Buying Time = Buying Happiness
My cleaner is the best purchase I make all week
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Back when I lived in the UK, I had two cleaners come to my house every Wednesday and clean it for an hour. They were local gals who had set up their own company and charged me less than they probably should have done and they always did a fabulous job.
Everyone thought I was nuts. Why spend money on a cleaner when you can do it yourself? Having a cleaner is only for people who have the money once every other expense is taken care of. And who has the money for that?
This was a time when my husband and I were living on somewhere in the region of £32k ($37k) between us, per year. Nearly 5% of our money was spent on our cleaners. One could argue that I certainly didn’t have the money for that.
But I HATE cleaning even though I love a clean house. I can’t focus in a dirty or messy one but I’m so bad at picking up the mop that when I have to do it, it takes me hours. And there will still be dust everywhere. It makes me miserable.
That’s hours of my life I could be doing, well, pretty much anything else from working to napping.
I prioritized the cleaner because the cleaner bought me time. And it turns out, I may have been onto something.
Because studies show that buying time buys happiness. As my friend Ben Le Fort wrote in his most recent essay (which became the inspiration for this post):
The real secret to happiness might be knowing when to trade money for time and vice versa.
In other words, buy time saving services, buy your happiness.
***
Even though I’ve been writing about money for the last two years - and thinking about how to make it work for me a damn sight longer than that - I still find this a headfuck.
You’re telling me that I can buy my way to happiness?
I mean, I know that’s what marketers tell me. Buy this dress, it’ll make you happy. Buy this perfume, it will have you breaking out in cartwheels. Buy this bigger home, that fancier car, both will keep you content until you die.
But most of us know - even if we succumb to the temptation more often than we’d like - that money can’t buy happiness in this way.
So what do we do? We try to look for happiness in the small things. Slowing down. Noticing our surroundings. Experiences. Reading a great book. Cooking a great meal. Living a smaller, slower, simpler life.
Which is great except so few of us have the time to stop and enjoy the small things. Largely because we’re so wrapped up in making money to buy the big things.
That is until we use our money to buy time.
Stop buying the goods, start buying the services.
As Ben says, services can be expensive. But so are TVs. Clothes. Cars. Houses. If you take a Simple and Straightforward approach to finances, you might find some flex in the budget for a service or two.
Sell the McMansion, get a cleaner for the apartment.
Save money on a car payment, get that tiny car cleaned.
Reduce spending on your kids’ toys, hire a babysitter.
Move budget from goods to services and you might have time to stop and smell the roses as many times as you damn well please.
And happiness could (or indeed should) follow.
***
Alas, it’s still taboo to buy time with your cash. For most people, it’s seen as just a little bit too fancy - and that goes for people with wealth as well as for people without. The aforementioned study suggests that:
Despite the potential benefits of buying time, many respondents allocated no discretionary income to buying time, even when they could afford it: just under half of the 818 millionaires that we surveyed spent no money outsourcing disliked tasks.
My two cents is this is down to an unhealthy mix of societal norms.
One, we are taught that our time isn’t worth anything and thus we don’t want to pay anyone else for theirs.
Two, we are taught that laziness is one of the worst traits that humans can possess and paying for services you could do yourself is just plain lazy. Why pay for a cleaner when you could get up off your ass and run a duster over your house yourself?
The Puritan work ethic has a lot to answer for.
But as the study says, if we spend all our time wrapped up in outsourceable chores and tasks, we are adding pressure to our precious time.
And time pressure is the antithesis to happiness:
Our experiment demonstrates that people felt less end-of-day time pressure when they purchased time-saving services, which explained their improved mood that day. According to the broaden-and-build theory, improvements in daily mood should promote greater life satisfaction over time.
In other words, take the pressure off, be a happier version of you.
***
The TL:DR is this:
Spend less on goods = more money to buy services.
Buy services = buy time = buy happiness.
If we spend all our money on things, we are yet again looking for the happiness crab under the wrong rock. But if we siphon some of that money out and start to use it to buy services, that could make us happier than the Cookie Monster hopped up on a bumper pack of limited edition Oreos.
Buying my time back with a cleaner was one of the best money decisions I ever made.
It bought my happiness. And happiness is worth a lot.
Remember that.
We have a cleaner once a month and it's the greatest thing I've ever done for myself. Time IS money. This will never get cut from our budget.