After two years of living in a larger house and cleaning it ourselves, we’ve finally come to a point where we’d like to consider hiring cleaners. As a frugal person, I feel bad hiring people to do things I can do myself, especially since I don’t have a job. Therefore, I’ve always done my own housework. Besides, for the past 26+ years, I’ve loved the smell of Pine-Sol every time I scrub the toilets.
However, the downside of living in a larger house is that maintaining it can feel overwhelming. And after a while, the uncleanliness and messiness starts to wear on my wife and me. We would much rather be spending our time playing with our kids or watching The Morning Show on Apple TV than clean for four hours.
Yet, like paying someone to detail your car for $300–$500, I can’t get over how wasteful that feels. The car will easily get dirty in one or two weeks’ time. So as a result, I’ve also never paid someone to wash or detail my car. I just get a hose and sponge and do it myself for 15–20 minutes. Although the car isn’t perfectly clean, it’s 80% clean enough!
So in this post, I want to figure out a way to overcome our reluctance in spending ~$450 to deep clean our house. It is a luxury expense and frankly, I feel like a lazy traitor to my finances for considering hiring cleaners. Maybe you have the same dilemma and feel the same way.
The Reluctance To Hire Cleaners To Clean Our House
The first thing I did was gain some perspective on what other people do. And what other people do with regard to hiring cleaners shocked me. Maybe you can pitch in and share what you do as well.
I spoke to a cleaning lady on my walk home the other day. She was cleaning one of my neighbor’s houses so I asked her how often she cleans the house. She said she and her crew clean the house every week! Both parents are working professionals with two young kids, and they’ve had their house cleaned almost every week for the past 13 years.
Holy moly! Could a house really be that dirty and messy after only one week, even with a couple of young kids? If the parents just spent 15 minutes every other day cleaning up, and maybe 30 minutes on the weekends, the house would surely be clean enough, right?
If you care enough to pay for weekly cleaners, surely you care enough to allocate 15 minutes a day to cleaning up. Your tolerance for uncleanliness is low, so you naturally take action.
Why the Guilt Is Real and Why It Matters
For many of us who came up practicing frugality and growing up in a middle class houseold, hiring help feels like an admission of failure. If you can do it yourself, you should. Doing chores is character-building. Scrubbing the toilet makes us appreciate our wealth and helps us keep our bathrooms cleaner when using.
If you’re a FIRE practitioner, every dollar not saved or invested after covering basic living expenses can feel like a waste. Spending money on things like monthly cleaners can feel especially painful, because it means buying back less of your future time and freedom.
Over time, living in America can make us soft. We have an abundance of food, so we overeat. Our parents give us everything we ask for instead of letting us struggle to earn what we deserve, so when it’s time to pay back our college loans, we revolt. When we need money, instead of taking a minimum-wage service job, we turn to the Bank of Mom & Dad for another bailout.
In Japan, cleaning our own homes is viewed as a sign of respect – for our space, for ourselves, and for others. It’s a reminder that life is always sliding toward disorder, and it’s our responsibility to keep it in check. The last thing I want to do is develop an entitlement mentality, where I start expecting other people to handle all the unglamorous work for me.
But frugality is a tool, not a religion. There comes a point where spending money to buy time and sanity is the rational move. The math isn’t just dollars versus chores, it’s dollars versus hours versus stress versus relationship bandwidth.
The Hidden Costs of Doing It Yourself
- Time: It can take between 1-3 hours for a single professional to clean 1,000 square feet. The larger your home, the more hours or manpower it will take to clean. Those are hours you could spend on work, sleep, exercise, or with your kids.
- Energy: After a long week, cleaning requires energy reserves you may not have. That affects moods and patience. The worse your mood, the less happy your marriage.
- Quality: Professional cleaners with experience and the right tools can deep-clean faster and more effectively.
- Opportunity Cost: What is your time worth? Even if you value it conservatively—$35–$50/hour—regular cleaning quickly pays for itself.
- Security: There is a chance the cleaners will steal your valuables or sell your home’s layout to a thief. Hence, do proper vetting through an agency and lock your valuables away. One person can also be at home as well to minimize risk.
A Practical Spending Framework On Cleaning By Income
I’m always thinking of financial guidelines to follow to optimize our spending. So let’s consider how much to spend on cleaners based on household income and net worth. Below is a simple framework I suggest when deciding whether a service is worth outsourcing:
- Monthly cleaning budget ≈ 0.5% – 1% of monthly gross income (scale up with house size and caregiving needs).
- Or think in net worth bands: the higher your net worth, the more you should buy back time vs. doing low-value chores yourself.
Rough guide:
| Household Situation | Annual Income | Suggested Monthly Cleaning Budget |
|---|---|---|
| Frugal / Lean FIRE | <$100K | $0 – $85 |
| Middle Class Households | $100K – $250K | $40 – $200 |
| High-Income Households | $250K – $700K | $100 – $600 |
| Affluent / Top 1% Income Households | $700K – $2 Million | $300 – $1,700 |
Example: If you make $250,000/year (~$20,800/month), a $200 monthly cleaning bill is ~1% of monthly gross. That’s within the 0.5–1% guideline if you consider the family-wide value (less fighting, more sleep, more free time).
