Making medicine is one of the many activities that demonstrates how the DIY life leads one towards freedom from the need to earn large amounts of income. Today I made tincture and sleeping pills. The tincture included lobelia and kava kava. The sleep aid is made of veg cap's filled with valerian and kava kava powders.
I used to buy a 30 pill jar of sleep aid for $14.00. Instead I now buy bulk herbs and make my own jar of 100 pills which takes me under an hour. You could say that my new price for the item is about $1 a bottle or you could say that I pay myself $13 an hour for the time I spent doing it myself. Now usually I also grow the plant and that makes the math all the better, my per hour wage (so to speak) goes up exponentially.
If you consider DIY repairs to my VW Beetle, like the recent window regular which costs $400.00 at the shop vs an at home repair of $40.00 for the part plus 3 hours, you can see how one's wage, or cost per hour increases. For that Beetle repair I "paid myself" about $85.00 an hour.
We like to use the language of "I earned $100.00 an hour today," when we talk about it. And we like to track the math because it tracks the economy of each task and makes decisions about what to do next easier to make.
8 comments:
Somehow this still seems like you're tied to the mirrorworld economy in a way. Once that crashes your time will be valueless, at least in that framework. Here on the fringes, we DIY or die. There's no other choice.
Ha ha! DIY or die. I like to think we're in transition, taking advantage of every stage between. But "really" are you free of commerce? If you can't make a thing you can still buy it.
From where do you get your bulk kava kava powder?
From where do you get your bulk kava kava powder?
Here is something I just read on Backyard Chickens, where there was some debate about the true cost of starting a flock. Here's what a guy who calculated the value of his time said:
I was not talking about taking unpaid time off of work. I was talking about working extra.
The cost of 1 hour of free time = 1 hour of work or 1 hour of sleep. This is called "opportunity cost" in economics.
Opportunity cost is the cost related to the next-best choice available to someone who has picked among several mutually exclusive choices.[1] It is a key concept in economics. It has been described as expressing "the basic relationship between scarcity and choice."[2] The notion of opportunity cost plays a crucial part in ensuring that scarce resources are used efficiently.[3] Thus, opportunity costs are not restricted to monetary or financial costs: the real cost of output forgone, lost time, pleasure or any other benefit that provides utility should also be considered opportunity costs.
Example:
A person who has $15 can either buy a CD or a shirt. If he buys the shirt the opportunity cost is the CD and if he buys the CD the opportunity cost is the shirt. If there are more choices than two, the opportunity cost is still only one item, never all of them.
This could also be getting an extra job or doing something else to make money. The value is different from one person to the next. A brain surgeon would be economically driven to have someone build them a coop because the time they spend at work is so much more valuable than my time. They may choose to build their own coop for many reasons but saving money is not one of those because the time spent building a coop would cost them more money than buying one.
It really comes down to the fact that starting a backyard flock costs both time and money. If you spend more time you can spend less money and vice versa. We all work to a balance that makes sense to us individually.
I think it will be interesting to see how others have achieved this balance.
And it goes on....!!!!!!
Cargo wrote:
I was not talking about taking unpaid time off of work. I was talking about working extra.
Enh, that only makes sense if you WOULD be working extra with that time, if you weren't building the chicken coop. For those who would, then sure, that is definitely the economic cost.
For people who can't (or simply wouldn't) be doing paid work instead, though, I think it is totally fakey economics. (Not at all criticising you personally, please understand; am criticising the whole opportunity-costs concept in general)
Anyhow, what is the "opportunity cost" for me personally working on my coop? Is it
a) nothing, because realistically I would not be doing anything paid with that time; or
b) some hourly fraction of $45k/yr, which is what I was making at my former college-professor salary when last I worked that job nine years ago, even though I no longer have that job nor could I realistically reacquire one; or
c) minimum wage, which is about what I'd get if I went out there to find something to occupy spare hours that would actually hire me for a job that fit with my other obligations; or
d) the cost of hiring someone to do other things that I'm not doing because I'm working on the coop instead (setting fenceposts, gardening, cleaning, childrearing, etcetera) and if so, then which ONE of those hired-out job costs, because it is not like there is a specific one in the queue waiting for me to finish building a coop; or
e) nothing, because I am doing it because it is enjoyable and provides me with a useful thing in life as well as good skills-exercise.
?
I will certainly accept "opportunity costs" as a relevant *concept*, but when it comes to actual hard numbers I think it very often makes no sense. Me, I'll stick with actual price-tag direct costs in my accounting, or at most add in the garage-sale value of things that I could resell I suppose if I were not using them in the construction smile
So, you know what I would say the biggest "hidden" cost of building your coop is?
The, well, I don't know what the academic economics jargon is but I'm sure there is a phrase for it, the future cost of what that coop leads you FURTHER into spending.
I mean, if you don't build a coop in the first place, you don't have chickens so you never get MORE chickens and have to feed them and then an incubator and the electricity for that and the brooders which you have to buy lamps for and then a bigger coop and more pens and more runs and perhaps some turkeys and then it happens that the people you hang out with to discuss and learn about poultry suck you into getting sheep too which then need housing and feed and...
So really, building the coop "caused" you to engage in all those future expenses too. Well, me anyhow tongue
Seriously! smile
Hummm. maybe I'm confused but all that sounds like a long way to explain the way things are. his view begins with that money has value, the surgeon may build a coupe for pleasure but it'll never be economical to him because the time being a surgeon provides so much more $. But it all crashes is one is in a world in which money has no value. I guess I am to trying to get as far from money as I can and that shapes my view.
this also makes me realize that the question of "value" has to be approached from the starting point of one's priorities.
for example: my priority = freedom obtained by making stuff, good labor and wealth obtained in the form of high quality of life (food, goods, my time is my own).
with this as the desired result than I can go about weighing the costs of actions against something concrete. If say buying getting chickens is going to give me good labor (building coupe, taking care of) and protein (eggs) and prevent me from needing a job to get that protein than I've achieved all three goals. and if i had to get a job to buy the way to these goals I'd likely have to work to pay for the labor to build and maintain the coupe and pay for eggs from the store. not to mention travel costs and the ancillary costs of having a job.
the bulk kava came from a part time Truth or Consequences, NM resident. they live in bali the rest of the year where they run a kava biz.
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