[music playing] Hon?

I think there's someone stealing our trash cans.

Oh, no.

That's just the guy from curbit.com.

It's an online service that rolls your cans to the curb on garbage day.

Only $14.99 a month.

Whoa, that seems pretty pricey.

Babe, everyone knows that time is money.

So we're actually saving money by not doing chores ourselves.

That's why I've got Instacart delivering our groceries, Rover walking the dog, Washio doing our laundry, and TaskRabbit cleaning the gutters.

Well, I guess that'll give us more time to write this episode.

No need.

I already hired Writey-O to finish the episode for us.

Really?

Wow, that's really meta.

[music playing] The convenience economy is nothing new.

Ever since the Industrial Revolution, first world families have been willing to cough up hard-earned dough to spend less time on household chores.

MAN (ON TV): The confining hours around the washtub are a thing of the past.

WOMAN: Until recently, that meant gadgets and appliances.

But the internet has ushered in a new kind of convenience, on-demand services that quickly match clients with freelancers who will do just about anything.

MAN: The on-demand industry is one of the fastest growing in the world.

Transportation and food delivery are still the biggest sectors, but new services and areas like home and pet care are popping up all the time.

There's even a service that matches you with goats in your area who will come by and trim your lawn.

Goats?

Oh, we are totally doing that.

It's an economy driven not just by technology, but changing social demographics.

Not too long ago, it was standard for every household to have one full-time employee who took care of the vast majority of household chores, and all for free.

Thanks, Mom.

MAN: But unpaid work is still work, and since more women have entered the workforce, it makes sense that we're starting to assign dollar values to the tasks most of us got to take for granted.

So how do you know whether you can afford to outsource your chores?

When considering one of these on-demand services, the first question you need to ask yourself is whether this is leverage or luxury.

Leverage is more like an investment.

Let's say that by hiring a lawn service, you save yourself two hours of yard work, and you invest that time into your side business screen printing t-shirts to sell on Etsy.

Like the responsible side hustler you are, you've already calculated that you make about $25 of profit for every hour you put in.

And since the lawn service costs $40, congratulations.

You've successfully leveraged your money to make more money.

In other words, as long as you're able to make more per hour than what you're paying someone else, you're coming out ahead.

But let's say that's not an option for you.

Maybe you work 40 hours a week with no overtime and no side hustle.

Then you're likely outsourcing chores for a different reason, to free up personal time to do stuff you actually like.

That puts this service into the luxury category.

Luxuries are not necessarily bad things, but they are harder to judge economically, because you can't really put a dollar value on me time.

But one thing's for sure.

No luxury is worth going into debt over.

So that's why you've got to mind the gap.

If any outsourcing service pushes your monthly expenses above your monthly income, you'll have to forgo it or find some other place to cut back.

That means you'll need a clear idea of how much these services actually cost, and some of them aren't very transparent.

Grocery delivery services like Instacart are clear about their delivery fees, but they also charge hidden markups on many items that are constantly fluctuating.

There's no way to know how much extra you're paying without going down to the store to price check, but that kind of defeats the purpose, doesn't it?

One Instacart user actually did the math and posted his results on Reddit.

Turns out he paid an average of 42.8% markup, including some items that cost well more than double their in-store price.

When you factor in the service and delivery fees, he spent almost $70 not to go to the supermarket.

That might be on the high end of the spectrum.

But the point is, the easier these services are to use, the less likely we are to keep track of the costs.

When you pay a cab driver in cash, you're very aware of the value of that ride.

But with Uber, you just get out of the car and walk away.

Depending on how you approach it, the on-demand economy can be a solid investment, a path to more freedom, or if you're not careful, a financial ball and chain that could drag you deeper into debt.

MAN: We often recommend that saving for retirement should take priority over present comfort, because there will come a day when you really won't be able to mow your lawn or go shop for your own groceries, and you want to be able to afford those services then.

MAN AND WOMAN: And that's our $0.2.

[music playing]