Time versus Money: Financial Experiments from Our House

The discussion of time versus money probably dates back to the origins of money as a medium of exchange. They are both nearly intangible concepts created by human beings. Time, however, has a finite amount, a limit above which no more time is available. Want more than 24 hours in your day? Forget it. It is physically impossible (unless you are theoretical physicist Mitchell Feigenbaum and can wrap your head around living a 26 hour day in the same space as our current 24 hour day, and even he had to quit that experiment) (1). Money, it seems, is limitless. Consider this:

There are 10^11 stars in the galaxy. That used to be a huge number. But it's only a hundred billion. It's less than our national deficit! We used to call them astronomical numbers. Now we should call them economical numbers. --Richard Feynman

Through sleights of hand, the quantity (and value) of money in circulation is constantly manipulated. I'd love to see the balance sheets. Or maybe not.

 My wife and are borderline obsessed with the topic. The more we learn about money and how it works, the less we want anything to do with it. We are constantly experimenting and analyzing just how much money we need to live, and how much work we should do ourselves versus what we should hire done. I suppose the experiment will constantly evolve as we and our children get older. But our current situation, and the experiment that's taking place, can be illustrated in a series of recent events from our own life.

#1: My son enjoys Star Wars, as does the rest of the family. What's more, he likes the Star Wars Lego sets and would love to own the Lego Death Star (pic courtesy of Lego).

Admittedly, that thing looks pretty cool, and depicts the significant scenes from A New Hope and Return of the Jedi. It also costs $400, which is well past what most reasonable folks (including us) are willing to pay for a pile of plastic bricks. Honestly, (and despite its cool-ness) it's ridiculous. No 7-year old should possess a toy that costs $400. It can only be built one way--as the iconic Death Star. Currently, he has to cobble together an Imperial HQ from the green, pink, red, and blue pieces in his collection using his imagination and ingenuity. His fairly significant Lego collection, incidentally, exists largely due to the tub of bricks my wife took in trade for tutoring work a while back. Chalk one up for time. (Grandmas have added to the collection, though. Chalk one up for money.)

#2: The kids have chores they are expected to do, like clean up their playthings, put away their clean clothes on laundry day, and help at dinner time. They each get a small weekly allowance (1 quarter for every year of age) that they have to split between a "save" jar and a "spend" jar. (Yes, it is an "entitlement" program by the strictest definition, but they need to learn to manage money, and they can't do that without, well, money). They can also do additional jobs for cash, usually also doled out in quarters. Yesterday, the job was moving and stacking firewood.

This picture was taken a couple years back, but you get the idea.

 Now, as far as income goes, the money that my kids are paid for the more onerous tasks is pretty lousy--they each made about $2 for their hour of work. But how much money does a kid really need? A couple bucks is a good chunk of money for a 4-year old.

When they quit for the day--even though the job was only half done--my first impulse was to bring up the money required to purchase the aforementioned Lego Death Star as a carrot to get my 7-year old back out there stacking wood. My back sure appreciated his help. But then I thought better of it. First of all, at $2/hr, the thought of saving up even $400 is quite dispiriting. Why use a carrot that is unattainable on a kid's timescale, and which I may or may not even allow him to buy? More importantly, though, he and his sister were playing together, using their imaginations to create a new setting in (read: make a mess of) the living room. I would much rather have them spend time together building a relationship than obsessing about money and the material goods they can procure. Our society is materialistic enough without me pushing it on my children. Chalk one up for time.

#3: But why were we stacking firewood in January, you ask? Why wasn't that job done at the beginning of the winter? Well, it was, but we were almost out and had to actually purchase a cord to get us through to April. The guy we bought from has a dump bed on his 1-ton truck and used it to deposit a cord in the driveway. Thus began the moving and stacking, at which the kids and I took turns at first. My wife came out to help soon after, and she ended up doing most of the moving (while I stacked and split some of the larger pieces) after the kids called it quits. (To be fair, my son is home sick from school today, so I don't think he was feeling really awesome yesterday, either.) Chalk one up to money.