How Much To Spend On Cleaning Based On Net Worth
If you’re financially independent or FIRE, your net worth may be a better guide than income for deciding how much help to hire.
Here’s a simple rule of thumb: Yearly cleaning budget = 0.1% of your net worth
That’s enough to maintain your home and sanity without feeling wasteful. In other words, if you have a $1 million net worth, you have a $1,000 annual cleaning budget.
| Net Worth Level | Lifestyle Description | Suggested Yearly Cleaning Budget | Typical Cleaning Frequency |
|---|---|---|---|
| <$1 million | Still building wealth / FIRE-in-progress | $0 – $1,000 | DIY + semi-annual deep clean |
| $1–$3 million | Lean FIRE / modest comfort | $1,000 – $3,000 | Monthly deep clean |
| $3–$5 million | Regular FIRE / upper middle-class comfort | $3,000 – $5,000 | Biweekly or alternating deep clean |
| $5–$10 million | Fat FIRE / lifestyle optimization | $5,000 – $10,000 | Weekly clean or full-service monthly |
| $10M+ | Obese FIRE / efficiency-maximized | $10,000+ | Weekly full-service + organization help + four full body massages + private chef once every two weeks |
If your net worth is high (say $2–5M+), spending $1,000+/month to maintain a large house is often a very efficient use of time. On the other hand, if you’re still building wealth and income is tight, aim for monthly deep cleans + DIY maintenance.
Positives of Hiring Cleaners
- Time back: Instead of scrubbing baseboards, you get family time or productive work hours.
- Mental health: Less clutter = less cognitive load. A tidy space leads to calmer conversations.
- Relationships: Fewer fights about chores equals higher marital returns.
- Professional quality: They hit spots you won’t. Deep cleans, grout, vents — the works.
Negatives of Hiring Cleaners
- Recurring cost: Once you outsource, it becomes a line item that grows.
- Guilt: You might feel you’re buying comfort instead of earning it.
- Security/privacy: Letting strangers into your home requires vetting and trust.
- Dependency: If the cleaner quits, you’ll have to go back to DIY mode or find new cleaners.
How We’ll Test This New Expense
We’re going to run a simple experiment: a $450 deep clean after 27 months paired with a realistic 5-minute daily tidy routine by everyone in the family. Why the hybrid approach? Because deep cleaning handles the heavy lifting, while the small daily wins keep the house from sliding back into chaos or turning into a Lego minefield by Thursday.
If the $450 deep clean feels worth it, we’ll wait three months and reassess whether we want to do it again. My theory is that a quarterly deep clean is the sweet spot, just enough to maintain order without busting the budget and feeling lazy. At $1,800 a year, that feels like a reasonable price for 12-16 more hours of free time.
Metrics I care about:
- Hours reclaimed per week (track with a simple log).
- Stress levels (my wife and I rate household stress weekly).
- Relationship friction (are we happier or not).
- Net effective cost (time worth saved vs. dollars spent).
Give Deep Cleaning A Try And Cut Back If Desired
We’re going to redefine this expense as investment in family time, in sanity, and in the kind of life we want to lead. If you’re on the fence, run the numbers for your household. Try a short experiment, and decide based on reclaimed hours and reduced friction, not on guilt.
Who knows. You might find hiring cleaners to be the best use of funds ever!
Readers, I’d love to hear about your cleaning routine. Do you hire professional cleaners for your home? If so, how often and how much does it cost? For those who are able-bodied, how do you overcome the guilt of not cleaning your house yourself?
Diligently Track Your Finances
Hiring cleaners is one of those lifestyle upgrades that feels small but quietly compounds. A few hundred dollars a month doesn’t seem like much until you zoom out and realize it can mean tens or hundreds of thousands less in net worth over time if you’re not paying attention.
That’s why I’ve used Empower’s free financial dashboard ever since leaving my day job in 2012. It helps me see, in one place, exactly where my money is going and whether my spending choices actually align with my long-term goals.
If you’re debating whether cleaners are “worth it” at your income or net worth level, start by getting clarity. When you can see your cash flow, investment fees, and net worth trajectory clearly, spending decisions become far less emotional and far more rational.
If you haven’t reviewed your finances in the past 6 to 12 months, now is a great time to do so. You can run a DIY checkup using Empower’s free tools or opt for a complimentary financial review. Either way, you’ll likely uncover opportunities to optimize and free up money for what matters most to you.
Spend intentionally today so you can live freely tomorrow.
Empower is a long-time affiliate partner of Financial Samurai. I’ve personally used their free tools since 2012 to track my net worth, cash flow, and investments. Click here to learn more.
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