During the early part of the spring, my son (13) started to get into playing basketball. Since we didn’t have a hoop at home, we would hop into my car and drive to a county park that is less than 5 minutes away and play together. Good times, good exercise and a fun shared activity. After a few weeks of this, my wife found an ad for a home basketball hoop from Target on sale for $225.99. We figured that was a good deal and decided to go and make the purchase, especially since with the weather being good, we would get a lot of use out of it. I went down to Target and picked up the hoop (which came in a huge box), assembled my tools and took a look at the instruction booklet.
I will be honest. I am only moderately handy, and the instructions were a bit intimidating. There was a lot more hardware included than I expected, and thus more work (and time) that I would need to put into setting it up. It was also already 2PM on a Sunday, and to be honest, putting together a basketball hoop was not exactly how I wanted (or planned) to spend a precious day off.
I took a deep breath and said to myself that I just needed to get started. After about an hour, I had the rudimentary shape of the hoop coming together. As I worked, my neighbor came outside and saw what I was doing. As it turned out, his family had essentially the SAME hoop set up in his driveway. We talked for about five minutes while I took a break, and finally he said “You know, I paid a handyman to put mine together.”
“Oh really?” I asked. “How much did you pay him?”
“$75. I could give you his number if you want.”
My neighbor is super nice and we are about the same age. It’s likely we have very similar household incomes and to any other observer live a similar lifestyle. The big difference is my neighbor spends for services that make his life “more convenient.” Grass cutting service. Car detailing. House cleaning service. Professional basketball hoop setup. The list goes on and on. As I went back to work on the hoop, I started thinking about what all these services must COST. And not only cost once, but on a continual basis, because you know, the grass grows back, the car and house gets dirty and there is ALWAYS some new purchase that you need to hire a handyman for to put together. $75 here, $50 there, $100… it all adds up.
Have you ever heard those stats put out there where if you make your own coffee instead of going to Starbucks, you will have $10’s of thousands of dollars in 20 years? I decided right then and there as I was working on the basketball hoop that I was going to create an account and start actually SAVING what most people would spend on things they could be doing themselves.
I started here:
- Basketball hoop installation: $75 (one time)
- Grass Cutting: $50 (recurring)
- Haircuts at Sports Clips for me and my son: $30 each (recurring)
- NOTE: During COVID, my wife got clippers and started cutting our hair at home. We plan to never return to paying for haircuts
- Any other thing that I choose to do for myself vs. Pay someone: $50/hour
Starting that day, I put the money I saved by doing the above things for myself into a brokerage account and invested into a low cost total stock market ETF (VTI). Every time I got paid from work (every two weeks) I would add the appropriate amount to the brokerage account based on the last two weeks’ worth of savings.
So what happened? Well that was back in April, and just three months later, I have $914.05 in that account. Over the course of a year, that is well over $3600. All easily obtained by just developing simple habits like being willing to roll up my sleeves and work hard for myself. Crazy, this stuff actually works.
Thing is, the money isn’t even the most important thing. There are so many other awesome benefits to NOT paying someone else to make your life more “convenient.”
- Exercise – I get a workout and fresh air when I do projects outside or cut the grass. This lifts my mood and boosts my health, especially since I have a desk job.
- Learning – Putting together the basketball hoop was hard and I made some mistakes along the way. But I learned how to do it. I also learned more about the tools I using. I now feel confident that I could put together a hoop a lot more efficiently the next time
- Satisfaction – I get the awesome feeling of satisfaction from doing a job well myself. Every time I walk past my grass or the hoop I feel great thinking “I did that with my own hands!”
So what is the lesson? Going the “easy” route and paying someone to do work that we could easily do ourselves literally drains our banks accounts AND deprives us from some pretty awesome side benefits. Don’t be one of those people! Even if a project looks a little scary at first, you CAN do it. You may make some mistakes, but you will be successful, you will develop some “grit” and feel an amazing sense of accomplishment when you are done! Also, find a way to actually capture your savings. A lot of people make choices to save money in an area by not spending, but don’t actually save/invest it. Thus that money probably gets spent on something else, instead of increasing and compounding over time.
As it turned out, putting the basketball hoop together took about 3 hours. I paid myself $75 and so I guess I was working for $25 an hour. I learned something, got some exercise and feel great that I did it myself! I’ll be sure to keep you all updated on how this account grows over time and other ways I find to do things for myself (and pay myself.) All small baby steps on my journey to financial independence.