I can’t speak for anyone else, but I get the idea from my experiences with SAHP’s, particularly my stepmother and my several babysitters while I was growing up. My recollection of being ‘babysat’ was that I would play with the babysitter’s children in their bedrooms or the back yard while the babysitter was inside watching game shows and soap operas. When I was 4-5, my weekdays with my mother typically went like this: She drove me to the babysitter in the early AM and dropped me off so she could go to nursing school, then picked me up at around 3pm to take me to my grandparent’s house (where we lived), and she would go work a shift at K-mart and maybe wake me up to kiss me goodnight when she got home at 10:30.

My stepmom, who was a stay at home mom, had way more free/unstructured time than that. As did my aunt, who was also a SAHM, as did my mother’s cousin, also a SAHM, both of whom were my babysitters at different times until I turned 8 and my mother remarried.

Can you choose between taking your kid(s) to the park on a sunny Tuesday afternoon, taking them over to a friend’s house for a playdate, or hauling them to the thrift store to shop for their clothes? That’s unstructured time. It may not be free, but you can often choose what to do with it, and those choices can be frugal ones.

I don’t know where the idea comes from that SAH parents have all this “free” time? We are some of the hardest working people I know, and we don’t even get “paid”.

First, not all “acts of frugality” take the same amount of time. It may only take 30 seconds to turn the thermostat down at night, but it make take several hours to do OAMC. It’s not that all frugality activities are time intensive, because many of them aren’t, but there are some that are. To ignore that is foolish.

Secondly, there are different perceptions of time. For someone that has more unstructured time, they have a different perception of time costs. If you are a SAHP, taking an hour out of your day may not seem like much time to you – whereas if you work 80 hours a week, then taking an hour out of your day may seem like a lot of time.

Lastly, there’s a definite bias towards frugality (on both sides) that leads to exagerating or minimizing time costs. To glean from the comments, someone says “exercising is only 30 minutes a day” and someone else says “no, I have to change clothes, drive to the gym, shower, stretch – all that adds a lot more time to that 30 minutes.” A similiar argument can be made about most frugal activities. Someone can say coupon clipping only take a few minutes while you’re watching TV in the evening, and someone else can say it takes an hour to clip them, sort them, file them, and match them up to 6 different sale flyers. It’s easy to see that each comment has it’s own bias in it – if you’ve already decided that it’s worthwhile, you are going to emphasize how little time you spend on it. If you’ve already decided it’s a hassle, you will emphasize how much time it takes.

Even if someone is spending hours a week watching TV or unwinding other ways, they don’t feel like they have time for new things because that unwinding time feels essential. Rather than telling someone where they can find more time, they really need to find their energy and motivation. That’s a much more difficult process.

Sonja, I don’t mean to single you out, but that type of comment has always annoyed me. The truth is, it takes more than 30 minutes a day to exercise. If I pack my gym bag, walk to the gym after work (5 minutes from my desk to my locker), get changed, stretch, shower, get dressed again, and walk back to my desk, that would take 30 minutes.

Note that I omitted any actual “exercise” there.

Just the ancillary tasks alone would take 30 minutes. The exercise itself would add at least another 20 minutes, for just a bare-bones, “get-your-heart-rate-up-then-stop” workout. A real, worthwhile routine would take an hour (plus the 30 minutes of supporting actions).

Don’t get me wrong – I exercise every day. But I’ve learned that when you add it all up, it definitely takes more than 30 minutes.

Also, regarding the CFL light-bulbs. We use them in high-use rooms, but it doesn’t make economic sense to just blanketly replace them throughout your whole house. We have rooms we don’t use very often (spare bedrooms, basement storage, etc.), and it just don’t make sense to replace a $0.25 light bulb with a $8.00 one. Chances are, the light will be on for less than 500 hours in total, ever, so the $0.25 light bulb will not burn out in our lifetimes. Just something to think about.

People in this situation just need to throw out their junk. (It is usually valueless junk) This saves money because there is less clutter and they can find items they need (i.e. scotch tape) instead of going to costco (to save that value-on 50 rolls of tape) and spending money they don’t have on it.

We have good jobs, minimal debt (no credit card debt), retirement and regular savings. And we went to Disney last year too. So if I’d rather pay $10 to gain an extra hour a week, especially if that hour is after I’ve worked and gone to the gym and driven home, who cares?

When we have enough additional disposable income, I plan to have someone come clean my bathrooms too :-P

For me, instead of cooking quadruple meals, I like to cook meal parts and freeze them. Every time I cook ground beef or chicken breasts, I cook a few extra. Then, they go in the freezer (chicken goes in cubed or shredded). It’s then much easier to put together some yummy dinner without spending time cooking the meat. I also chop up lots of veggies if I’m doing it for dinner one night — if I have to chop half an onion, why not chop two whole onions and have onion ready for the rest of the week?