[Womble]

In the thread on field topping costs, Maysie said:

It can be very hard to value your own time properly and many people struggle to do it.

This got me thinking, since on a purely economic level, our smallholding is still losing us money, and will probably never turn a profit unless we were to devote significantly more time to it....

So, if we recognise that the benefits of smallholding are mostly intangible, how do we know where to draw the line?  For example, when is it worthwhile to pay somebody else to do a job, and when is it better to do it yourself?

Well, it turns out that working out your true hourly rate is a really fascinating exercise. For instance, you may work X hours a week for £Y. But actually you have to do an hour's washing and ironing for free in order to go to work clothed, then you have to travel, then you have to pay tax..... 

This means that our true hourly rates at work are never quite what we think they are. However, even taking this into account, there's still nothing I do on the smallholding that pays as well as working my 'proper' job (and I'm sure I'm not alone in this). So how do we decide?


The things I try to consider are:

1) If the job will take 5 hours (say), could five hours of working my job job pay somebody else to do it for me? Also Do I actually have five hours of paid work available to me that I will have to not do in order to do this task?
2) Will I do a better job than the person I might hire?  (often yes, but more often emphatically no.... e.g. fencing).
3) Will I learn anything useful by doing this job myself?
4) Will doing this job take me away from things I most love doing? (e.g. spending hours fixing the car when I could have gone hiking with my friends).
4) Is it a job I'll enjoy?  If not, then why am I bothering (the classic example of this is chicken plucking - each bird takes me 45 minutes, but a professional with the proper tools charges £2.50).

Any thoughts?

[Maysie]

This is a very hard one to reply to, but you have already pretty much covered my thoughts - almost exactly.   

My 2 pence worth:

I have a desk based job. 
I work for myself, as I was utterly fed up of being an over-taxed hamster in an ever spinning wheel of PAYE while employed. 

My work is OK.  I am based at home, so do not have to travel much and my commute to work is rather short and not very stressful.  The issue is, I am not a desk-based kinda guy, but my work pays me far more than I could earn doing what I actually enjoy doing, which is far more 'hands-on' physical work such as smallholding.  So I use my desk based job to afford us the lifestyle that we can enjoy on the weekends and evenings.  If I used the basic maths of 'I can earn more in an hour than the hired help' I would never leave my office and would be utterly miserable, so I love cutting the grass, fixing the fencing, making pig arks, faffing around in the garden etc. 

Despite what I have said above, I still pay people to help me around our farm, as there are jobs they simply do better, or have heavier duty kit to deal with things easier than I could. 

I tried to strim the grass and weeds down the sides of our driveway the other day and after 3hrs of fruitless revving, I gave up and asked the local chap to cut it with his flail mower, which would take him just over an hour.  I would have rather spent 3hrs planting veggies or fiddling around doing something else than getting annoyed, frustrated and bitten by horse flies to save a few pounds, but saving money was not the reason I did it, which was to just get it done when it needed to be done! 

A fencing contractor does a MUCH better job than I can, so we use one.  We are still waiting for him to turn up though, despite booking him in February. 

We have been trying to get our boiler replaced for the last 11 months and are still waiting(!).  If I could do it myself, then I would as I am fed up of waiting for unreliable plumbers. 

We use a 'man who can' for our large chainsaw/felling jobs as he does a great job, has all the kit and is very reliable.  I don't save any time though, as I am constantly answering queries, seeing how he is getting on, or making tea, but that is much easier work than the hard graft he is doing! 

We know we will probably never make a worthwhile profit out of the farm, as it is too small to be commercially viable, but I am sure we can make it pay some of its way when we have hatched our cunning plan for farming success.......

Time is not an infinite resource, so we have to do as many of the things we enjoy (while still making enough money to pay our bills). 
What value can you put on happiness.  It makes me smile every time I see my wife in the fields with her horses (at home rather than in a rented paddock miles away) and that is utterly priceless. 

[SallyintNorth]

I don't need to be paid for a lot of what I do, it's how I choose to spend my time.  So yes, I might pay for someone to do things I can't or don't wish to. 

Farmers don't tally the hours and come up with an hourly rate either . Most of 'em - I mean livestock farmers, I don't know any arable types - couldn't imagine living any other way, or wanting to live any other way!  And if they pay someone to do something for them, it's often the paperwork!

We talk about valuing your time in the context of crafting too, and that's quite tricky.  A lot of people like to sell things they make to fund buying other raw materials and making some more things.  But that undermines people who are trying to make a living at their crafting. 

Our little spinning / fibre group in Gilsland was asked to have a presence at the Christmas Craft Fair, but they wanted us to have a sales table.  Well none of us made things to sell, but we did want to be at the Fair and get ourselves known.  So we agreed to each make two small items to sell for the event.  One of the members researched how to do pricing for craft items for those not in it to make a living.  She said one model was to charge all costs - raw materials, heat and light while working, everything - plus £1 per hour for your time.  I'd been working on my first lace shawl, so said, "Ah, ok.  So I'd charge £16 for the yarn I bought plus £1 per hour's knitting time.... that'll be £1,016 then!"  (It was my first lace shawl, I had done a lot of ripping back and reworking! )

[Backinwellies]

   

My 2 pence worth:

.

