by Tricia
Over in the comments section on my post about making our own bread, Rich brought up a great point that when you factor in some other costs besides the ingredients, homemade items may actually cost more than pre-made. That is an excellent point.
– If it takes one hour to make something, is it worth spending the time doing that versus using that time to bring in more income?
– What about the cost to run your appliances?
For the first question, I think that one is highly subjective. I ran the numbers, and once I added my time into my bread making – the price of the homemade bread did rise above the store bought bread. But then I thought about the non-monetary benefits. I felt like a million bucks when my son told me thank you for making the bread – he loved it so much. Now that I’ve done it once, he’ll join me in the kitchen for the next loaves I bake. I think it will be nice time spent together.
For the second question, I had no clue on how to factor in appliance usage costs. Rich came to the rescue and found an article written June of this year that gives some approximate usage costs by appliance:
Newsminer.com Article
According to the article, an oven costs about $0.43/hour to operate. So four our bread it cost about $0.22/loaf to bake them. That’s not too bad, especially since if we bake bread in the winter it will help heat the house a little bit so our furnace doesn’t have to work as hard. If it was around $1.00/loaf, I may start to rethink making our own bread, but the cost doesn’t seem too bad to me right now.
When everything is factored in, the homemade bread did cost more than the store bought bread. The cost of my time put it way over the top. But when I thought about it a little bit, I do my share of wasting time during the day. One great example is watching TV. If I replace that TV watching with creating food from scratch for our family, then that is an improvement. So I think that’s another way of looking at it. I’m still not making income, but I am making better use of my time during non-working hours.