I’ve recently finished reading Tim Ferris’s 4 hour work week and was intrigued by the idea of outsourcing your life to free up time. It seems like a great idea on paper – outsource all your work and life chores, and free up your time for higher income generating tasks. I started to look at this in the context of the UK and most people trying to reach FIRE and here are my thoughts;
What I’ve looked at outsourcing
I broke this down into 3 categories – Day to day chores, Life Admin and work and looked at each separately.
Chores
Not many of us love our chores. A local cleaner to me would cost £10-15/hour. So, if I can earn £20 an hour or more this would be worth outsourcing. Gardening would be similarly costed in my area – but I barely look at my garden anyway (Though I will be soon – wait for some updates on my good life efforts). Laundry I can get done for around £20/week.
So, for chores I’d need to drop off some clothes and earn £25/hour. Cleaning takes maybe 3 hours/week tops so I’d need to earn £30 in the same time. Gardening I don’t currently do. And laundry takes maybe 20 minutes to an hour at a push so I’d need to earn £20 in 20 minutes – plus I actually have to drive the laundrette to have it done.
I also looked at shopping but thought the HelloFresh style meal boxes were quite expensive considering the costs of cheap meals you make yourself. And online grocery shopping doesn’t seem very appealing when I work at home and like to get out of the house anyway.
Life Admin
We all do our own finances In the FIRE community I expect but what would outsourcing some of my life admin tasks look like. I made some calls and took some introductory meetings for a few things I could outsource.
An accountant would cost me around £400/year for taxes made up and filed. It takes me around a day to do them myself so this would entirely come down to if they can save me money over what I already save by reading the government tax guidelines online…..I’ll let you know on this as I’m going to let them have a go and find out.
A financial advisor can provide me with investment advice for £600 and review my asset allocations each year for the same. With our low cost index approach this seems unnecessary but I’m going to talk to a few financial advisors and report back on this.
Bills I’ve signed up for lookaftermybills who will automatically switch my energy provider for me. As this is a do once and forget this seems like a pretty good deal. Sadly I couldn’t find a service that would do my other life admin tasks and bills like this.
Work
Tim Ferris talks about working with outsourcers and I looked into this. Amazingly, you can get a full time virtual assistant from the Philippines for less than $500/month. In fact, prices seem to start from as little as $350/month. This seems insane. I made a list of all the tasks I could outsource to free up more work time. The stumbling block I hit was that I couldn’t actually find enough tasks to justify a full time employee – as most of my job I’d actually need to still do myself. I can see this being great if you’ve got a laundry list of tasks you can outsource in your job – and I’m looking at ways of templating out some of the work I do to see if this could be outsourceable.
What I found with other higher tasks is that outsourcing them wouldn’t net me very much money. The rates I am charging are similar to what it would cost me to get other freelancers to do the same work. I’d maybe make £5 an hour “commission” but then I’d need to find more work to fill that time – plus I’d have to manage other people and check their work anyway. So I scrapped this side of it for now.
So Should you Outsource Your Life to FIRE?
I feel that some of the outsourcing tactics only really work if you create a life around being able to actually outsource this work. I think it’s definitely possible but I’m not sure it’ll help most of us reaching FIRE. If you can create businesses like Tim Ferris has that are purely digital – outsourcing all the work is probably quite straightforward, if you work a normal job it’s probably not.
I think the real problem is that a lot of these tasks are done in our downtime anyway. And really the problem is that you’d have to actually allot that extra time into income generating tasks. I think for me I’d be better off cutting out a few more hours a week in TV or videogame time and using that to put towards FIRE income generating activities rather than spending money to free up more time.
I’ll do a follow up on this when I’ve looked more into outsourcing some of my work to see if that is feasible for now I think I’ll keep doing my own cleaning.
Would love to hear your thoughts on this and if you’ve found some great outstourcing techniques I haven’t please let me know!