{"id":2773,"date":"2014-05-05T08:53:24","date_gmt":"2014-05-05T12:53:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.changinglanes.biz\/?p=2773"},"modified":"2015-10-01T05:32:50","modified_gmt":"2015-10-01T09:32:50","slug":"cost-convenience","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.changinglanes.biz\/index.php\/2014\/05\/05\/cost-convenience\/","title":{"rendered":"The Cost of Convenience"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"coffeecup\"<\/a>Like most people, I’m lazy. No wait let me rephrase that, I like things that make life easier; like the right tool for the job. But these conveniences, even though they make my life easier come at a price. A price that I don’t think most people think about. So let’s break down some modern conveniences.<\/p>\n

As my business has grown I’ve switched from doing my own billing and invoicing in Excel and Acrobat to an online service. With Excel,\u00a0 I would spend about 2-3 hours doing billing each month. I would have to figure out my totals, do some math, type up each invoice. Looking back it was a huge pain. Now I spend about an hour each month. I bill a lot more clients too. All I have to do is generate the invoice, edit it if necessary, and then email the invoice right from the online APP. End of the year is super easy, too. I just generate a report, takes about 1 minute. So for the year I’ve saved 20-24 hours of my life by switching to this service. This service also costs me $29\/m so $348 a year. Well worth it in my book.<\/p>\n

Another convenience that makes the business world run that I don’t partake in but my fianc\u00e9e does is coffee, specifically the k-cups. I’ll admit these things are pretty darn nice even though they create similar waste to a regular coffee machine. On average a k-cup costs roughly 56-75 cents per k-cup. If you have one cup of coffee a day that is $204-$273 a year! My fianc\u00e9e likes the k-cups from Aldi so we average 42 cents a cup so roughly $153 a year. That is compared to a bag of coffee that can give you roughly 40 cups, 13-25 cents a cup. If you use a Keurig or a similar machine that has a filter that you can put your own coffee in, then that isn’t a bad trade to cut your cost down to $47-100 a year. But who am I to stand in the way of a person and their coffee?<\/p>\n

Convenience isn’t a bad thing, you just need to think about the end result. So next time you go for convenience, think about these things: What value does this convenience afford me? Is the cost really worth the time I’m not spending doing it a different way? What other ways are there of doing the same thing?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Like most people, I’m lazy. No wait let me rephrase that, I like things that make life easier; like the right tool for the job. But these conveniences, even though they make my life easier come at a price. A price that I don’t think most people think about. So let’s break down some modern […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[13,19],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2773","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-business-management","category-financial"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.changinglanes.biz\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2773","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.changinglanes.biz\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.changinglanes.biz\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.changinglanes.biz\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.changinglanes.biz\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2773"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.changinglanes.biz\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2773\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2782,"href":"https:\/\/www.changinglanes.biz\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2773\/revisions\/2782"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.changinglanes.biz\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2773"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.changinglanes.biz\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2773"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.changinglanes.biz\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2773"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}