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Transcript

Doing Everything Yourself Isn't a Virtue · Mom's Money

• 0:03
  Doing everything yourself isn't a virtue. Moms have been sold a very expensive lie. If you can do it yourself, you should. Clean it yourself. Cook it yourself. Book it yourself. Drive everybody yourself.
• 0:17
  Plan the party yourself. Wrap the gifts yourself. Remember the forms yourself. And then we call the woman who is drowning responsible. I don't. Sometimes doing everything yourself is not frugal.
• 0:31
  It's terrible capital allocation. This is Mom's Money Talk. I'm Ellie Ezra, the mom talking money like no one ever did for you. This is for the woman who's done managing money and ready to run her life like a business.
• 0:46
  I'm not a financial advisor, but I've built companies, sat in rooms with investors, and learned how money actually works. And here's the truth. You don't have a money problem. You have a systems problem.
• 0:58
  This isn't about budgeting harder or cutting lattes. It's about spending with intention, building assets, and thinking like the CFO of your household.
• 1:07
  Because if you're a mom, you're already running a business, the business of the home. So I'm giving you the playbook, one that makes your life feel lighter, not heavier.
• 1:18
  I think money should buy back capacity, and I think more moms should pay for help. There's a morality problem. This is where money gets weird for women. We don't just ask whether something is worth paying for.
• 1:33
  We ask whether we're allowed to pay for it. Could I clean the house myself? Yes. Could I make the cupcake? Yes. Could I drive across town to return the package myself? Yes.
• 1:45
  And somewhere along the way, I technically can became therefore I should. Why? We don't expect a CEO to personally do payroll because she's physically capable of opening QuickBooks.
• 2:00
  We understand role design when it's at work. Then we come home and act like outsourcing is a moral failure. There is the obvious math.
• 2:09
  If you can create two hundred dollars of value in the same hour somebody else can do a forty dollar task, doing the forty dollar task yourself isn't automatically smart.
• 2:19
  But I actually think the hourly rate argument is too small because maybe that hour doesn't produce money. Maybe it produces sleep, recovery. Maybe it produces a workout.
• 2:32
  Maybe it means you sit on the floor with your kid instead of rage cleaning a bathroom at nine o'clock at night. Maybe it gives you enough mental space to think. Maybe it keeps you from snapping at your husband.
• 2:45
  Capacity has value even when it isn't monetized. That's the piece women are rarely allowed to count. There's an invisible cost. Every task has two prices, the cash price and the capacity price.
• 3:01
  A grocery run might cost zero in labor because you do it yourself. And I'm gonna go off on grocery shopping for a minute because I don't think we actually talk about what grocery shopping is.
• 3:12
  This is what grocery shopping is. You get in your car and you drive to the grocery store. You park your car. You leave your car to go into the store where you grab a cart.
• 3:20
  Then you walk up and down the aisles to find everything you need around the store. You put everything into your cart. You walk to checkout. You take everything out of your cart. Everything gets rung up and put into bags.
• 3:31
  You put everything back in your cart. Then you walk back out to the car. You take everything out of your cart and put it into the car. Then you drive to your house.
• 3:39
  Then you take everything out of your car, bring it into your house, unpack it, and put it away. Even talking about it drives me crazy. It sounds insane. It's such a ridiculous process. Okay.
• 3:51
  This is why grocery shopping is a problem. Now, we all do it. We've all done it. For years, we have just been part of this process. And now someone will take their time, and you can pay them to do it for you.
• 4:03
  This is what twenty twenty-six offers us. It's the opportunity to take something that wealthy people have already leveraged, someone else shopping for them, and do that ourselves. You don't need to be wealthy anymore.
• 4:15
  You can just use Instacart. And look, if you're a mom with extra time and capacity, someone can pay you to go grocery shopping for them. I will happily let someone else do that for me.
• 4:26
  There is no way on Earth I am going grocery shopping if I can help it. Now look, there can be joy in it. That could be your time away from the kids.
• 4:35
  You could genuinely enjoy how stimulating it is to be by yourself and shop. I get that. But to me, there is so much more I could be doing with my time that is building an asset for my family.
• 4:47
  I already know what I get every week. This is not something that's exciting for me to go and look around and be stimulated by.
• 4:53
  There are other ways I can get that feeling of being by myself and being stimulated, like taking a yoga class. I can get just as stimulated, and I'm getting a workout.
• 5:02
  In fact, I can't tell you how many times I've been at the gym while someone else is grocery shopping for me.
• 5:07
  And so while I kinda make fun of it, I also need to bring up how ridiculous it actually is that women are the ones who are responsible for doing this. Why? We don't have to do that anymore. What does it cost?
• 5:18
  To me, I use Instacart, and I kind of liken the cost to basically putting one other thing in your cart. Okay? How many times are you doing that when you're walking around the store anyway?
• 5:27
  But now someone gets paid to do it. Someone is starting a side business doing this. They're bringing in income doing it. By all means, let me support you doing it. I feel the same way about laundry.
• 5:40
  I use a laundry service now. And the woman who actually does my laundry, I saw her on the news. She has four different laundry machines. She's making ten thousand dollars a month doing people's laundry.
• 5:50
  It's her full time job. She has her family doing it as well. Her kids who are young adults, they go do the pickups. She's able to do it from home and still be there for her young children, and her partner's involved.
• 6:00
  She made a business out of it. By all means, please. I can go off on laundry just the way I go off on groceries. The time it takes, it could be spent somewhere else.
• 6:11
  And this is for moms because moms are typically the ones who are responsible for these tasks, and we wouldn't ask our husbands to stay home from work and do it instead.
