Originally Posted in July of 2007

Mrs. Frugal and I don’t have a T.V. When I tell people this, the usual response is, “Why? How do you live like that?”

There are several reasons we don’t have a T.V. One is the cost savings ($60 per month in cable bills and we don’t have a T.V., so we’d have to shell out $600-1,000 for a good LCD).

Another is the space. We don’t really know where we’d put a 30″ screen, and so…well…we haven’t gotten around to it.

The third reason is the sensory overload. When you go without T.V. for several months (over half a year and counting), when you finally watch it at someone else’s house, the screen and sound give you sensory overload. The commercials are loud and annoying (I know Tivo skips through them, but what if you watch live T.V.?), and even the shows seem to be screaming at you in order to keep your attention.

The final reason we don’t have a T.V.: we don’t really have the time for it. We’re too busy wasting our time doing other things like talking with each other, reading, surfing the internet, blogging, and balancing our checkbook.

There is one show we enjoy watching: American Idol. But for that, we go to my parents’ house when it’s on. If the show isn’t worth driving 10 minutes to go watch, the show probably isn’t worth watching (for us).

We aren’t people who are stuck up and think that we’re elite because we don’t have a T.V. Television has had some wonderful shows that I’ve loved over the years.  What’s different about not having a T.V. is that it causes you to really think about each show you watch one-by-one. If we want to watch a video, we watch one on our laptop on the bed. We have some shows on DVD, and we watch them, too.

UPDATE: APRIL 2009

We moved out of that apartment after about 18 months and bought a home. We didn’t get a TV until Mr. Frugal’s sister gave us an old, 27″ TV. (The label on the back says it was manufactured in December of 1997.)

We don’t have cable, but we have a collection of DVDs that we watch and occasionally rent a DVD or borrow one from a friend.

It works for us and we don’t miss cable at all.

Last night I was in a writing class and we were talking about personal finance. We were talking about how thrifty I am and I said, “My free time is worth about $12/hour to me.”

The people in the room asked how I reached that number. I didn’t really know at the time, but as the night went on, I continued to think about it. I remembered back to my freshman year in college and what my economics professor taught us.

He said that researchers have found that people are generally willing to spend about 1/3 of their hourly wage so that they don’t have to wait. The conversation came up when the class was discussing how to price tolls for a toll road most effectively.

In order to measure potential demand, an economist would estimate how many minutes would be saved and charge the fee based on what the average salary in the area is. Charge too little, and the number of drivers increases. At some point, the cars will increase to a point where the number of minutes saved decreases.

Charge too much, and no one takes the toll road. Given speed limits, there’s a limit to how many minutes the toll road can save a driver.

What’s funny is that $12/hour is roughly 1/3 of my hourly salary (not my real salary, as my previous post points out).

So if a toll road could save me 15 minutes, I would be likely to spend $3.00. If it saves me 20 minutes, I would spend $4.00.

My wage, before taxes, is about $34.80 per hour assuming I work 52 weeks a year for 8 hours a day. But what I’ve realized recently is that I should be adding my commute time to the 2,080 hours and subtracting my vacation & holidays. Let’s see what happens.

In a year, there are 261 weekdays (365 – 52 Saturdays – 52 Sundays). We get 10 holidays and 15 vacation days. In addition, we get up to 8 sick days, of which I’m on track to take 5. So the number of days worked is 231 (261 – 10 – 15 – 5).

The number of hours spent working or in my car each day is 10.5 (8 hours of work and 2.5 hours in my car).

10.5 hours x 231 days worked =  2425.5 hours for my job each year.

To find my real salary, I take my salary and add benefits and subtract the cost to get to work.

I use Mrs. Frugal’s benefits for the most part, as she’s a teacher and teachers have great benefits. My primary benefit is 401(k) matching. That adds about $653 this year.

I then subtract what it costs me to get to work. I drive 5o miles round-trip and I assume it costs me $0.39 per mile. This must be adjusted to become pre-tax dollars. In other words, I have to earn $0.52 in order to cover the expense of driving one mile (0.39/0.75). This comes out to $26.00 per day, or $6,006 per year (231 days * $26.00 per day).

So I take my salary, add $653 to it, subtract $6,006 from it, divide by the hours spent in my car and at work, and I get $27.68 per hour. After tax, this is $20.76 per hour.

When it comes down to it, that doesn’t seem like a whole lot of money given my degree and time spent in school.