The Cost of my Sloth
Lately, especially after paying my last Visa bill, I've been wondering what the heck I've been doing with my money. All I see on my bill is - parking, parking, parking, gas, gas, gas etc...
Really, I'm paying some big bucks daily for just being me - i.e. lazy. So I've decided to finally tally up what it costs me to be - me - i.e. lazy.
Daily incremental cost of driving instead of TTC:
Parking = $10 - $15; say average = $12.50
Gas ($50/week x 80% driving to work / 5 days) = $8.00
Total = $20.50
Less: TTC one way (because if I woke up at 6:45am everyday, I would be able to catch a ride
with my brother): $2.25
Incremental Cost of driving: $18.25 x 5 days x 4 weeks = $465 / month
Daily incremental cost of buying lunch instead of packing a lunch:
Cost of lunch = $8
Less: Cost of materials for a lunch - say $3
Incremental Cost of buying lunch: $5 x 5 days x 4 weeks = $100 / month
Daily coffee costs (need caffeine due to again - my sleepiness; i.e. sloth):
Tim Hortons Large coffee: $1.40 x 2/day = $2.80
Less: No costs; water is free
Incremental Cost of being addicted to Timmy Ho's:
= $2.80 x 5 days x 4 weeks = $56/ month
Monthly gym fees for which any derived benefits are foresaken because I don't go: $26
Eating out for dinner (well, not necessarily sloth, more like hedonism, but I'll just put it under the category of sloth):
$15 per meal x 3 meals / week x 4 weeks = $180
Total monthly cost of my sloth: $827
Annual costs: $9924
All non-tax deductible too, so not even an after-tax amount.
YIKES!!!
Wednesday, September 15, 2004
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15 Comments:
i was going to calculate this myself but i was too lazy. thanks for doing it for me.
Both of you are quite nerdy.
Uncle Benny
You forgot to calculate the amortization on use of your car as you drive it down every day. But then again, considering the state of disrepair your car is in, the incremental cost is probably $0. You might want to amortize the cost of your MP3 player though, since it is the most valuable part of your car. :)
Oh yeah - plus - minus any costs of driving me home at night. So really - only about $5,000 of your total is sloth costs. The rest is your generous donation to your slothful friend who refuses to drive downtown and instead steals rides off all her even more slothful friends.
PS - I think you can credit most of your "Timmy Ho's" (hahahahahaha that's great) costs to your blogging. 1:30 AM!!!!
Well, I excluded the amortization because it's a sunk cost; no more out-of-pocket. Unless the amortization is to proxy the cost of increased maintenance costs.
Bullpen - well for you, the costs are lower for driving because of the Go-Train 2-way; so that's $10 per day; your daily driving incremental is $10.50 x 5 days x 4 weeks = $210/month.
Should I factor in the timve value of money?
But what if all your sloth "free" time (SFT) is spent back in the office at 1:30am, catching up on month/quarter/year-end work that never ends cause you got stuck in a HUGE queue waiting to order from the BEST street meat dealer in town (who sells grape Crush), which resulted in skipping out of meetings you're supposed to chair?
Or, (in the spirit of OTOHOTO) what if my SFT is spent back in the Tower, cause I'm STILL in BL's office, profusedly apologising about the file. I'm sorry about the file. All the files. Well, especially THAT file. We're ALL especially sorry about THAT file.
Hey wait, so can we still call him Bullpen? Shouldn't it now be similar to Manager Ray and Manager Rosie, except that it becomes ML in short? =)
My my, aren't we all geeks here? AKT, I'm right there with you with my cost of sloth. To your solace, you can probably go with a more aggressive calculation if you have the best streetmeat a couple times a month for lunch (or for dinner too -- that is, if you can find vendor #___, what was it again? in the evening.) And I must say that drinking mediums instead of larges saves me about $100 a year! Yes!
