Once our needs are met (food, clothing, shelter), then a great use for money is to make life easier.
This article discusses five inexpensive ways I've found that make our lives easier in an outsized way.
Buying back your time or buying down your aggravation
Such things can either buy back your time or buy down aggravation.
Buying back your time lets you repurpose your time to something more pleasurable or fulfilling. Paying someone to mow your lawn or clean your house is an example of this.
Buying down your aggravation lets you enjoy your time more by making regular activities less stressful. Reliable appliances just plain work better, for example.
Bus tubs for collecting cups and dishes upstairs
I like my coffee. A lot.
However, I don't always remember to bring my empty coffee cup downstairs with me to refill it. When that happens, I grab another one, fill it up, and bring it upstairs. Eventually, I have four to six coffee cups scattered throughout my office. Carrying those down took at least a couple of trips.
To encourage me to clean my office a bit more, I got a set of four small bus tubs back in December 2019 (according to Amazon). When Covid was in full swing and I was working at home 100%, these came in really handy.
One of the tubs collected my cups and dishes (but not too many of them), as well as other things that I knew needed to go downstairs. The tub fits nicely on a small set of drawers.
Another one of the tubs I've inverted and used it as a monitor stand. It blends rights in.
The others move around from purpose to purpose.
For $5 each, these little tubs have lasted for a few years without any noticeable wear.
Multiples of regularly used items
Multiples of things I use all the time, or every day, also make things easier.
For convenience in the morning, I make a shake with chocolate whey and powdered milk. Over the years, we’ve accumulated a bunch of blender bottles.
Since then, I’ve never been without a clean one in the morning for my shake. Having several of them saves me from needing to clean it that day. With our daughter at college now we do a dishwasher load maybe every other day.
I took out three blender bottles tonight from the dishwasher. A great way to make life easier.
Make life easier with matching plastic containers
A big frustration-saving move we made was ditching all of the random reusable plastic containers we had in favor of a single style.
At the time there was a coupon deal on Ibotta for Rubbermaid Easy Find Lids containers, so we went all-in with $40-$50 worth of containers and repurposed the ones we had, which were mostly semi-disposable Ziploc and Glad containers.
Man, this was a good move! It was then so easy to match up the lids to the containers. Before we did this, we had to dig through and try several lids to find the matching one. The non-matching lids were close but didn't work.
No more! The containers stack nicely and finding the right lid is a breeze. Pays dividends every day.
Visual timer to keep on task
I guess this one is a frustration reducer of sorts that I can use at work or at home.
I have a 60-minute Secura visual timer at both my office work desk and my home work desk. It's battery-powered but ticks very softly. The alarm has two volumes; I set it to the lower volume so I don't scare myself or my coworkers when it goes off.
This little gadget reliably helps me to get more done by time-boxing my tasks. (I'm using it as I write this article.) It also helps me to not miss meetings at work; I set the alarm to go off a few minutes before I need to go to the meeting room or to get on Teams.
Make life easier with a can opener that doesn't suck
A few years ago I was eating a homemade hamburger soup pretty much every day. That meant lots of cans of beans and other things I was opening to prepare the soup.
It was a pleasurable experience to make the soup, save one thing: I had a string of really lousy can openers. The cutting disk would get loose and I would have to clamp down really hard on the handle or torque it as I turned, to get the cans open.
I finally asked for a really good can opener for Christmas, and it sure didn't disappoint.
My mom got it at a restaurant supply store. The brand is Garde and looks like this. Nearly five years later it works like a charm and it STILL puts a smile on my face when I use it.
(This post was inspired by a similar post over at AllThingsFinance.net. Cover photo by Jeremy Bishop on Unsplash.)
