The Relationship Between Time and Money

You’re having a cookout, so you go to the store to buy some burgers. You have a choice:

· A big lump of ground beef

· A package of eight pre-made burgers

How you answer this question says everything about you and your outlook on life.

So I actually asked AI about this. AI probably rolled its eyes when it got the search query. “How much does ground beef cost versus pre-made burgers?”

• Ground beef: $6.50 per pound makes 4 quarter-pound burgers, so each patty costs about $1.63.

• Pre-made/fresh patties: At $6.49–$7.50 per pound, each 4 oz patty costs $1.62–$1.88.

• Bulk frozen patties: Often about $1.47 per patty, sometimes slightly less per pound in very large packs.

So you’re saving, at most, 25 cents per burger by buying the big lump of ground beef? Multiplied by eight burgers is $2.00? Brilliant!

So then you have to consider how much time it is going to take to take that big lump of ground beef and turn it into burgers. Let’s say, for the sake of argument, 15 minutes, which means that you’re valuing your time at $8/hour, which is just above the federal minimum wage (which nobody makes anymore). Also, you get burger fat all over your hands, and now matter how hard you try, and how many times you wash your hands, your hands are going to smell like burger for the rest of the day. And you make a mess of your kitchen.

The fact is that humans are not meant to make burgers out of ground beef—machines are. Machines will do it better and cheaper. Also, the burgers you make yourself will be all lumpy and they’ll fall apart on the grill. The pre-made burgers you get from the grocery store are perfect.

So sure, if you want to save two bucks, make the fucking burgers yourself, in your million dollar house and with your $80,000 car in the garage. If you buy the lump of ground beef 40,000 times, you will have saved enough for a new car. Maybe you just like the feeling of meat in your hands. You can come over to my house anytime.

A few years back, Mr. Money Mustache did a blog post about how he made a pizza at home to save money. A pizza from Domino’s was $20, and the ingredients to make a pizza were $5, so he saved $15. Brilliant!

Except making your own pizza is a pretty labor-intensive proposition, so you’re spending three hours rolling out dough and chopping vegetables and grating cheese and making sauce, so if you value your time at $25/hour, it’s an $80 pizza. $5 for the ingredients and $75 for the labor. Again, Domino’s makes pizzas faster and better than you—they have what’s known as economies of scale, so you should just order the pizza from Domino’s and do whatever you want to do with your free time, like watch baseball, or write a blog post, or whatever. Another concept worth talking about here is the division of labor—you’re really good at trading stocks, and someone else is really good at making pizza, so you should trade the stocks and let someone else make the pizza. I suppose if you thought having a pizza night at the house was a good thing to do with the family, then sure, you can justify this behavior, but you’re not saving any money.

Time is more important than money. You can always make more money, but you can’t make more time. I’ll say that again—you can’t make more time. The 15 minutes you spend pounding ground beef you will never get back—you are 15 minutes closer to death. Now, let’s say that you were very, very poor. Indigent, even. Then, it would make sense to buy the lump of ground beef and make burgers. But for everyone else, making your own burgers is a money-losing proposition.

I will tell you a story. When I moved into my last house in 2015, the first day I was in the neighborhood—we were still moving in furniture—two cops showed up at the front door. They asked if I had seen anything unusual in the neighborhood. Apparently, there was a burglar going around stealing TVs in the middle of the night. Well, the guy eventually got caught. Now, in the universe of TV burglars, this guy gets the gold medal. He broke into 24 houses and stole 24 TVs before he got caught, which is an excellent record. And then I thought about it—what was he selling the TVs for? Probably $300 at most. And he couldn’t sell them all at the same pawn shop—he was probably driving all over the state to move the hot TVs. If you took into account all the nights he spent breaking into houses, and all the time he spent trying to move the hot TVs, it probably came out to about $15 an hour. And he ended up getting an eight-year sentence.

Which brings me to my point—for normal people, good people, they understand the relationship between time and money. Criminals don’t. Criminals will risk 20 years in prison for $20. You know who else doesn’t understand the relationship between time and money? Cheap fucks. Your landscaping bill is $300/month. I’m not paying that, that’s outrageous, and then you do your own landscaping, which values your time at $10/hour. I suppose some people like doing their own landscaping—they enjoy getting all hot and sweaty, but as a way to save, it is a money-losing proposition. Again, the landscaping company has economies of scale, and there is such a thing as a division of labor, so if you make $30/hour uploading fart videos to YouTube, then it makes sense to do fart videos and let someone else do the landscaping.

I think about this all the time, and it is to the point where if I am walking through the grocery store parking lot and I see a nickel on the ground, it actually doesn’t make sense for me to pick it up, because it takes me five seconds to stop and pick it up, and I make more than a nickel every five seconds. It probably doesn’t make sense for me to pick up a quarter, either. Inevitably, I do, because I abhor waste, but it makes no economic sense. And it’s about time that we got rid of the penny. All that time wasted counting out pennies at McDonald’s drive-thrus. Fuck the penny, round up to a quarter, and make the line move 20% faster. The whole change thing is funny—there’s been so much inflation that some places I go (even gas stations) will just round up or down to the nearest dollar. Forget the shrapnel. For my part, I take all my change and put it in a jar and take it to Coinstar once a year and get about $150 in cash, which is the most efficient way to deal with change.

Washing your car? Run it through the car wash. Cleaning your house? Hire housekeepers. Painting a room? Hire a painter. Doing home repairs? Hire a handyman. You’re going to be standing on the top step of a ladder changing a light bulb and eat shit and end up in the hospital breathing out of a hose. The car wash does it better and faster. The housekeepers do it better and faster. The painters do it better and faster. Some people do have a psychological need to control this stuff—I do it better. At what cost? Since we moved into the new house, we have landscapers ($475/month), housekeepers ($440/month) and we have never been happier. And I do realize that some people like washing their own cars. Put on the Bluetooth speaker, listen to some tunes…yeah, I don’t get it. Run it through the machine for $12 and save two hours. Literally anything else would be a better use of your time. I spent about five hours today working on my novel, not sitting on a riding mower with a can of Busch Light and a toothpick sticking out of my mouth.

They say time is money. Time is more than money. I don’t want to spend one second of my time doing something I don’t want to do. If that means I spent an entire afternoon vegging out and watching baseball, that is better than the alternative. I work, make money, and spend it on time-saving help and inventions. Easy for me to say, right? Freaking rich guy. Actually, these principles apply to pretty much everyone. A lot of people think they’re poor, when they’re really not. Buy the pre-made burgers for the first time in your life, and see the difference.