Monday, September 7, 2009

Saving money is like a job.

Many ways to save money take a little extra effort and people often wonder “is it really worth it”? Is it worth taking a $1 coupon to the store? Is it worth getting a library pass to the museum for a discount on admission? Is it worth driving to different grocery stores to stock up on deals?

Well…..figure it out! It’s Labor Day weekend, a great time to think of saving money like a job and figure out an hourly wage for your work. For example, taking the $1 coupon to the grocery store. The total time invested in finding and clipping that single coupon was likely 1-2 minutes (you may have spent 10-15 minutes clipping and organizing coupons but that yielded more than one coupon). Using that example, it took 2 minutes to save $1, on an hourly basis that would be $30 per hour. (There are 60 minutes in an hour, divided by 2 minutes for each coupon=30 coupons per hour multiplied by $1 per coupon.) If someone offered you a part time job paying $30 an hour tax free, would you take it? You can use the same type of calculations to figure out the value of any of your money saving efforts.

The point is not that someone out there is going to offer you a job clipping their coupons for $30 per hour! (Although if someone did offer me that job, I would take it!) The point is that the effort that goes in to saving money and living within a budget has a real monetary value, just like a job. Labor Day weekend is a good time to acknowledge that effort.

This article was written by: Nancy Ockers



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