Tiffany Raiford
The concept of paying someone else to do things around your house is nice, and it’s something that works for most people. If your time is worth more than what it will take you to do a job, then by all means hire it out and get it done without any stress. However, if you need to save money and can’t seem to find a way to do that, you should consider firing your help and learning to do certain things around the house on your own. It doesn’t sound like a lot of fun, I know. But most of us waste a great deal of money asking other people to do things for us that we can do ourselves. But before you decide to go this route, make sure you take the time to consider whether or not it will really pay off. For some, it will. For others, it will save money but cost them in other ways, such as time with the family and their friends, or even time that they should spend working.
Clean the House
If you hire someone to come over and clean the house, ask yourself if you have to do this. Do you have to pay someone to come clean your house, or could you do it on your own without any second thought? Would it save you money to do this on your own? The answer is probably, yes. You can save a great deal of money cleaning your own house, so try doing it for once.
File Your Own Taxes
Taxes are expensive if you get them filed elsewhere, and most people have fairly simple returns they can do on their own without any professional help. You can save yourself a great deal of money if you choose to file your own returns and not bother with paying professional fees. But remember that you can write off the fees you pay to your tax preparer the year before, so you can get a bigger refund or pay fewer taxes.
Mow Your Own Grass
Chances are good that you are wasting money on this one. You could buy your own mower and make up for it in a month or a summer, even. You could do this yourself and save a great deal of money. Of course, if you have a yard person who charges very little – like a teenager – it might be worth it to let them do things like this so that you can have a good time of your own.
Pressure Wash Your House
So many people pay to get this to happen, but it’s not necessary. It’s not even a job that takes so long you don’t have time. You need only set aside a few hours in the morning one weekend to get this done, and you will save yourself a bundle by not paying someone else. It can be an expensive job if you let someone else do it, and that’s a huge waste of your own money.
Wash Your Own Car
If you take your car to the car wash, you are a huge waster of money. It’s so much more affordable to wash your own car. You will also do a far better job than anyone else, which means that you will be very happy you took the time to do this on your own. This is a job that isn’t done well enough at the car wash, but costs too much to have someone else do on your behalf.
Do Your Own Laundry
We take so much stuff to the dry cleaner that we really don’t have to. We take things that are so much easier to just wash and hang up at home and then steam to make them nice and perfect. You will save hundreds of dollars a month by doing this, and it’s something that my husband has come to realize. His was by accident of course, since we moved and the dry cleaner he loves is no longer convenient to his commute. We bought a steamer to try out to see if we could do this on our own or if it was worth the added time to his already long commute to go out of the way, and it’s been the best thing we’ve ever done.
Wash Your Own Windows
We all hire someone to come wash our windows, but it’s really only necessary if you have windows like I do, that are 30 feet in the air and impossible to get to and still feel safe. The rest of the windows, however, are easily reachable and absolutely able to be cleaned by us. Of course, we rarely do it since we have small kids and their little handprints and faces are always touching them, but the thought really is there.
Do Your Own Gardening
This is something we have come to love. At one point, my daughter asked if we could go outside and help the gardener with the flowers, and I found myself wondering why we didn’t do this anyway. She loves to be in the garden, and we love to be outside. We decided to try it on our own and it’s been so nice. It’s such a bonding experience for us and our kids, and we love every second of it nowadays.
Cook Your Own Food
We don’t hire people to cook our own food in our home, but we do go out a lot and it’s much less expensive (and so much healthier) to just eat at home. Sure, we have to clean our own dishes. But on nights we are feeling particularly lazy, we will eat on disposable dishes we can just throw away when we are finished and it’s been a huge money-saving effort.
Clean Your Own Carpets
We never had carpet in our old house, but now we do. We don’t want to keep it forever, but it is nice with the twins crawling around right now. The lack of red marks and bruises on their knees is nice, so we will keep it a while longer. But it’s a pain to keep clean with kids. We first began hiring someone to come every two weeks and clean the carpets for us, but we’ve since learned that it’s just a much better idea to buy a steam machine and do it ourselves – and we love it.
Photo by Carsten Koall/Getty Images
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