[aianus]

Yes. Owning your own home is like cooking your own food. It might be cheaper but only if you don't value your own time or have anything better to do.

There's a reason why even rich, successful businesses rent office space instead of buying. They just can't manage a property as efficiently as the companies that focus on that.

[wahern]

Businesses often sell their real estate on leaseback terms because it allows them to book one-time profits that boost the executive's bonuses or as a way generate cash that private equity firms can easily extract. They don't typically sell to third-party investors, but often finance the debt of the newly created property owner.

For many businesses it absolutely makes sense to own your own property. For example, if mid-way through a 20 year lease on a building the economy goes bust, do you really want to be paying the same rent that was negotiated during boom times? It could destroy you.

There's textbook theory, and then there's reality. The real world is an incredibly complex system with innumerable variables, and can't be reduced to simple concepts like "specialization". It all depends on context. Obviously for most companies it doesn't make sense to own their property. There's no disputing that, and your point stands. But for rich companies, it often actually makes a lot of sense, notwithstanding insiders trying to extract value for their personal benefit.

[standel]

Facebook, Google, Apple, Microsoft, IBM, HP and many others would certainly not agree with you. They cook their own food, own lot of real estate and I am pretty sure they don't think it's time they lost.

These big companies do not manage one single house (office). They manage a real estate portfolio. Most of big companies have a mix of rented and acquired office space. Ultimately, owning real estate or not is an investment decision.

Some big companies, like HP recently, went from owning most of its real estate to sell large chunk of it ... Reason is to get some cash flow and to rationalise some expenses. But not because someone else could manage better their real estate.

[Grishnakh]

It's not just real estate. I'm not sure about today, but in the 2000s when I worked at Intel, they owned their own jet planes. They had so many employees flying between certain cities they had locations in, that it was more cost-effective for them to operate their own mini-airline.

Outsourcing stuff always costs more, because you have to pay for the profit of the company you're outsourcing to. It's worth it when it's something you don't do that much of, or aren't very good at, but if you do a lot of it, it's worth it to do it yourself.

For an extreme example, think about printing: is it worth it to outsource all your computer printing needs to a specialized printing company? Or should you just buy a laser printer for $100-500 and do it yourself? It doesn't take very much printing for it to be a massive waste to pay someone else to print stuff for you.

[Veen]

That's because they have a lot of superfluous capital and cash flow that needs investing somewhere. If your profits aren't like Apple's it's often smarter to rent and use the capital for something else.

[criddell]

> It might be cheaper but only if you don't value your own time or have anything better to do.

No way. My family of four eats around $250 of food every week. That works out to $3 per person per meal.

The other expenses would have to total more than $600 before we would break even eating fast food every day. The food we make at home is considerably better than fast food, so I think it would cost an extra $1000 to eat out than cook at home.

[aianus]

It takes ten minutes to earn $10 doing software engineering. In no universe am I cooking a better meal in less time.

[matthewowen]

Can you spend 10 extra minutes and earn an extra $10?

This mode of thinking is interesting, but it's usually overrated as a way of deciding on time value. Most people have a job that takes some time and pays some money, but they can't arbitrarily work a little longer for a little more money as they desire.

This isn't to say your time value might not be high enough to justify not cooking... but it's usually a complex calculus, that involves assessing what you would actually do instead of cooking (for many people, that might just be zoning out in front of the football game), and figuring out the expected future value of it (eg spending the time reading a book may provide you with future intellectual or financial wealth). But then you also have to factor in the human growth from cooking: maybe you'll be a happier person if you cook more frequently.

This is quite a web, but I guess that's the point in my opinion. Annual salary divided by minutes worked in a year feels like a slam dunk way to make these decisions, but it's really not rich enough.

[aianus]

Yes, I was a contractor billing in 15 minute increments until a couple of weeks ago. I haven't cooked so much as an egg since college.

[Jtsummers]

If you strictly want to maximize your money, you're probably making the best choice for yourself.

