Time v money: Examining the cost of convenience in daily life - Nadine Higgins

Making dinner at the end of a long day can be exhausting but are time-saving expenses like pre-cut veges a worthwhile trade-off? Photo / 123rf

THE FACTS

• Time-saving expenses can be valuable or wasteful, depending on individual perspectives and needs.
• Kiwis spend an estimated $1 billion on payWave and credit card surcharges annually, saving minimal time.
• Higher income often leads to spending more on reclaiming time, creating a tension between money and time.

One of the things I’ve observed from seeing the minutiae of what clients earn and how they spend it is that generally the higher your income, the more of it you spend trying to claim back time.

There’s a tension between these two finite resources, one many of us struggle to find the right balance between. If you trade hours for dollars, the more hours you work, the more time-poor you are. If you’re retired you likely have a different problem, trying to stretch your dollars to last your lifetime.

Time is arguably our most precious commodity, and there are myriad options that will relieve you of your cash in exchange for the promise of claiming back more time for yourself.

Whether those timesaving expenses are an insane waste of money or key to maintaining your sanity depends on your perspective.

A household with two parents working outside the home would probably argue the cost of a cleaner is an investment that “saves” hours, allowing them to spend Saturday morning with the kids instead of scrubbing toilets, for example.

But perhaps for the house-proud type-A who cleans before the cleaner comes (only to be disappointed by the job they do), it doesn’t seem like such a great exchange.

A short walk around Auckland’s leafy suburbs shows you just how much money gets ploughed into outsourcing jobs. Gardeners, lawn mowers, dog walkers, house cleaners, pool cleaners. But is it all worth it?

For the residents of those elite enclaves, the answer to that is likely inconsequential, but for most of us, it’s worth weighing up whether we’re getting bang for our time-saving buck and the convenience outweighs cost.

Not all time-saving expenses are as highfaluting as having someone to sweep the leaves out of the pool, so I’m putting forward some small-scale examples.

Saving your credit card details online

When you find something drool-worthy online that some inspirationally good-looking influencer is promoting, before you know it, you’ve “added to cart” and you’re headed for the checkout.

If your account or your browser has your credit card details handily stored, you save yourself a few minutes not having to find your wallet and input your card details. But crucially, you’ve also removed a key opportunity to pause and reassess whether that purchase is worth it.

All the research shows credit cards encourage us to spend more – whether that’s through removing friction, distancing us from the pain of parting with our money or by lighting up the addictive parts of our brain, the result is the same.

Therefore, the time you save by having your credit card details on file can become a very expensive decision (and that’s before you incur any interest on those purchases).

Contactless payments are generally up to about 2.5% of the purchase price. Photo / Sarah Ivey

Contactless payments

If I’ve forgotten my wallet, I will reluctantly tap my phone, but I will curse my forgetfulness, because I resent the transaction fees.

Contactless payments are generally up to about 2.5% of the purchase price and yes, a small percentage on a small expense is a small amount.

But did you know Kiwis spend an estimated one billion dollars on payWave and credit card surcharges each year – and for what?!

If that was genuinely delivering us value, I’d be first to argue it was money well spent. But that billion dollars probably bought us, collectively, 2 billion seconds, because that’s all it takes to swipe your card and enter your PIN.

Two billion sounds like heaps, but if you want to crunch the numbers, it’s the equivalent of each New Zealander “saving” less the seven minutes per year, which I’d argue is not a good return. If you genuinely can’t spare two seconds to swipe your card and input your PIN, I’m worried about you.

Pre-cut vegetables

Making dinner during “witching hour” when the kids are whining and ravenous and you’re at the end of your tether can be hard work, so anything that makes it quicker has got to be worth it, right?

But every time I see the pre-cut, pre-packaged vegetables in the supermarket I can’t help but do the maths and conclude it’s a waste of money (and a waste of plastic packaging when the vegetable originally came with its own protective skin!)

This week my local supermarket had 120g of pre-cut celery for $4 – which works out to $33.33 a kilogram, for something that’s not only easy to cut, but mainly water. Likewise, 120g of cut carrots was $4 when an individual carrot was just 33 cents.

A piece of pumpkin was $3 a kilo, but 400g of pre-cut pumpkin pieces was $7.50 a kilo, so more than twice the price. If that was whole pumpkin it might be worth the higher price, as that can be tricky to cut, but a chunk of pumpkin isn’t that hard to deal with (and a few minutes in the microwave can also make the job easier).

It might sound like I’m splitting hairs (and not just pumpkins) but this is just to get you thinking. The point is that every spending plan deserves an audit of what really brings you value.

There will be expenses that are worth every cent for the time they save and sanity they preserve, but no doubt there are also things where that delicate time-money balance is out of whack and need rethinking.