Haircuts At Home
Upon setting our sights on financial independence, Mr. Sense and I eagerly experimented with all sorts of tricks from FIRE bloggers, including attempting haircuts at home to save on trips to Hair Cuttery. We had first experimented with this during the early days of Covid shutdowns, with… subpar results. But over the last couple of years, we’ve refined our technique and even gotten the kids on board. My sister trimmed Kid’s long hair over the Christmas break, and Boy Sense recently consented to letting me cut his hair, which turned out very well to my immense relief.
After a quick review of last year’s spreadsheet, I believe we only paid for one professional haircut in 2023. After several months of growing out my short pixie style, I got a pro to reshape my awkward accidental mullet into something low maintenance that Mr. Sense could touch up at home. No one in the family has dyed hair or any other treatments, so I don’t anticipate any salon trips this year.
Once a month or so, I use an electric trimmer to cut Mr. Sense’s hair. I use a guard around 1 ½ inches all over, and then go over the sides and back with a shorter guard. I then use scissors in the front and around his ears and to clean up any obvious stray pieces I missed. The whole process takes about fifteen minutes, including clean-up (Mr. Sense sits in the bathtub while I cut his hair, making this part very easy).
I wouldn’t claim this is an absolutely perfect haircut, but it certainly suffices for my low maintenance husband, whose primary day job involves homeschool teaching and driving kids to various activities and appointments. Plus, he’s handsome enough that I doubt anyone notices any imperfections in his hairstyle (and I’ve actually overheard him receive quite a few compliments on his hair!).
So how much money do we actually save this way? Let’s estimate that a basic haircut at a budget-friendly establishment costs $33 including tip, which is what I paid last time I went to Hair Cuttery. If we plug in $33 savings/month into a compound interest calculator from Investor.gov and figure 7% investment return, after ten years, we’re looking at more than $5000. This is based on saving and investing the money we would have spent on basic haircuts for just one guy!
Of course, many people spend much more than $33 per month on average for haircuts and other treatments. According to a Yahoo Finance article from 2023, the average woman spends $877/year on hair care, and the average man spends $562/year. In contrast, our family of four uses about one and a half bottles of VO5 shampoo and conditioner each month. (about $1.14/bottle at Walmart , so $3.42/month). If we spend $50/year on this stuff (rounding up for tax and whatever) versus the eye-popping $2878 this article says is the norm, thereby saving and investing an additional $2828 annually ($235.67/month), we can estimate our net worth to increase by almost $39000 over ten years from this one adjustment.
Wow. I didn’t care that much about having fancy hair anyway, but now I’m starting to think having slighted crooked ends might be a real flex.
It’s true that home haircuts and inexpensive shampoo won’t work for everyone. My younger sister has thick curls which she struggled against for years before she found a hair routine and products that work for her. And we’ve paid for some nicer products for our daughter when her alopecia was acting up (fortunately, her hair has grown in beautifully, and ongoing treatments with a dermatologist are covered by insurance). Haircare is culturally important for many people and some careers call for an especially polished look. There are lots of good reasons why someone might choose to invest more money in haircare.
What I’m challenging here is the assumption that haircuts are just another thing we have to pay for in the world we live in. Actually, we don’t have to pay to get our hair done, just like we don’t have to turn our air conditioning on as soon as the mercury shows 78 degrees out and we can choose to bike for errands within a few miles of our homes. We can decide to spend on the things that are meaningful for us and skip the autopilot style expenditures that most of us pick up from our parents and peers.
And making just a handful of frugal choices– skipping the stuff that we don’t really care about anyway– can make a tremendous difference in our long term financial health.
