What is your time worth?

This topic keeps coming up more and more, especially when people see my monthly updates on how many points I earn or how many points I burn.  I think it is a very important topic, seeing as how MS is a get-rich slow scheme.  Anyway, I was browsing WSJ yesterday (free subscription from DDF, not the recent AMEX offer) and ran into this article titled “Do you know what your time is worth?”  Hopefully you don’t need to be a member to read it.  If you can’t read it, here’s a direct link to the online calculator.

The questionnaire is like 5 questions and should take you 5 minutes to answer.  You will need to put some thought into your answers though.  One question was, “If your favorite store was giving out a $100 gift certificate, and you could play on your phone/read/do whatever in line, how long would you wait?”  Another question asked, “Instead of spending 4 hours doing something on a weekend, you could spend X dollars to get it accomplished in 2 minutes, how much would you pay?”  You should seriously put in a REALISTIC answer.  I put in that I’d wait 30 minutes for the GC, and that I’d pay $100 for the 2 minute task.  As you can see, there is a consistency issue, and the calculator will give you a consistency score.  This hits home since a reader asked me recently why I wouldn’t pay off a lease and resell a car for a $1,000 profit that would take me 4 hours when I MS at a much lower $250/hr rate.  That was a great question, and I didn’t have a great answer.  I just told him I didn’t want to deal with the hassle, but clearly he was right – he caught me being inconsistent.  And that’s where the inconsistency score comes in.  Luckily, my consistency score was 6.16, which was 75% better than people who have taken the tool.  Other things I learned:

• I value my free time A LOT higher than my salaried wage
• My hourly salary wage was less than my MS threshold wage of $100/hr
• I apparently need to either ask for a raise or move on to do something else

There were other insights that were spot on!  If you do any manufactured spend, I implore you to spend 5 minutes to go through the test.  It’ll put a relative value on your time and help you decide how many hours you want to put into doing MS related activities.  This is also why I hire a maid to clean my house instead of doing it myself.  It does beg the question though – what would you be willing to do for a higher $/hr.  I once learned that crane operators can make up to $200K/year (due to unions,) and at the time, my coworkers joked if we would quit our job to be a crane operator.  Sure, it’d be boring as heck, but that’s also a lot of money!  So just because something is more financially rewarding, if you don’t love what you’re doing, then it’s probably not worth it.

By the way, I did the same thing in that cartoon.  I have a local Arco gas station that is usually AT LEAST $.10 cheaper than the other gas stations in the area.  It’s usually $.20 higher than the Shell gas station nearby.  I knew that for a fact.  However, it was 11pm, and apparently it was closed.  I now had 3 options – a) go home and come back tomorrow, b) go to the Shell that is on the way home and pay the $.20 more than the closed Arco, or c) go to another Arco station that is 10 minutes away that I’ve never been to before and don’t know the price.  I gambled and went with option c.  It turns out option c was $.10 more than the closed Arco, but $.10 cheaper than the Shell.  Sure you could argue that it could have been $.20 cheaper than the Shell, but statistically, it should have only been $.10 cheaper.  Moral of story – don’t go out of your way to save $.10 on gas.  Remember, the rule of 2 reasons.