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Happy Money Series | How to Spend Well and Enjoy Your Money More  Every Saturday afternoon through my high school years, I mowed the lawn at my childhood home. Week after week, I'd push that mower around in the SoCal heat, across the multiple grass areas in the front and back yard. All in all, the job took a grueling hour and a half. Now I live in a house with a much smaller, but still reasonably sized, patch of grass. Ask me if I mow it myself. Heck no. The way I see it, I pay for lawn care one way or another. I either a) pay money for someone else to do it, or b) pay with my time and suffer through the dread of a chore I can't stand. For most people, option b) is the default. We grind through the chores we can't stand because outsourcing them feels lazy, or because we figure the money is better spent on almost anything else. It rarely registers as a financial decision at all. As it turns out, behavioral finance research says otherwise. Time Is the One Asset You Can't Get More Of I'm now the father of a three-month-old girl, so it’s no shocker that my free time is rather limited these days -- and that's with one kid. People with two or three are operating on a different plane of scarcity entirely. It’s not just a parenting thing, either. Time collapses for all kinds of reasons: a brutal stretch at work, a parent who gets sick and suddenly needs you, a move, a health scare, a relationship that needs to be more nurtured. Life routinely reaches in and quietly garnishes your hours, and unlike money, there's no version of time you can save up or recover later. Yet we keep telling ourselves we'll have more time later than we do now. So we white-knuckle through the present and promise ourselves relief down the road. The future arrives, the time still isn't there, and we make the same trade over again. Researcher Ashley Whillans, who has spent her career studying this exact trade-off, has a name for what this adds up to at a population level: time famine. When her team analyzed a Gallup survey of 2.5 million Americans, 80% said they didn't have the time to do everything they wanted in a day.¹ People who feel time-poor are less happy, more anxious, and more stressed. In her data, time stress dragged on happiness more than unemployment did. Now I have my doubts over the validity of a packed calendar representing more of a weight on someone’s life than being jobless; however, I am certainly on board with the notion that humans don’t fully comprehend the magnitude of unhappiness that can come from lack of time. More Money Often Means Even Less Time You'd expect wealthier people to feel the most time rich. Afterall, they can hire the cleaner, take the cab, or pay for the shortcut. But research suggest the opposite: across studies in Europe, Asia, and North America, people who earn more report feeling more pressed for time, not less.² When a resource is valuable, we perceive it as scarce. The more you're paid, the more value you attach to your time. Thus, those who make more can feel the loss of time more acutely. Removing The Negative There's a popular rule in happiness literature: spend on experiences, not things. I even wrote about it just last week! However, there’s another missing piece to this equation: we can spend money to outsource jobs we don't like or simplify our lives. Previously mentioned researcher Ashley Whillans and her frequent collaborator Elizabeth Dunn studied what happens when people spend money specifically to offload tasks they hate (cleaning, yard work, errands, sitting in traffic). The conclusion was that not enough attention goes to buying your way out of unpleasant tasks. Think of it this way: nearly all discretionary budgeting is built around adding a positive: the vacation, the nice dinner, the concert. Very little is built around removing a negative. But the utility of each is asymmetrically weighted. Eliminating a recurring source of dread often does more for your weekly baseline than stacking one nicer thing on top of a week that still contains the dreaded thing. It’s hard to enjoy an experience as much if you know the house needs deep cleaning. The Millionaire Who Still Mows His Own Lawn Whillans and her colleagues surveyed 818 millionaires. Nearly half said they spent nothing outsourcing tasks they disliked.³ In separate studies, 99% of people could instantly name a chore they'd love to pay someone else to do, yet only 17% actually spent money to make that happen. What does this mean? It means that the barrier isn't really money at all. As Whillans found, paying someone to do tasks we don't like can make us feel lazy or wasteful, so we opt out just to avoid that feeling. In other words, it’s more of a permission problem than a capital problem. So consider this your permission slip. As a personal finance specialist, I'm telling you it is a sound, defensible use of money to pay someone to take a chore you hate off your plate. Not a guilty splurge, not a luxury you have to justify, but a reasonable line item. To be clear, this isn't a mandate to outsource every laborious task. If you genuinely don't mind mowing your own lawn, keep mowing it and bank the money. My point isn't that chores are beneath anyone, but rather that the dread you feel toward a specific task has a real cost, and you're allowed to spend money to make it go away. Spending the Time Well Once You've Got It One more note about buying time: it only pays off if you don't immediately squander what you bought back. In a study comparing millionaires to people of average net worth, the wealthier group was happier in part because they spent roughly 30 more minutes a day on active leisure and 40 fewer minutes on passive leisure.⁴ Reclaiming two hours from a chore and pouring all of it back into scrolling Instagram doesn't move the needle. Spend it on people, movement, or something you actually find absorbing, and it does. The Reframe: Keeping Tabs On Your Happiness Dollars Want to put this into practice? Here's a simple way to start. For one month, sort your discretionary spending into two buckets: money spent buying into a good mood (the retail therapy, the dinner, the ball game) versus money spent buying out of a bad one (the house cleaner, the grocery delivery, the express lane on your commute). Whillans' work suggests spending as little as $40 to save time can buy more happiness than spending that same $40 on stuff.⁵ You don't need to outsource everything. Just find the one or two recurring tasks that hang over your whole week and pay for somebody else to take care of it. You'll be surprised how much lighter the week feels once the dreaded thing is simply gone. Frame it that way and hiring that house cleaner might not seem like such a splurge. Instead, it starts looking like an undervalued asset, especially in a season of life when the hours simply aren't there to be had at any price. References ¹ Whillans, A. (2019, January 24). Time for happiness. Harvard Business Review. ² Ibid ³ Whillans, A. (2019, January 24). Time for happiness. Harvard Business Review. See also Whillans, A.V., Dunn, E.W., Smeets, P., Bekkers, R., & Norton, M.I. (2017). Buying time promotes happiness. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 114(32), 8523–8527. ⁴ Whillans, A. (2019, January 24). Time for happiness. Harvard Business Review. ⁵ Ibid
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