Time is Money. We’ve all heard this saying so many times that it almost loses its effectiveness, but this weekend I was reminded of how true it really is.

I grew up learning that it’s always better to know how to do things yourself rather than paying someone else to do it. My dad did all of the landscaping. My mom did all of the painting. I never had a store-bought Halloween costume and my sister and I had an awesome tree house made out of scrap wood from our garage.

I carried these habits into my adult life. Because of that, I now know how to do so much more and have saved more money than if I had tried to find people to do these things for me.

The Value of Our Time

This past weekend we moved into our new house. I cannot think of a busier or more stressful time to have placed such an event, but such is life! I was wondering how in the world we were doing to do all of this, until my husband suggested we hire movers to take care of it all.

My first thought was, “No! That’s not how we do it! We rent a U-Haul, we load it ourselves, we unload it ourselves and that’s that!” But then I realized I wasn’t placing a high enough value on my own time.

Sure, we could have moved all of our stuff ourselves, but it would have taken several days. I wasn’t necessarily just paying someone to do something that I didn’t want to do, I was paying someone to free up time in my schedule.

Every hour I didn’t have to spend moving I could spend grading projects for my class, working on my doctoral projects, getting speaking gigs, etc…I wasn’t paying a mover 30 dollars an hour to move my furniture as much as I was paying 30 dollars an hour to have that time free for other things.

I am certainly not advocating that we all spend our last dime paying people to do things for us. However, if you’re anything like me, it’s good to have a reminder once in a while that we don’t have to do everything ourselves either. Our time is extremely valuable and we owe it to ourselves to use it wisely.

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Photo Credit: Renjith Krishnan