In the spirit of case analysis and your preparation for the impending evaluation, JCL, may I suggest that you give qualitative factors to supplement the quantitative analysis, and I did thoroughly enjoy Alan's time calculation. [And it's hard to put a cost on hedonism either. =p] May I add that the main benefit of driving is flexibility -- one doesn't have to adhere to the GO-train schedules. Also, it's think it's quite fun to speed on the DVP in the evening when there are few cars -- this benefit can only increase if you had a new car -- imagine, there are benefits to buying a new one! =p
"ML" - *sigh*
still technically bullpen larry...at least for a few more weeks...and really, still will always be bullpen larry - because, as you know, bullpen is synonymous with chump. so a more appropriate description may just be chump larry or chumpy larry or CL.
yam - if you factor in the car as a convenience, then you gotta add the speeding tickets that you get as well...and then the cost to fight the ticket...and then the increase on your insurance because insurance is based on convictions, not points...oh yeah, and the time value of such administrative garbage....sloth...thats me. slothy larry.
are you guys serious?
please. there are normal people reading this. who exactly.. i dunno :P
ME!!!!
there is me!! .. i'm normal! hahaha yayyyyy matt!
TTC is actually even cheaper.. although the fare is $2.25, you can get 10 tokens for $19.
And as for lunch, how could you be spending $8/day?
Monday: Big Xtra Combo - $4.27
Tuesday: Street Meat - $3.00
Wednesday: McChicken Combo - $4.27
Thursday: Modern Wok - Soy Sauce Chicken - $5.74
Friday: Sautees - Chicken n Shrimp Pasta - $5.18
That's less than $5 a day.
Okay, so the revised calculation based on buying TTC tickets at bulk would be: ($19 per 2 weeks x 2 weeks) - ($2.25 x 20 days) = $7 per month x 12 months = $84
So the revised Incremental Cost per year is $10,008. So I broke the $10k barrier.
I won't eat Mickey D's for lunch on a regular basis - given that I already don't go to the gym, I draw the line at street meat.
Maybe we need a sensitivity anal-ysis based on several factors - Meal Quality 1-10; at 1, we could just eat a can of Spam everyday..10 would be lunch Ruth Chris steak lunches.
I forgot to factor into my sloth costs the foregone expenses I failed to claim because I was too lazy to process my admin work (Manager-by-day-Bullpen-by-night-Larry can attest to that). I think annually, I probably lose $1,000 of expenses I don't end up claim. It's not fully sloth - it's also due to my passiveness and jelly-backbone. So $10,1008 is the revised.
SLF - Sloth Free Time - maybe we should rate different activities and assign an opportunity cost per hour to the activities based on the 'value' of that activity. Then you can really see if there are positive benefits to the saved time as Alan suggests. For instance, spending the $$ to drive so that I can come home to watch the Apprentice would have a value/hour of > $14, so then it's worthwhile to drive. But if I had ended up watching Canadian Idol or something would have a value of < $14 - more like $5. ;)
Wait a sec... all this analysis is missing the critical point! We need to provide akt with a helpful course of action to alleviate/mitigate this excessive spending. Given she has graciously identified the problem (i.e., much wasted time w/ nothing to show for it).
The implication of the noted problem is that akt will spiral into debt and will resort to selling lemonade on the sidewalk for $0.15 a cup. If she does not correct the short term problem she will not be able to survive in the long term.
Also, time spent doing other things consumes the crucial time she needs to tend to her funktified toes/feet.
Recommondation/Course of Action:
- to limit the risk of knarly toes, hire a qualified individual to maintain them
- restrict spending to only street meat from the same vendor (and only top the dog w/ bacon bits)
- to prevent accidents from your sleepiness implement a permanent IV into your arm that only shoots caffeine every 2-3 minutes
- monitor on a frequent basis (i.e., weekly) the progress made and change as needed
Uncle Benny
One thing we all failed to notice, that deserves due recognition: AKT paid her Visa bill.
That in itself is quite the feat =) Congrats!!!
Hehe =D
water is free, but you can try teas (e.g. green tea) instead of coffees to help wake you up in the mornings...it's cheap and it works.
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