Okay, I admit it, I am a die-hard do-it-yourselfer.  When we have a plumbing problem or a car problem, I fix it.  When I needed a professional website design, I found a free template and studied it to learn how to code HTML.  I don’t like to pay for things I know I can do myself.

However, there is a limit on when to stop trying do things yourself and when to pay someone else to do it — and if I’m willing to say that, you know it’s true.  The biggest reason is because the cost of doing it yourself is actually more than paying someone else to do it.

There are two different ways something can cost you more to do it yourself.  One way is because the opportunity cost is too high.  Opportunity cost is basically the amount of money you lose by doing something, because the time you are spending on it could be used to make money if you were doing something else.

For instance, if you take a lot of time to design your own web design template (as I did), you could be losing an opportunity to make money by running your business.  If the money you would make is greater than the cost of the web designer, the opportunity cost is too high and you would be better off NOT doing it yourself.

The other way that doing something yourself can cost too much is if there is a lot of equipment and other things you will have to buy and maintain in order to do it.  For example, a really die-hard (i.e., more so than me) do-it-yourselfer might be tempted to try to do their own web hosting, but the cost of the servers, the redundant power and Internet connections, etc. is most likely much higher than the cost of a hosting plan.

Of course, there are some ways to compromise on doing it yourself.  For instance, server colocation enables you to own and maintain the equipment yourself, and just pay a company to provide the power and Internet connections.  Another example of compromising might be paying for web design software (usually considerably cheaper than a web designer) instead of learning HTML and writing your own code.

It’s actually kind of humbling to realize that you can’t — or shouldn’t attempt to — do everything yourself.  What compromises should you make?  What things are better to have done for you?  The answers to these questions differ for everybody, depending on your unique skills and experience, so I’m interested to hear what works (or doesn’t work) for you.

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