How often are you home? When you’re there are you using every area of your house? Are there rooms of your house that go untouched for weeks at a time?
Each of us are home for different amounts of time, so each of us gain different levels of utility from our place of residence. However, we all pay on the same rent or mortgage schedule, that is, we pay per month. Is there a way to see how much home you’re getting for the money? Perhaps a housing bang for your buck?
Something I like to do is calculate my per hour used housing costs. I not only break it down into per hour, but only into hours that I’m there. If a person is never home, what’s the point of paying for it?
This is simply a fun way of looking at how you pay your housing expenses and isn’t something that is necessary by any means. Here’s how I do it:
I review my average week and estimate about how many hours I’m home and how many I’m not. Remember, there are 168 hours total in a week.
Currently, on an average week I spend 84 hours at home and 84 hours not at home. That means on any given day I’m home for about 12 hours, whether it’s sleeping, eating, working on my computer, or whatever it may be.
Now for my expenses. My rent is $650 and utilities are about $50 a month, so a total of $700.
Now let’s divide $700 by the average days in a month (30) which gives us $23.3 Rent per day. Now divide this number by however many hours you’re home on average per day.
My number is $1.94 an hour to actively be in my house. Not too shabby, and very cheap living.
How much you pay per hour of being in your home?
$2.66 is what we actually pay. But using your method I have the advantage with a SAHM. I might even go further to say that our costs should be divided by 4 people that live in the house so that would drastically reduce the hourly expense. In addition we routinely pay 21% extra with every mortgage payment. This is optional so if we look at dead cost we are responsible for our minimum cost per hour, per person is something like .50/hour. Do my a favor…. don’t let my wife see this!!! .-= LeanLifeCoach´s last blog ..How To File Taxes… Read more »
Good take with the multiple family members. Sometimes crunching numbers is fun like this, not sure it really serves a value purpose other than an insight.
Haha, I’ll do my best to make sure you wife doesn’t see this site… and your comments!
.-= Ryan´s last blog ..The Part Time Job Search =-.