Should you wash your own car? Time is Money

Should you wash your own car, or should you pay someone to wash your car for you?

The lazy me would automatically opt for outsourcing the car wash to others. The thrifty me would want to save the $10 I have to pay someone to wash the car and opt to clean the car myself. The health conscious me would take this opportunity to sweat it out.

How do you decide? Putting aside the health aspect, you may want to ask yourself how much would it cost to wash the car myself? Is it the $10 that is asked for, or does it cost more than that? In other words, what is the worth of an hour to you? Remember that Time is Money.

To calculate how much you are worth per hour, take your yearly gross income, remove the last 3 digits, and divide the number by 2. That will give you an indication of how much you are worth per hour.

Say, you earn $5000 per month. Your yearly income, excluding any bonus is $60,000, and your hourly rate is thus $30 (60,000 /1000 / 2).

In that case, if it takes 1 hour to wash the car, you would have lost the opportunity to make $30 in additional income. It would be better off to pay someone $10 to wash the car, and you spend that 1 hour on productive efforts, like reading a book on business, or take that time to phone your client to build a better client-supplier relationship.

I am reminded of this quote by Brad Sugars, Founder of ActionCoach.

The only difference between YOU now, and YOU in five years will be
... the books YOU read,
... the people YOU associate with, and
... the way YOU implement the knowledge into YOUR business

So, make full use of your Time!


Note :

The simple formula of calculating the hourly rate assumes an average of 2000 working hours per year :

No. of working weeks : 50 (52 - 2 weeks annual leave)
X
No. of working days per week : 5
X
No of working hours per day : 8
= 2000 hours per year