If you can do that much typing for 2p  then I have many jobs for you 

[honeyend]

It depends if you want to make a living income or cover your costs.
 My husband is retired so his time is free but why spend time doing something you do not enjoy when you can pay someone who will not become distracted and do it in half the time. He enjoys fiddling with the tractor, woodwork, which is great but |I would rather get someone in to do the heavy jobs.
  The best paid job I have is the hour a week I spend cleaning my lodgers room. Its tax free and well paid.

[Womble]

Sally, I had much the same conversation with a colleague who wanted to buy eggs from me.  "£1.75 a box?  But they're 89p in Tesco!"


"Oh", I said. "Well I could let you have them at cost I suppose".


"How much is that then?" he replied.


"That'll be £74.86 please".

[Maysie]

If you can do that much typing for 2p  then I have many jobs for you 

Good point. 
Well made. 

Probably not the most sensible adage I could have used given the thread topic!   

[SallyintNorth]

Enjoying this thread .

[Womble]

One interesting point following on from Maysie's post is that when you employ 'a man who can' (or indeed a woman), the quality of the job and the hassle they give you is usually what makes the difference, rather than the cost itself. Two examples:

• A friend of a friend came to cut up a big fallen tree that was too big for me to handle. He turned up with a chainsaw no bigger than mine, worked unsafely and ran out of chain oil half way through. I'd have paid him to go away!

• Following that fiasco, we hired proper tree surgeons to take down large branches overhanging our greenhouse and sheds. They planned everything in advance and worked safely, lowering each branch to the ground individually. They were expensive, but worth every penny.

Of course I need to keep reminding myself to be wise and choose the quality / expensive option, and also that it is a luxury to be able to afford that at all. A quote from the one and only Terry Pratchett (again  ):

“The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money.

Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles.

But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while the poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.

This was the Captain Samuel Vimes 'Boots' theory of socioeconomic unfairness.”

[Maysie]

My expensive boots have holes in them. 

I guess I must have worn them incorrectly.....

[SallyintNorth]

Ah, it's choosing the right expensive boots.  The ones that are genuinely good quality, as opposed to the ones with the well-known brand name (which has just been sold to a pile-em-high-sell-em-cheap merchant, in whose hands their reputation will take a few years to tarnish...), or the celebrity-endorsed (and therefore fashionable, which translates as won't last, don't need to), or the Posh Stuff brand name (supposed to make you look like you have money but by the time us plebs can afford them, they simply show us up as gullible! lol), or ...  etc 

[doganjo]

For work you can't or don't want to do, why not employ someone who is retired?

Not geriatric, but fit and well and retired.  They are being paid by the government (pension) or a works pension provider, so they can afford to work for a lower rate.  (and if they are honest they will do)

As a Lead accountant with an oil company for a number of years my rate of pay was £30 an hour, but I work for £10 an hour from home now.  I'm doing what I love to do, plus I can do it when I want to, and I can do the physical jobs I'm able for and employ 'a man who can' for the jobs I can't do (or prefer not to - like my lovely cleaning lady 

[Womble]

That's a good point Doganjo. The job we really should get somebody to do is cleaning. Currently the hen house gets mucked out far more regularly than our own. The trouble is getting it tidy enough in the first place for somebody to clean it - It can't be just us, can it?  .

they can afford to work for a lower rate.  (and if they are honest they will do)

I'm intrigued - why do you say that?  (I mean, isn't a job a job, regardless of who does it?).

[pgkevet]

One way of improving the value of your time is to stop wasting it. I say that as someone who enjoys sitting on his behind and pratting about on tinternet and uses time saved so doing.
I've made small but important inroads into time saving. Well very small inroads. I now only buy one brand and colour of socks... pairing is easy and if one sock gets a hole then only half a pair is thrown away.
In a  similar vein i have laid down the law that the only paint I'll use indoors is white. Avoids all that cutting in, cheapest and i discovered a low tack economic masking tape - so spend a couple of hours neatly masking around fittings and frames, whack a brushed width around those edges and filling with a roller, repeat for the second coat and job done.
Equally there's certain things just not worth doing ... growing peas for the freezer for instance. Manual sowing, harvesting seeing all the grubs in your produce, shelling the darn things all for a bag-ful you can buy dirt cheap in any supermarket. Unless growing in commercial quantities with machinery to harvest just not worth doing.
At the other end of the scale there is stuff that comes under enjoyable hobby.. where cost is immaterial (within reasson). Recently the casting on my Husky big strimmer that holds the handle broke. I could probably buy one for, say £30 but instead bought an ally bar (£18) and have spent the last few evenings machining  a quality replacement. I'm using several thousand squids worth of mill and lathe and tools and likely will have put in 8-10 hrs work making an unnecessarily pretty replacement. But that's because I started metalwork as a hobby a few years ago so I consider the effort fun.

[doganjo]

That's a good point Doganjo. The job we really should get somebody to do is cleaning. Currently the hen house gets mucked out far more regularly than our own. The trouble is getting it tidy enough in the first place for somebody to clean it - It can't be just us, can it?  .

they can afford to work for a lower rate.  (and if they are honest they will do)

I'm intrigued - why do you say that?  (I mean, isn't a job a job, regardless of who does it?).

A My cleaning lady tidies up as well.  The only room I tidy before she does it is my own bedroom which has personal things lying about. 

B Nope, I'm already being paid by the Government at about £50 an hour which well covers my revised/up to date from 15 years ago rate of pay.  So it would be really mean to ask for more.  Maybe I'm too philanthropic