16 Mar How a shower head saved me $140 PER MONTH

Once in a while in life we put something out in to the universe and for whatever reason it makes its way back to us.  When my wife returned to W2 work we weren’t sure how we were going to balance everything with household duties that she always handled while being at home.  I had sworn up and down that we’d end up spending some money when she went back to work to buy back some of our time.  The two most common ones were hiring a house cleaner to come and also dry cleaning.  Dry cleaning wasn’t as big of a deal to me because my clothes are pretty easy to clean and with an ironing session while watching Netflix one evening could have it all done without issue, but the house cleaner one really stayed with me.

The thing about the house cleaning is its really not that hard because we are tidy people as it is, we cleanup after ourselves, its just the actual once a week true cleaning that is needed.  If we were to say ready-set-go and we both broke off and did our cleaning chores for the house on a give week it probably takes a total of 1 hour maximum to have this place in good shape.  That doesn’t include showers being fully cleaned however, or windows being cleaned, just the normal general cleaning gets done in that time. I clean bathrooms, and sometimes get to softscrubbing our white corion sink.  She handles vacuuming, floor cleaning ,and stainless steel appliances.  The showers however remain my chore, but I just loathe doing it.

Thus we decided for the new income she’d be bringing home we could comfortably afford to splurge $140 to get a house cleaner about every 3 weeks so our showers would get done for us, the house would be cleaned for us one week and we’d get a week off. I called a few friends who I knew at one time or another had a house cleaner but I hadn’t heard about it for a while, after all how often do you talk about your house cleaner? None of them had their house cleaners anymore for various reasons ranging from too expensive to, firing them because they weren’t doing a good enough job, or not letting people in their house because of coronavirus and they were thinking about firing them anyway.  I had no leads, I didn’t feel like finding any leads so I figured we’d just forget ahead and see how it went.  I am sure I grumbled once or twice along the way that we had to clean the house or it was shower day and how terrible that was.  At one point I looked on Home Depot’s website for shower heads that detach with the hose line on them and they were like a hundred dollars or more, something like that and I dismissed it.

I rarely do the Costco shopping for our household since my wife does all of our shopping but periodically I get sent to handle it and I always come home with more than I was supposed to get.  Either I wanted something and got it, or something is there that we had been wanting or needing but just never gave in and bought.  On this fateful trip I came away with a couple sweet pump squirt guns for my son and I to have water fights in the front yard, I think they were a $12 random splurge for 2 guns, not bad! I found a sweet deal on Pork Belly so I got that for the smoker which feeds my stomach and my soul.  Lastly and certainly not least however, right on the main isle they had nice looking multi-setting shower heads that you remove and have a hose that would reach all the way end to end to rinse my shower walls.  Halleluiah.  They were even the brushed nickel color that we like versus the shiny chrome finish or whatever.  I grabbed two of them and went on home fat and happy with what I’d found, dropped all the stuff on the counter showing my wife my freshly purchased “haul” and of course she said some famous words along the lines of “this is why I don’t let you shop….”.  Touché wife.

No time was wasted and I was upstairs installing one of these new shower heads in my master bedroom shower that I use daily and bam, it worked exactly like I wanted.  5 settings, removable, nice water stream, and one of the settings was a higher setting that I consider pressure washing my walls after I’m done.  Boom, now I can rinse my shower walls clean every day, spray a “daily” spray cleaner in there every few days and on shower scrub clean day I can easily wet the walls, wash the walls and rinse the walls clean without the incredibly annoying efforts I had before.  If this $30 shower head wears out or breaks on me in 1-3 years, I simply won’t care.  I’ll drive straight to Home Depot and happily pay $100+ for a higher quality and longer lasting model because this was worth every penny and has kept me from giving in and hiring the house cleaner that I thought we were destined to have.

In my post about purging so we can splurge, I walked through why we avoid spending frivolously and focus on subscription or reoccurring expenses to keep our monthly costs and spend low.  In exchange we can buy bigger expensive things without really thinking about it because we are still going to have an incredibly high savings rate that month.  Sometimes the splurge is a small thing like $60 worth of shower heads for our two bathrooms that actually stopped me from spending $140 a month that I really don’t need and can simply live without.  Afterall, we can get every basic house cleaning chore done in about an hour each, get our body moving in the morning, and take pride in our work.  Why hire that away when it won’t give me equal dollars to joy return?  A shower head saved me $140 a month, not through water bills, but by replacing a pain point while also improving my overall shower experience.  You may not need a shower head to save you $140 a month, but maybe somewhere in your budget line items you might find you are over spending to solve a problem you have that could be re-considered and thus a line item removed and savings rate goes on up.  Go find it.