#4: What does firewood have to do with the topic of time vs money? Here's the rub: it cost $200 for that delivered cord (which, according to a quick perusal of Craigslist, is about the going price), and took another chunk of time to move and stack it. In contrast, this spring I spent $20 on a permit, went up into the mountains with my neighbor, spent a morning loading up his truck, and spent another several hours over several days cutting, splitting, and stacking. People who read this and deal regularly with firewood know that this isn't unusual or really even noteworthy. But I really enjoy the work, and surprisingly, it does not affect my back the way other strenuous activities do (like digging; just thinking about using a shovel to move dirt makes my back tingle). What's more, swinging the 6-lb maul is a good shoulder workout, and I get to spend a nice bit of time outside. So, next year, I plan to spend a lot more time with my $20 permit getting and putting up wood. Not that Ernest with the dump truck does a bad job, but since I enjoy it and it costs roughly 10x more for me to buy from Ernest as it does to do it myself, I think my DIY nature prevails. Chalk one up for time.

#5: Right before Christmas 2013, I paid to have the timing belt on my Toyota 4Runner changed. This job required a fairly large sum of money--the shop I like charges roughly $100/hr for labor--but was made slightly humiliating by the fact that I could have done it myself. I had the parts on the shelf in my garage, and they'd been sitting there all summer. What I didn't have (or didn't think I had) was the time. The fact that my day job requires 36-40 of any given week's prime daylight hours, the fact that our 2-car lifestyle necessitates having two running vehicles at any time, the fact that we have exactly 2 cars, and the cold, nasty weather in late December that would have made both the car work and a 30 min bike ride to work uncomfortable at best, kept me from tearing into it. I've done jobs like this before that have taken me a couple weeks or more. I hate having inoperable cars in the driveway or garage. But I can't shake the nagging feeling that I should have just sucked it up, done the job, and saved several Benjamins. After all, I do my own oil & "consumables" changes, and I've done brakes, shocks, wheel bearings, U-joints, tailpipes, and mufflers.

Ooooh, shiny new brakes on an old rusty truck. The shocks were next on this rig. That is my great grandfather's torque wrench on the floor.

 It wasn't outside my ability, just a little outside my comfort zone, I guess. Then again, the mechanic did the job in 4 hours, and I got writing and work on the computer done while I waited. Furthermore, I completed my upright piano project as I kept putting off the timing belt job. I'll probably never have to think about again, unless I still have the 4Runner 5 years from now. Did money win this one? Maybe. Fear certainly kept me from spending the time.

#6: This past summer, we had a large patio installed. Again, we traded money for the materials and labor. Oasis Landscaping did a great job, and it made the back yard much nicer. This job, in my opinion, was totally worth having someone else do. They did in 3 days what it would have taken us months to complete. I think we could have done it, but it would have aggravated me to no end not having it done or only having it half-done. That said, We did move the old, smaller patio to our garden "faux-zebo."

You can almost make out the faux-zebo floor from this angle. The one we paid for extends out of the right of the frame. The pallets cover a French drain I'm working on. This was taken last July, when stuff in New Mexico actually grows.

 My wife and I installed that in a few evenings (while my kids danced around on the piles of pavers), but then, the consequences of an incorrectly installed  "faux-zebo" patio are relatively minor compared to mistakes right up next to the house. Yeah, I was glad to have enough money saved up.

These examples beg several questions--
- how much of my day job hours did I put into making money to pay for firewood, car repair, and patio work this year?
- if I made less money would I have been as willing to pay for those jobs? 
- would that time at work have been better spent actually putting up my own firewood and doing my own car repair?
- did I enjoy working at my day job enough to offset the cost of these services?
- would I have enjoyed dealing with firewood and my cars more than being at work and bringing home money?
- who do I know that would have traded their work for other work in my fields of expertise and/or interest (rather than money)?

There are some other questions and issues as well, but I think these are the most relevant. Of course, the universal, overarching question that comes up in these discussions of time versus money is this: am I living to work or working to live? I hope most of us choose the latter, though with the way money works in the global economy, I'm not so sure that we have a choice if we elect to be a part of the mainstream.

The question--is time or money more valuable?--really depends on point-of-view, but I lean toward valuing time more highly than money, mainly because paper money itself has no intrinsic value other than as kindling for a fire. "Credit," or "account balance," is a flow of electrons arranged in patterns of 1s and 0s. How is that going to keep me warm or feed my family, especially if our ongoing social contract regarding financial media changes?

Food for thought, definitely.

Thanks for reading, and have a great week!

(1) Chaos: Making a New Science, by James Gleick, 1987 Viking-Penguin, Inc..