Most consumers love a deal. However, some of us spend untold time searching for the best possible bargains.
If you’re one of these obsessive bargain-hunters, unless you derive some hedonistic pleasure in snatching deals, you may not have considered the possibility that you’re putting too low a value on your time.
Perhaps you could benefit from some perspective: the time you spend hunting for deals and trying to save that last penny may not be worth it. While you can quantify how much money you save by shopping around, you may not realize the opportunity costs of deal-hunting: it often comes at the cost of your time.
You may have a vague sense of the fact that “time is money,” but this might not be telling enough. You can find the approximate value of an hour of your time by dividing your annual income by 2,000 (or, more easily, by disregarding the last three digits of your annual income and dividing the result by 2.)
Set a cost threshold based on the value of your time, say $15 per hour, for deal-hunting. If you’re not saving at least this amount, deal-hunting might just waste your time and money. So, refrain from scouring the internet for a better deal on a weeklong vacation or bidding on eBay if you’re not saving $15 per hour. Likewise, don’t drive across town to Costco just to save a dime per gallon on 20 gallons of gas.
I’ve written previously that life is all about values and the priorities you assign to those values. Therefore, decide which choices in your life really matter and focus your time and energy there. Let numerous other opportunities pass you by.
Another part of leading a wise and meaningful life is not always seeking the best but instead making good-enough choices about the things that matter and not concerning yourself too much about the things that don’t.
Idea for Impact: Don’t spend more time on a task unless it really warrants this in terms of “time-is-money.” As the American Philosopher Henry David Thoreau said, “The price of anything is the amount of life you exchange for it.”
Love this, I realized one day I may be wasting my time. This was the simple way I figured I could calculate whether it’s worth the time or not. Will I be saving more than my hourly rate? Would I be making more at work? Otherwise I might as well pick up a shift here and there and make more efficient use of my time rather than getting a bad deal on my time.