I think you said one of the smartest things I’ve read lately. Working a second job, even one that earns substantively less than your primary income, has more value than the money earned. It reminds us of the value of hard work, and helps us make intentional decisions about how we spend our money toward conveniences.

I hold my MBA as well, and am ‘the boss’ at my day job. Even at the peak of my career (which I walked away from last year — but that is another post) people in the neighborhood near mine knew me as “the yard guy” or “the fixit guy”; I moonlight doing landscaping and light household repair. I look at it as “therapy that I get paid for doing”.

@Mary – I’ve actually read “Nickeled and Dimed,” and I agree–it is a fantastic and very eye-opening book. The author herself freely admits that while she committed to working the menial jobs that she did for the sake of writing the book, she didn’t truly experience the levels of trapped-ness and desperation her co-workers felt, simply because she knew that her time doing such work was finite and that she had her higher education to fall back on at the end of what to her, in the end, was only an experiment rather than a real life of poverty with no way out.

I’m also trying not to be offended by your use of the phrase “navel-gazing.” Maybe I’m misinterpreting (text-only posts are difficult that way), but that feels rather dismissive to me. I’m fully aware that I have educational and financial advantages, but that doesn’t make me any less sincere in my wrestling with these issues. I do donate time (and money, when I can) to causes that I feel are worthy. And I also scrub my own toilets. ;o)

@lynn – I like the way you apparently work for extra cash when you need it. That has the dual benefit of saving rather than going into debt and, as you observed, keeping you in touch with physical labor and the value attached to it. I think that’s very important in the largely sedentary, information-based world that many of us inhabit.

Thanks also for your comments on the whole “moral dilemma” question, which seems to tie in with your willingness to do work that others in your position might not. It’s a refreshing attitude.

Anyone else care to chime in? :o)

I hold an MBA and have a perfectly decent job. But we live in a high cost area and when I want a little cash, I occasionally tend bar P/T. (When I did it for a living, I was in my 20′s- no problem. 20 years later, my back aches!) Tending bar makes me look at my money differently. When I work extra for cash, and my feet hurt when I am done, I am loathe to turn around and pay almost the same wage out again for someone to clean my house- or give to a step-child to buy a cell phone with! You could argue that I am using my “middle class white collar salary” to pay for it, but it doesn’t feel that way. It puts me back in touch with the reality of working hard (physically) for a living and appreciating the desk job, too.

Also, I am “the boss” at my day job and “just another worker” when moonlighting. Good for the soul and it tamps down the arrogance of those of “us” who’ve “made it”. As for the moral dilemma; I don’t have it. Why? Because not only do I tend bar if I need extra cash I would scrub toilets, graduate degree or not, if my bills needed paying and it met my goals. The trick is- when you pay someone else- make sure you pay them fairly and competitively- don’t get greedy.

Oh- and tip your bartender when you go to your company Holiday party! You’ll feel great about yourself!

A non-living wage with not sick days, health insurance or any sort of job stability or chance for advancement creates a permanent under class where, even with the most heroic efforts, leaves the poor, uneducated and non-english speaking stuck and miserable, unable to climb out and support themselves and their families.

The ivy league-educated author of this New York Times bestseller, after working undercover as a “maid” and in other low end, soul crushing positions, has come to the conclusion that she can scrub her own toilet.

You realize that your navel-gazing about this very topic is a by-product of your own educational advantage. Only relatively well off people can sit around on their computers and strategize about various scenerios for their resources.

My advice? Scrub your own toilet. Then donate your time to give a hand up to somebody.

Really like this blog and the remarks.

Mary

I’d like to ask the group a related question–somethng that came up for me when I recently read Tim Ferriss’s “The Four-Hour Work Week.” The way he describes outsourcing menial tasks raised my moral hackles, and I’m trying to figure out why.

My family would probably be classified as lower-middle class…we never wanted for any of the necessities, but there was always an awareness of having to watch the money closely and not spending on “extras.” So I was raised to value hard work and self-sufficiency, but I’m beginning to realize how much of a poverty consciousness I absorbed. I have also discovered that I have a kind of disdain for money–the attitude of “it’s greedy and not spiritual to focus on wanting money,” etc.–which I now want to get over. After all, money is neutral. It’s what you do with it that counts.

