If you didn't read the article (you should, it's a very short read), the answer is basically that an hour of your free time is worth $14/hr according to the gov

If you didn't read the article (you should, it's a very short read), the answer is basically that an hour of your free time is worth $14/hr according to the government and $19/hr according to some economists doing experiments at Lyft. The economists of course see their study as groundbreaking and claim their value of time is "significantly larger than what the U.S. government values people's time at". But $19/hr is only 35% more than $14/hr, and they measured the value of people's time in 9 US cities. Sounds to me like that's simply because most numbers in US cities - salaries, cost of living etc - are at least 35% higher. In any case, I think that number is very individual. For example, tons of people in America who make in the $7-15/hr ish range spend hours of their time on "beermoney" tasks, which pay only a few dollars an hour. Is their time, then, worth the $2ish/hr they make with beermoney tasks? Then you have the marginal value of time. Say you're buying tickets to an event: you might spend, say, $8 to skip a 20 minute line, but you wouldn't spend $50 to skip a 2 hour wait - that is, as the duration gets longer, your hourly rate gets lower. And of course people will often pay exorbitant amounts of money to save time in specific situations (you're late for a date so you call a taxi, you're late for a meeting so you take the high speed train etc.) Personally, I have saved insane amounts of money by "setting my rate low", so to speak, doing everything to save money from taking cheaper flights to building my own home (a boat.) Firstly, a penny saved is actually between 1.6-2 pennies earned after taxes and other benefits. Secondly, additional work has many hidden costs - commute, stress, time spent finding a job, etc etc - that mean your job costs a lot more time than the time you're paid for. And finally, saving has a bit of a "momentum" behind it. Change your own oil and the first time might be difficult, but the third time will be easy, and oh hey, maybe I can change that light myself, and soon enough you'll save tons of money over the life of your vehicle. Expensive habits, however, tend to build on each other: oh, you got an iPhone, those Airpods do go well with it, oh and the Apple watch would work great with the fitness app to track my health... and suddenly you've spent $2000 on unnecessary consumer electronics - which, to earn back, you'd need to make an additional ~$3200-$4000 of pre-tax, pre-benefit income! I think a big problem is that people don't really understand the "cost" of each additional dollar earned. For most people reading this, of each additional dollar of income, the amount you actually get after accounting for everything is somewhere between $0.48 and $0.60. Seriously! It's not just your federal marginal tax rate, it's many other things - state taxes, many forms of government benefits, reduced insurance rates below a certain income, you pay more for your kids' college, etc etc etc. And that $0.48-$0.60 is assuming you make a decent income (if you don't make a decent income, or have kids, this number is even worse!) If anyone's interested in this kind of thing, I would highly recommend the interactive page on benefits cliffs by the Atlanta Fed.