If the skill is quick to learn, does it make sense to pre-learn it (and maintain the skill!), or just have the resources on hand to learn it if necessary?
I think this is presupposing that your skills are fixed and if anything happens you're stuck with always being dependent on others even if it's a really bad deal for you. That's not the case for most of these
Other considerations:
- Sometimes you need a solution NOW. Household infra tends to break down on Saturdays and Sundays a lot for some reason.
- Sometimes it's not even about efficiency. Like, we got ourselves an allotment garden recently. Per your $100/hr vs. $30/hr math, I could and should just hire a bunch of contractors to clean it up and set it up for us. But for me, this defeats the point of getting that garden in the first place.
- Some work is too small for a contractor with necessary skills to come, unless you let them bill you for 10x the work. I had to learn how to patch holes in ceiling myself, because the price for getting the 4m x 5cm hole fixed was the same as for renovating the whole ceiling.
EDIT:
Also what 'lotsofpulp said - sometimes you want the outcome to have a very particular shape or quality level, and to guarantee it, you'd need to micromanage the contractor so badly, that in many cases it's easier to do it yourself.
Doing it yourself can be rewarding and potentially much quicker. Why not do it yourself if you're able ( and assuming its not one of those things a pro could do in 1/10th the time).
Also, if you do not bother to learn at all, you have no way to verify that the work is actually done correctly. People will absolutely take advantage of your ignorance.
Is that avoidable? Learning it yourself doesn't scale to more complex things. I can't go through medical school just to verify that my doctor's recommendations are good
I'm not saying you need to be paranoid and scrutinize every decision down to the molecule, but you are the greatest person who cares about the things you care about, and you deserve to know about those things.
Unless you have a spouse or partner at home who can be there, but then you're losing whatever they could have been earning if they were working instead.
This sounds like you're dependent on your one employer for work. That might be the most important thing to become independent of!
I agree that most people aren't in that situation and they're dependent on a specific employer giving them work, but it's not an impossible situation.
I like to do things myself or learn how to when I cannot sufficiently predict the quality of the service I will get or if the damage can be too great.
This ordering requires defining the scope, and the narrower the scope, the easier it is to compare people. If you only look at "maintain the rented city apartment" and "live in rural house" in isolation, it's pretty easy to rank people by independence. But if you say that _either_ of those counts as "independence", the things get much harder to qualify. But either way, there will be people who can't do anything, people who can do everything, and a large mass of "uncomparable" people in the middle.
well you don't call a plumber to unclog a sink, you'd call a "handyman" or someone like that. You call a plumber when you need a new feed off of a buried gas line. I think you have to factor in the expertise needed which will drive cost per unit time.