You saw the headline — so let me just assure you that it’s true. I realized this week that it must have been at least a decade since I walked into a barber (or so much as a Great Clips) and paid for a professional haircut.
There are a couple of reasons for this. First, for the past several years, my wife has simply used the clippers we bought at Walmart a while back to quickly and easily cut my hair (although she sometimes tries her hand at just trimming it and has even dyed it a few times). Before this, I’d often get free cuts as part of my job as an extra. And, beyond that, I also had a friend in beauty school who was willing to cut both mine and my wife’s hair. In fact, I’m pretty sure she’s the last person I paid for such a service.
So why do I bring this up? Well, because I wanted to calculate just how much this strategy has saved me over the course of what we’ll just call 10 years. If the average person gets a haircut every six to eight weeks, that’s 65 to 88 sessions I’ve skipped. Next, while the a Google search suggests that the average cost per hair appointment in Missouri is $56, I’m going to call an audible and say $20 sounds more reasonable for cut and tip. This has probably gone up with inflation lately — but we’ll call it $20 for our past purposes. So, on the low end, we’re looking at $1,300 while the high-end estimate is $1,720 (or apparently $4,816 on the super high-end) saved over the course of 10 years. Oh, wait, I need to subtract the cost of the clippers themselves, so I guess we’re really at $1,709.02 😉
Obviously I’m lucky in that this approach is even an option for me! I’m well aware that not everyone can have hair as low maintenance as mine nor might they have someone in their life capable of cutting it for them. But, if I’m being honest, I really don’t mind this arrangement and am glad to have painlessly saved this money.
Overall, while this quick tip ended up being pretty silly, let it be a reminder that the key to mastering personal finance is to figure out what you value and cut (no pun intended) away what you don’t. This is just one example of how I’ve done that so far — and I intend to continue.