As a kid, I recall that weekends when I was trying to sleep in would be interrupted by the sound of gas-powered lawnmowers whirring to life around 8 AM. For the next few hours on Saturday and Sunday mornings it would be uncommon not to hear the sound of some sort of lawn equipment being used somewhere up or down the street. Just the normal background noise of suburban American life.
Queue my surprise moving into a neighborhood of roughly the same income strata as the one that I grew up in (but slightly more densely populated) and weekend mornings are… almost completely silent? It didn’t take me too long to figure out what was going on; I was working from home one Monday and noticed that a landscaping company came in the late afternoon; they swept through most of my neighbors’ yards in about five minutes each. Their mower with a four foot cutting width made quick work of each lawn.
Curious at how many of my neighbors were paying someone else to cut their grass, I started looking a bit more closely. Out of our dozen closest neighbors, only two others mowed their own lawns. A single anecdote is not data, but in my neighborhood 75% of the homeowners are outsourcing their yard work.
Thinking of our family and friends who have lawns, I realized a similar majority of them pay someone to do their yard work. I can’t help but feel like there’s been some cultural shift during the past decade when I was in college and renting apartments. Unfortunately, I was unable to find any reliable statistics on how the percentage of people who perform their own lawn maintenance has changed over the years.
The landscaping company that hits all of our neighbors put a flyer in the mailbox advertising prices for various sized lawns. $50 for a quarter acre. Fifty dollars to cut the grass. Could I afford to pay? Absolutely. Will I? Not as long as I have functional knees, or my net worth is under $10 million or so.
The lawn service mainly bugs me when looked at in terms of the cost per hour. It takes me 40 minutes to mow our lawn, and in the process I save $50. That’s an effective hourly rate of $75 per hour. I don’t even get paid that much at my job, and I certainly don’t know of any activities to monetize my free time to that degree.
My neighbors buying the lawn service are implicitly pricing their free time at $75 per hour, which is about three times the median per capita hourly income in our town. Let’s be honest, most people are not that busy. 40 minutes less of scrolling social media, watching TV, or doing whatever most people do these days to save 50 bucks seems like a no-brainer to me. I will make time to avoid the recurring expense of paying for a lawn service.
Is lawn care just another victim of the growing subscription economy? At a time when the savings rates of Americans are once again hovering near record lows — in June 2023, the St. Louis Fed reports the personal savings rate was just 4.3% — it seems like a little bit of extra financial cushion would make more difference than ever to a lot of people.
I’m a sucker for Return on Investment (ROI) calculations to determine the payback period for various purchases. I really just like to know, “if I buy this item, when will it have paid for itself?”
A few months ago I purchased a brand new SKIL electric lawnmower on sale at Lowe’s for $250. It also came with a Massachusetts state rebate of $75 for electric-powered lawn equipment, for a net cost to me of $175. I can’t speak to its longevity yet, but the 40V mower seemed to do a solid job of cutting through thick tufts of grass that wasn’t touched for several weeks at the start of summer. The ROI period for a lawnmower is apparently just 4 uses based on the $50 per visit cost of the local landscaping company! That may be one of the fastest ROI periods of any consumer purchase that I have looked at.
It’s interesting that even without the state incentives, the cheapest electric mowers are now less expensive than the cheapest gas mowers. Which is probably mostly a function of the price of batteries, as the mower is otherwise just a cheap plastic shell with a few wires and a blade mount. Factoring in the lower cost of operation and maintenance of an electric mower (no engine means less parts to break), going electric is clearly the frugal move.
How much does it cost in electricity to mow the lawn? My battery has a capacity of 200 Watt-hours and uses about 75% of the charge to mow a quarter acre. So that’s 0.15 kW, and at my current electric rate of 23.6 cents per kWh, it costs just 3.5 cents to mow our lawn! This is about 25x cheaper to operate than a gas-powered mower that consumes 0.25 gallons of gasoline per hour.
Other benefits of electric includes significantly less emissions, as well as quieter operation. Since the decibel scale is logarithmic, an electric mower that is 10–20 dBa quieter than a gas-powered mower is actually half to one quarter as loud.
I saved an additional $100 by purchasing a push mower over a self-propelled one. It’s really not much more effort than pushing a shopping cart, due to the weight reduction from losing the engine. Another huge benefit of an electric push mower is that the battery charge will last longer, since the self-propelled mower is expending some of the charge to spin the wheels.
I’m on a quest to DIY as much as I can to limit our total cost of home ownership and keep as much money in our pockets as possible. Low-skill activities that are high-cost when paying for other peoples’ labor — like yard work — are the lowest hanging fruit around.
Next time you see someone out mowing their own grass, they might just also be a fellow practitioner of stealth wealth!