So Tim talks in his book about outsourcing menial tasks to people long distance, and often in other coutries such as India. Even if I had the wherewithal to do this, to me that smacks of a kind of master-and-servant mentality.

On the one hand, you might argue that your “virtual assistant” in India (or wherever) has freely chosen to work for what I might think of as slave wages, but which to them is actually decent money.

On the other hand, compare that to, let’s say, getting a maid. Let’s face it–the person you hire is highly likely to be from the lower classes. It may not be politically correct to make such an observation, but I don’t personally know anyone who would choose to make a living dusting furniture and scrubbing toilets–unless they have large amounts of initiative to pursue other careers and goals, people do menial jobs for a living when their life circumstances don’t readily present more pleasant options.

Let me stress that I do NOT mean to offend anyone by these comments. I’m sharing them because I’m very much in the process of working these things out in my own mind and would love it if people shared their own thoughts.

Where do you (mentally, or in actuality) draw the line between feeling like you are taking advantage of others and wanting to leverage your time by paying them to do tasks that free you up? Does anyone else have a moral dilemma with this?

Looking forward to your responses!

That’s not usually the case, so there’s another dimension to this: the money I spend for time now might mean less time is available later. If I pay for someone to fix my electrical system now, I have less money to invest. This means I can’t use it in the future – when I might want to (or have to) retire early.

You could look at it this way: the more time you have to work for someone else to put bread on the table, the more the REST of your time is worth. This presents a kind of supply-&-demand scenario. The less time of your own you have, the more that time is worth to you.

Forty hours a week is a huge chunk out of your life. Having to fork that much time over to an employer means all the rest of your survival chores have to be done at night (when you’re exhausted or occupied with kids–or both) and over the weekend. That means you have two days in which to

* do the grocery shopping (often involving trips through traffic to several stores);
* schlep to Home Depot (often several times, if you have a repair project under way);
* clean the house (a two- to five-hour job, depending on the size of the house and the size of the mess);
* get dog or cat food;
* wash or groom the dog;
* wash the car;
* mow the lawn;
* water and groom the garden;
* clean the leaves out of the gutters;
* clean the pool & adjust chemicals;
* wash the windows;
* take out the trash;
* repair the toilet;
* change the car’s oil;
* take the cat to the vet;
* reconcile your bank accounts;
* calculate the budget;
* drive the kids to soccer, baseball, music, friends’ houses;
* prepare a week’s worth of food, if that’s your thing; and
* oh yeah…you thought you were going to watch a movie! LOL x 10!

In other words, you’re trying to cram an entire week’s worth of chores and running around into two days! In my opinion, that makes your “free” time worth at least as much as & probably more than your hourly wage, real or employer-alleged. When your supply of time is low, it’s well worth hiring a housekeeper, a lawn service, or a pool dude (or dudette), to have someone else change the oil, or to buy a product instead of making it.

The time I have to put in at the office is brass. My free time is gold.

If I make $25/hour during the week, my weekend time is worth more than that to me because it’s all I’ve got to myself. I may be willing to pay a little more than my job pays me (which is not necessarily what I’m worth, anyhow) to free up my extra hours. If I make $25 an hour at work, I may not take a job an extra ten hours a week for $35 an hour because that free time is worth more to me than $25 an hour.

I might sometimes trade time for money because I must, but my time is priceless.

http://www.crown.org/Tools/Calculators/Work_OneIncome.aspx

It will be interesting to see what you all think, especially when discussing the SAHP.

Everything you pay for can be boiled down to paying someone else to spend the time to produce a finished product/service.

On another note, I used to vaguely think(dream) that my true hourly wage was what I made before taxes. I used to use that as an excuse to hire others to do work, so that I would “save” money and time.

Now that I’ve calculated my true wage after taxes, expenses, actual hours worked and so on, it makes much more sense to do many more things myself. And I’m better off for it now, saving a bunch of money and not living off in lala land thinking I made a ton of money!