with one that's slightly larger, 50-55" would be ideal for the space I have on the wall. But there's no need to rush that upgrade.
Consumerism has broken people's brains, they're stuck in an eternal loop of trying to keep up with the Joneses, never happy with what they already have. It's unhealthy and wasteful.
My desktop machine is 2011 vintage hardware (Phenom II X6 with 16GB RAM), upgraded piecemeal to an SSD and a Radeon RX560. It plays the games I like to play (currently GTA V and Mudrunner) in 1080p on max settings and it's obviously plenty powerful for ordinary desktop applications.
If a PC does eventually become too slow to be practical in daily use, then I would say it's no longer really fit for purpose. That happened with my old Chromebook, which couldn't even play Youtube videos smoothly after they changed the codecs. It happened with my old P4-based PC, but the person I gave it to kept using it for years for basic desktop stuff.
I just don't replace stuff for the sake of upgrading, so I buy very little new stuff and keep what I have for a long time. I prefer spending more up front for something I know will last, and based on how much use i expect out of it. I'm not going to buy a super fancy drill, since I only need to drill holes a couple of times per year, so a basic one is fine. On the other hand, I prefer walking to get around, so I buy good quality footwear that lasts and can be repaired.
Edit: I fully agree with you on all your examples. Just wanted to give a counter example.
Yeah, but that's now what I wrote.
There's a long, long, infuriating way between "works just fine" and "irredeemably broken". Trust me, I know.
Obviously, if a washing machine doesn't complete the washing cycle or a toaster doesn't toast right, it does need to be fixed or possibly replaced.
Same, but I think that's a good thing. The culture of throwing things away and buying new ones just for the fun of it is bad for the future of humanity. I only replace things that are working when I have certainty that the still-working thing can be useful to someone else.
(I guess the super rich can have very trusted employees with such access, or banks provide white glove service at some point, but that’s clearly different)
You can add a signatory to a bank account (and I'm guessing to a credit card as well). I don't know of any services that specialize in nit-picking through the use of an authorized signer however part of said hypothetical service could be to bond / insure that the secondary signer doesn't take some sort of negative action that leaves the account/owner in bad standing.
But again you're running into the ultimate question of why isn't your bank / credit card taking care of you...maybe it's because the bank / CC just make money off of the fiduciary mishaps of the owner when they don't have 20 minutes to wait on hold.
Most of the virtual assistant services have you store your spending details for this exact scenario.
If you have substantially more money than that then you can enlist financial professionals to legally act on your behalf and settle disputes for you.
I saw it with my old boss. People would always be asking if they needed help or would just offer free stuff in hopes of getting something later.
Last year I bought a new bed and it improved a lot of things for me. It's simple, but if you grow up thinking about every penny you spend you get weird habits.
The average human spends (or should spend) 8h in bed every single day of their life. The next 8h is the place you work, the ergonomics should fit you.
Spend money to have quality sleep. Spend money to work comfortably.
I guess my objection to the article, as presented, is it’s kind of tone deaf particularly at a time when many people are financially struggling to just assert that you’re “allowed” to hire people for a long list of tasks, at a cost that many people wouldn’t even dream of being able to afford or justify.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-economy-census-idUSKB...
Median mortgage payment is $1550/mo. 40% of US homes are free of mortgage.
https://www.businessinsider.com/personal-finance/average-mor...
https://www.forbes.com/sites/brendarichardson/2019/07/26/nea...
There are a lot of folks in the US that are just scraping by.
There are a lot more folks with enough disposable income to pursue one of these strategies. Not everybody.
[And this doesn’t include wealth and savings.]
I would expect a median family with median mortgage to have little money left over if they have children.
> I haven’t tried everything on this list, mainly due to cost. But you’d be surprised how cheap most of the things on this list are (especially the free ones).
So you have to spend/trade something, but (for me) it's harder to think of what's worth spending/trading for. Hence the post.
This is specially important to me now that I have children and very little time for stuff that I care about besides my family.