• 6:19
  And just because we can do it doesn't mean we should. Could you imagine the degree you could pursue if all the time you took for laundry and groceries you used to learn AI or get a master's degree?
• 6:30
  You could finish it in less than two years. It's hours of your week sucking your time dry. You could actually make a workout class every single time someone else is grocery shopping for you.
• 6:41
  You could take a walk at the park. You could put on YouTube and do a workout. Your body could change in the six months that someone else is grocery shopping for you.
• 6:49
  So yes, I bag on some of these things, but this is not new news. It's just newly accessible to everyone in a way that used to only be accessible to the wealthy. We are thinking long-term. We are building wealth here.
• 7:07
  And yeah, sometimes I go to Trader Joe's to grab the milk. Way different. Way different.
• 7:13
  But this is also why I think finance education for women that tells us to just, like, have fun on our Target run is so patronizing, and I wanna work against it.
• 7:23
  Because you know what happens when they make fun of us on our Target runs? Stay small. Stay small. Go ahead and spend all your money. It is a distraction from what else we could be building.
• 7:35
  The cheapest cash option can be the most expensive life option. That doesn't mean outsource everything. It means count the whole cost. So what should you buy back? Well, calm down. I'll use a simple lens.
• 7:52
  First, does this require me specifically? My kid needing me at bedtime, maybe yes, or maybe my husband can tuck them in tonight 'cause I'm working. Scrubbing the baseboards, absolutely not. I have zero skill set in this.
• 8:06
  Second, does this drain me disproportionately? Some people love cooking. Great. Keep cooking. Some people would rather eat drywall. Maybe meal prep is a smart purchase. I don't love cooking, but I meal prep.
• 8:19
  I have also bought meal prep at different seasons of my life. I do it now as lightweight as possible. Third, what does removing this task make possible? This is where you expand. This is where you dream.
• 8:34
  This is where your brain opens up to the possibilities buried under laundry and resentment. Does it make possible more income? Maybe it's just more rest. Maybe it's patience. Maybe it's exercise, more creative work.
• 8:49
  And then fourth, can we afford the help without creating a different kind of stress? Because outsourcing your life onto a credit card that you can't pay, it's not liberation. It's just a different problem.
• 9:02
  The good mom trap. A lot of women are not optimizing for life the way they want. They're optimizing for whether an imaginary committee thinks they're a good mom.
• 9:12
  The committee apparently has a very strong opinion about homemade cupcakes. My mom is a world-class baker. Literally, she once showed off a 10-tier wedding cake at a convention in Las Vegas.
• 9:24
  Me, I've never baked a cake in my life, and I'd rather eat pre-made cookie dough than bake the cookies. Guess what?
• 9:31
  I feel zero guilt about this, and my mom has an even more important role as the grandma who gets to do this for her family. We are disbanding the imaginary committee that makes you feel bad for this.
• 9:43
  I think epigenetics, movies, overall Western propaganda has us believing this shit, and we don't even really know where it came from. It's old embedded code that serves no one.
• 9:55
  Your children do not need a mother who personally performs every household function. They need a mother with enough capacity to be present for the things that actually require her and that fill her up.
• 10:11
  And yes, the thing you love doing is the thing you keep doing. I'm not trying to turn your home into a private equity roll-up, okay? I'm trying to get you to stop treating exhaustion like proof of love.
• 10:25
  Money should make life lighter. This is one of my core beliefs about wealth. If the only thing more money does is increase the number in your account while your life remains impossibly heavy, we're missing something.
• 10:39
  Wealth should buy options. Sometimes the option is an asset. Sometimes it's childcare. Sometimes it's a housekeeper twice a month. Sometimes it's grocery delivery, or in my case, it's always grocery delivery.
• 10:55
  And sometimes it's paying the teenager down the street to mow the lawn or wash the car or be part of his family business that does laundry for other families.
• 11:02
  Sometimes it's hiring somebody for five hours a week to do the administrative sludge that is eating your brain. That can be a wealth-building decision if it preserves the capacity you need to do the higher value things.
• 11:19
  This is what I mean when I say spend smart. So what's the order of operations? I would not start by asking, "What can I outsource?" Don't start there. Start with, what is making my life necessarily heavy?
• 11:33
  What do I hate doing? What sucks the life out of me? Maybe it's not laundry. I have a friend that uses laundry time to watch and re-watch Gilmore Girls. Power to you. But then ask, one, can I eliminate it?
• 11:47
  Two, can I automate it? Three, can I simplify it? Four, can somebody else do it? Notice, outsourcing is fourth.
• 11:56
  You don't need to pay someone to manage a stupid system that shouldn't exist, so delete first, simplify second, automate third, delegate fourth. That's household operation.
• 12:09
  So here's the guilt test, and here's a useful test.
• 12:11
  If your best, best friend told you she was exhausted and could comfortably afford $150 a month for help, would you tell her, "No, a good woman should suffer through it"? Of course not.
• 12:26
  So why are you saying it to yourself? Moms are... Moms are already allocating money, time, and energy, and attention all day long. Your job is not to prove how much you can personally carry.
• 12:42
  Your job is to deploy the household's resources toward the life you're trying to build. Sometimes that means spending less. Sometimes it means spending more in exactly the right place.
• 12:55
  The goal is to make the important things possible. Stop budgeting your life away. Start building something that pays you back. The goal isn't to save money. It's to build a life that money can support. Spend smart.
• 13:09
  Acquire assets. I'm Ellie Ezra. I'll see you next time. Moms-