Sometimes it seems like there’s not enough money at the end of the month. Wouldn’t it be nice if you got paid to do things that you already do? You know laundry, shopping, and cooking, those chores that you maybe want to give up if you could. But if you got paid to do them, maybe you wouldn’t mind.

The minimum wage in Colorado is now $13.65 per hour. Let’s figure out how much extra you could make if you got paid for those chores.

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Laundry. At our house, my washing machine takes an hour to do one regular load, and my dryer is the same. I do an average of 6 loads of laundry each week. Not including the time spent putting the laundry away, that’s a total of 12 hours, each week for a total of almost $164.00.

We use a dishwasher for most of our dishes, but the good knives, the wooden cutting boards, and the good pans all get washed by hand. Even when using the dishwasher, we rinse everything off prior to putting it in the dishwasher. If we don’t try to make a recipe that uses every dish in the house (and yes, we have done that a time or two) we spend about an hour total Monday through Friday doing dishes. Saturday and Sunday get about an hour each for dishwashing.

Sweeping, vacuuming, and mopping each happens at least once a week. When the dog is losing his winter coat, it happens more often. He generates a lot of hair.

Meal preparation and cooking take a bit of time, especially on the weekends. We have breakfast seven days a week, lunch is prepared six days a week, and dinner is made at least six nights a week. Depending on the meals, it’s at least 6 hours of total meal prep and cooking for us during the week.

Grocery shopping has a weekly total of about an hour and a half unless you count making the list and clipping coupons, which brings it up to about two hours weekly.

Being a chauffeur and a therapist for the kids is an activity totaling about one hour per day.

And I think I’m the only person who changes the toilet paper roll at the house. Though the activity doesn’t take long, it still takes time to do. Taking out the trash and taking items to the recycling center are other activities that don’t take much time, but they have to be done.

If you have a small child at home and must change diapers, you could guesstimate that total would be nearly an hour daily, at least.

Now if you add up all the time spent on those chores you already do, not including mowing the lawn or any of those outdoor chores, you’d end up with at least 33 to 40 hours per week.  That’s another full week of work, on top of everything else you do already, right?  But, if you were getting paid for those things, even at minimum wage, you’d have an extra $450 to $550 per week, and that wouldn’t be so bad.

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