Prostituting Myself - How Much An Hour?

Do you know how much you are worth an hour? One of the exercises that is helpful for good time/income management, is to calculate how much your time is worth on an hourly basis. This for me has a twofold effect; one, I know how much it costs me to perform an act myself and two, this helps me set a goal for earnings via other means rather than an employer.

Surprisingly many people who are trying to sea-change or tree-change never perform this exercise . They may have general figures in mind for yearly income, or even break that down to weekly. To truly ditch the dross that can be better done by someone else, then hourly is required.

So how much am I worth an hour?

There are quite a few ways of working out this figure. Being employed full time I can use my wage and divide the amount of hours I work to come up with a figure I can apply to all hours….

Example (Using Australian Dollars, scale accordingly for your own incomes)

47 (working weeks) x 40 (weekly working hours) = 1880

50,000 (pre tax salary) / 1880 = $26.60

Now remember that in that figure may be benefits such as sick leave but keep it simple at this stage with the dollar amount. Also if you were earning 26.60 for EVERY hour you are awake you would be a lot richer than just earning it for the hours you spend in the office, but again keep it simple.

So now look at the value of your time.

If I work 8 hours a day for $26.60 = $8.80 x 24 hours

Hmmm that looks like a manageable amount to strive towards in earnings now doesn’t it?

But What About Paying For Help ?

When looking at paying for help you should consider the following

1. are you good at it and enjoy it
2. are you not so good at it and enjoy it
3. are you good at it and dislike it
4. are not so good at it and dislike it

After considering the above, if someone else can do it as well or better than as you, and cheaper then it is in your best interest to have them do it.

Why?

Using the old housework example, you may be the best toilet cleaner around but if you could be using the time to create more income then why are you wasting your time cleaning toilets. If you doing things to earn money at the same time someone is cleaning your toilet then there is double the productivity and you are still making more money than if you were just scrubbing the bowl.

Be careful though, becoming a workaholic is not a good thing. Ensure you are doing things for leisure to balance those hard hours of income generating activity.

And This Little Piggy…

Offline project number 1

This project may or may not be a money making exercise. it certainly has NO future as a passive income type of project in itself, but as a teaching/experience/niche area it has potential.

My partner and I have bought the property to which we will be slipping away to come 2010. It is 700 acres of unspoilt bush with an existing comfortable mud-brick house in place. There are various parts of the existing property that could be rolled into products

• solar energy
• wind energy
• composting toilets
• sea change, tree change

My plan though is to build a straw bale observatory on the property. Straw bale building is becoming better known amongst the eco-aware people out there, and makes sense in the climate to which our property sits.

Here is a site that is doing the whole niche marketing thing, but doing it pretty well. Their free newsletter is worth signing up for if you are interested in learning about straw bale building.

Back to the project plan for the observatory. This is a very very long term project and I will be keeping the blog updated on progress…but do not expect anything for a while