For many of us, time with family, friends, hobbies, is a relaxing and physically/mentally/emotionally healthy thing to engage in, rather than trying to exploit every waking hour for income.

[jpetso]

You're not wrong, however the parent was specifically replying to a post that justified home cooking with financial considerations and didn't even go into the quality-of-life aspect at all.

I think the takeaway is that if you prefer coding over cooking then that's justifiable from a financial and time efficiency point of view. If you prefer cooking and the presumed family quality time over (even more) coding then that's also very reasonable.

[Jtsummers]

Unless you're spending all your waking hours maximally, the time savings of not-cooking versus cooking is not a well-considered trade off in the GPs post.

Just the transit time for a meal out is already going to cost them a great deal more productive time than cooking would. They don't mention Soylent or frozen meals, which are really the only viable way to spend your time more productively than either meal prep or eating out.

[chefkoch]

The whole math changes if you either don't live in silicon valley or cook for more than one person (or cook for more than one meal).

[aianus]

So instead of spending time with the family, friends, and hobbies you'd rather slave away in front of a stove to save $600/mo?

[Jtsummers]

I don't slave. It takes me 30 minutes or so to have a complete meal most nights. But only, perhaps, 10 minutes of my time. I start the rice as soon as I get in from the gym. Meats and vegetables get prepared after my shower. If it involves the stove, they're done in approximately ten minutes for most of my recipes. If it involves the oven, I may spend up to ten minutes in total on prep before tossing them in to bake.

I guess I don't make the most involved meals, but they certainly taste good.

EDIT: Besides, why can't the time I spend cooking be with my family or friends? Not like my home is big, if my girlfriend doesn't want to be in the open floor plan kitchen/living room/dining room and would rather hide in the bedroom, I guess she can. Would be awkward. Similarly for when friends are over. It's not like I need intense concentration while I cook, just enough to not burn/cut myself or burn the meal.

[Grishnakh]

So you'd rather spend all your time in the evenings transiting to a restaurant, waiting around for a table, waiting around for your order to arrive, getting hurried by the server so they can get a new customer in, then transiting back home?

Eating out at a nice sit-down restaurant takes a huge amount of time. I can cook myself a meal at home and eat it in much less time than going out.

The only way it's faster to eat out is if you get fast food takeout, which is absolutely shut nutritionally and will put you into an early grave.

You sound like all the dummies who think I'm wasting time by changing the oil in my car myself. It takes me less time than making an appointment, driving all the way to the dealership, then sitting there and waiting for them to do the work (which probably takes longer than me because they have a bunch of cars to work on and their scheduling isn't perfect, just like a doctor's office), then driving back home. I can do it myself in my garage in 15 minutes. I can't even drive to my nearest dealership in that time. On top of all that, you have to figure how much work time I'm missing in the process, since auto shops aren't open weekends or evenings usually (and especially not dealerships).

[criddell]

What do you do with your old oil?

[baq]

preparing food is one of the more social activities and one which people have been doing together since before they called themselves people. maybe you should try changing how you go about it?

[criddell]

In my calculation, it was $600 per week savings for my family of 4. That's $2400 / month.

[EpicEng]

Except that, in reality, no one is paying you for that 10 minutes. This is a nonsense claim I see thrown around here all of the time. If no one is willing to hand you a check for every spare minute you have then no, your time is absolutely *not" worth that money.

Taking on contract work is a non-trivial time investment. I can't just work for ten minutes whenever I want to pay for takeout, I will have deadlines to meet, which means less time with my family. I've done it, no thanks.

[DougN7]

IMHO it's crazy to think of every minute as either earned money or spent money. Second, very few people can arbitrarily trade any amount of time\effort for any amount of money. That's not how the market works. So how exactly would I go make $30 instead of cooking dinner for 30 minutes each evening? I assure you that whatever answer you have doesn't scale for my free time, or to everyone in the economy.