As I mentioned in my last post, I recently moved to a new apartment and it pretty much took a whole day. This reaffirmed that moving may be the thing that I hate most in the world. It’s just a cumbersome process from packing to cleaning to loading everything up to driving to unloading everything to unpacking and on and on and on. I thought that Amanda and I didn’t have much stuff until we started packing and loading everything. And I’m still pretty sure that we have less stuff than a lot of people our age, which is scary to me. There was so. Much. Stuff. We ended up taking two truck-loads to Goodwill and countless other bags to the dumpster and still had a ton left over to move.
This led me to continue asking myself two questions in my head throughout the process:
- Do we really need all of this stuff?
- How much does it cost to pay someone to move you?
I really value doing things myself when I can and not having to pay someone else to do something that I’m capable of, but the whole moving experience is just terrible for me. It frustrates me and makes me angry. I found myself asking the same question in my head over and over, “Is the money I’m saving by not paying someone to do this worth the frustration?”
I have no idea how much it would really cost, but a quick online search after we had everything moved told me that $450 should get it done. That seems like a lot of money for me to spend right now, but in the grand scheme of things over my entire lifetime that’s probably (hopefully) not going to be a very significant amount of money to part with. It’s not like I would be spending that money on a monthly basis or even a yearly basis, if it’s up to me. It would be a relatively small one-time expense to help me with a process that I hate. I guess the question I then have to ask myself is something along the lines of, “Did my family and I experience $450 worth of physical exhaustion, frustration, time, etc. during the moving process?”
It’s hard to quantify, and you still have to pack, unpack, and clean when you hire movers, but considering there were 4 of us involved in the process I think we may have been close to paying someone else to do the heavy lifting being worth it. That’s their profession, they know what they’re doing, and they know all the tips and tricks and best ways to move.
Hiring A Pro
Most people don’t have their financial lives in order, yet they either choose to ignore it or they think that what they’re doing is good, so they don’t ask a professional for help. Just like me with moving, just because we thought we knew what we were doing and we’ve done it plenty of times before, that doesn’t mean that we did it in the best way possible or that we couldn’t have hired someone else to ease our frustrations and physical exhaustion and allow us to do something more beneficial with our time.
There are many things that even those who have done extensive research on personal finance miss simply because they didn’t know to search for it or where they were searching never mentioned it. I’m sure there were many ways to make the moving process easier, but I never considered searching tips and tricks and I never thought about hiring someone until I was in the middle of the process and I was ready for it to be over.
People have a lot going on in their personal financial lives and it can be frustrating to keep everything straight and really know what the right decisions are to make. Unfortunately, most people just ignore things and hope they’ll work out and those who take matters into their own hands oftentimes become frustrated and give up or can even unintentionally make things worse.
I think there are a couple of questions that I could have asked myself about hiring someone to help me move:
- Does it provide me happiness? Overall, spending the money would have stung, but it probably would have provided me happiness because of how frustrated I was during the moving process.
- Will it keep me from reaching my goals? I don’t think that spending $450 would keep me from reaching my long-term financial goals.
Hiring movers would have likely made the process much easier on me, would have eliminated a lot of my frustration and allowed me to be happier, and would have allowed the day to go much smoother. Hiring a financial planner to help with your financial life can have the same benefits for you. You don’t want to hire just anyone, though. Here are some tips for finding the right financial planner for you.
