Spending Other People's Money

[marcusmarcusrc]

or, "thoughts I had after finding out that oversized color posters are $*&! expensive"

As a chemist (both undergrad and masters), older grad students and profs slowly convinced me that you _always_ spend the extra money to buy a reagent even if you think you can make it. This is a combination of "Your time is valuable" and "making stuff on an industrial scale usually means that they can get it more pure than you usually will on the benchtop" (with one or two exceptions where we knew we would have to repurify the chemical).

As a PhD student, my administrator has been working on me to spend more money when I go on trips. Taking taxis rather than public transit*, getting reimbursed for _everything_, etc. etc. Still, I prefer a per diem, because then I feel like I'm spending my money, not other people's money. As an economist, per diems seem more rational, too (well, people other than me might choose to go to more expensive restaurants just because their work is paying for it).

Anyway, I spent much of this morning walking around trying to save MIT money because I didn't want to spend $100 on a poster. Usually I just slap 9 pieces of paper on 9 pieces of posterboard, but since I'm doing a poster for MIT bigwigs, I thought it should look nicer than that. But see above: oversized color posters are expensive! But even after getting the cost down to $50 by making it smaller, using CopyTech rather than Kinko's, and doing the foam core mounting myself, I still feel bad about spending other people's money.

Do other people feel this way? I feel like much of the world _prefers_ spending other people's money...

*Note that I often take public transit anyway because I prefer getting a feel for the city I'm in. Certainly, when I go on vacation for myself I do that.

Comments

[desireearmfeldt]

I don't go out of my way to spend money like the older folks do (e.g. I'll catch a sandwich for lunch because it's the instinctive thing to do, I won't rent a car unless I think I need one (which is to say, public transit isn't an option)...).

But I don't think I'd balk too much at spending money to get the job done the default way everyone does it, if the alternative was spending a lot of time and effort trying to get the cost down. (Again, my natural instinct: I'll cut costs if it's easy; if it's a pain in the butt, I'll either pay the money or decide I don't need the thing, depending on what the thing is.)

Posters

[mjperson.livejournal.com]

Yeah, that pricing has always seemed shocking to me. Even at one poster per person per year for a small research group like mine where every one goes to one conference a year, on average, our six people group apparently finds it more cost effective to just buy a foolishly expensive full format roll printer and make them ourselves. A couple years of that and the printer pays for itself, and we can do some crazy advertising and the secret making of role-playing battlemaps in the meantime...

Re: Posters

[marcusmarcusrc.livejournal.com]

Yeah. I'm not sure how they get away with charging that much. The ink can't cost more than a few dollars a poster, right? How much does the printer itself cost? It seems like they must be making back the capital cost in a matter of weeks at the rate they're charging...

Re: Posters and Printers

[mjperson.livejournal.com]

There seems to be this significant break point at 24-inches.

Paper up to 24-inches wide, and you can get a printer of great quality for around $1000-$3000 dollars. As soon as you ask for 36-in wide paper, the
price jumps dramatically to the $8000-$Inf range.

Here, we're all pretty sure that all of the main technology is actually in the print heads themselves which care very little about the paper sizes, so the fact that personal printers are free, and 36-inch printers cost more than any of our master servers, seems to us to be a sign of airline-like pricing. Get the business printers for all they are worth, and let them pay for the vacationing printers. Whether you are a business or not is simply determined by how large the things you want to print are...

At least, that's our theory.

But yeah, we're also convinced that if a place like the Kinko's is asked to make just one poster a day, they pay for their printer in just a few weeks and then rake in the money, just to keep the printer market inflated or something...

[mister-nick.livejournal.com]

I don't like spending other people's money, but I don't even like spending my own money. It always seems like there should be a better use for it than what I want to use it for.

So when I buy anything, be it with my money or someone else's, I either just get it because I clearly need it and not worry about the price or dither about it indefinitely.

[astra-nomer.livejournal.com]

Whoa, that's how much posters cost??
I've always been at places that have their own poster printers.

[schnerf.livejournal.com]

Note that the crowd you know is a really odd sample set...

[marcusmarcusrc.livejournal.com]

What? I know odd people? Shock!

[chenoameg.livejournal.com]

Anyway, I spent much of this morning walking around trying to save MIT money because I didn't want to spend $100 on a poster.

If I had done that it would have had as much to do with value as expense. I'd be willing to spend $100 of my work's money on something worth $100. But if it doesn't seem worth $100 to me then I won't want to spend the money, mine or someone else's.

I'll also point out that the unwillingness to spend other people's money is a lot like spending time on other people's project instead of your thesis. Other people's resources are valuable, yours are fungible.

To actually answer your question (Do other people feel this way?)
I'm getting better at having a sane exchange rate between time, effort, and money. When I'm volunteering for something I know that all three resources are limited. I've already figured out how much of my time I can use on that project. So I spend more money if it will free up that percentage of my effort for other things.

In some ways this means that I'm freer with other people's money than with my own. My projects rarely have a strict deadline, so I can usually just take longer doing them. But it's also the case that I'm buying stuff for me in a more established way, so the increase in effort to save the money is minimal.

And clearly you should convince your department that you should enter a poster-printer-sharing plan with some other department. Most reasonable than buying your own, but less expensive than commercial printing.

[marcusmarcusrc.livejournal.com]

Yeah. I think the "it isn't _worth_ a $100" was definitely part of the problem here. I certainly don't have a problem buying a $500 plane ticket with my group's money if that's what I need to get to a conference...

And yeah, I do need to work on figuring out my personal time/effort/money exchange rate. That would be valuable.

[jadia.livejournal.com]

When I'm about to do something stupid like spend 4 hours to save $50, I like to calculate $30/hour because that's about as much as I could probably make in the industry if I wasn't in school.

[fclbrokle.livejournal.com]

I still fondly recall working for the Media Lab my freshman year... *ahem*

(Most memorable for me is the $500 video card I was sent out to buy. We plugged it into a machine, tested out our simulation, found it didn't run any faster, then took it out of the machine and stuck it on a shelf "until our simulation starts using the technology in the card.")

Working for Mathcamp and ESP has done interesting things to my perception of where it's worth spending money. Even Mathcamp, an organization that is by no means even vaguely wealthy, tends to spend more money on stuff than I was initially used to. At some point, though, I realized that there's only so much value to shopping around when the organization can benefit more from the additional time I'd put into it.

I do feel the same way, but I'm trying to train myself out of it so that I don't waste too much time shopping around. I'm definitely more willing to spend my own money on things than others' money, though.

[arcanology.livejournal.com]

Considering how expensive it is to have someone be a climate researcher, your time spent mounting posters on foam core is totally a net loss to the people who are sponsoring you.

Spending money on items in order to get other things done is not wasteful.

In addition, it's worth it to you to get things done faster, above and beyond the people who are sponsoring the climate research.

[maputi-pirate.livejournal.com]

I alternated between talking the postdocs out of spending 1000 on antibodies every week, and advocating for capital investments. But I do sort of like ordering stuff with other people's money.

What is a thing worth?

[(Anonymous)]

You might wonder whether it's worth the $100 to have a bright and shiny poster. That may not be a reasnoable cost for the poster, but it might still be worth it in that the poster will be taken that much more seriously than your bunch of printouts glued to a board. And having climate research taken seriously is worth it.

-Erin

Re: What is a thing worth?

[ilai]

Ditto that.

There's also the mantra of "if you don't spend it, you lose it" with respect to budgeting, which may be part of why everyone's advocating spending more money. If you severely underspend, the powers that be may decide you have overestimated your budget, and slash it mercilessly during the next budget cycle. Though I don't know if that really applies in your case....

Re: What is a thing worth?

[romantic-cynic.livejournal.com]

if you don't spend it, you lose it

That was my first thought.

[nuclearpolymer.livejournal.com]

I try to be careful to some degree. Mostly this means when traveling for business, I try to take the cheaper flights, since it can be the difference between $400 and $1400. But I won't take a cheap flight if it makes it likely that due to a missed connection, I could end up missing a day of work. Work money is sort of like my money in that the customer is the government (so tax money) and employees have pseudo-stock in the company.
I was willing to shop around for cars for 2 weeks of internet browsing and 2 days of actually running around in person, but figured that after that level, it wasn't really worth more effort.

If you were to have your poster redesigned by a graphics person, it might be even more effective, and it would cost enough to have the design work done that you might not flinch at the printing cost.

Your time is finite

[medyani.livejournal.com]

Considering how expensive it is to have someone be a climate researcher, your time spent mounting posters on foam core is totally a net loss to the people who are sponsoring you.

I agree with Arcanology, but would like to point out that it's not only your sponsors' time you are undervaluing but your own time. If you actually got to pocket the fifty dollars you saved for MIT, what did you make per hour by saving that money?

This dilemma, whether it's your money or someone else's money, always reminds me that no matter how difficult it is to see sometimes, Money is a made-up commodity. It represents the value of everything else, but does not have an intrinsic value in and of itself (though talk about printing costs-- I think the US National Treasury ranks at the top for expensive, but then we factor in economies of scale . . . !) Marcus, your time is valuable. Saving and shopping around is a good thing, but don't undervalue you.

Okay, that's my "2 cents."

[shumashi.livejournal.com]

It should also be noted that there's also a matter of scale to consider. Yes, I try not to be flagrant with my expense accounts, but to some extent, money has been budgeted for me to use, so I might as well use it. When I'm being wined and dined, that's what the money is for, so it's ok to go out for sushi instead of burgers. And when faced with breakfast choices, getting the $12 buffet rather than the $2 bowl of cereal is fine, because $10 is not an amount worth thinking about for most budgets.