♬ Your a mean one, Mr. Grinch
You really are a heel
Your as cuddly as a cactus
Your as charming as an eel, Mr. Grinch…♬

Lyrics by Theodor “Dr. Seuss” Geisel, music by Albert Hague, performed by Thurl Ravenscroft.

Mr. Grinch by Dr. Seuss

Anyone who runs a business knows that it is profitable only if you have funds left over after paying all the bills. This enforces a common-sense mentality in ensuring that your costs don’t get out of control. However, in some offices the principle of saving money is taken to such an extreme that their frugality is actually costing them money. Here are some examples (drawn from the collective experiences of my fellow Practice Management Advisors and myself):

In other cases, there are examples of lawyers putting time into tasks that were much better being delegated to someone else – thereby allowing the lawyer to free-up time to be put into either working on client files or marketing his practice to catch more or better clients. This is a lost-opportunity cost: You are failing to make best use of the time given to you in order not to ‘spend money.’

Other cases have lawyers in the office after-hours, doing tasks that could be done by others (i.e. by an office administrator). The consequences of this time use range from: bad health (which can result from failing to invest time into getting and staying fit – unfortunately no one has yet found a way to take $$ in the bank to buy back health) to disrupted family relationships (failed marriages and alienated children resulting from too much time in the office and too little time spent with kids and significant others) to the inability to enjoy retirement (either due to a life-long reluctance to spend money or due to not spending any time building hobbies or any other pleasurable activities other than practising law).

Someone once said that time = money. We can spend time in making money or we can spent time in saving money. Each of us need to find a reasonable balance between how we use the limited (and fixed amount) of time given to us on the twin tasks of producing work and on saving expenses. Hopefully we can recognize that not spending money can in some cases, result in lost time – and the indirect cost of spending too much time being frugal is being a grinch and letting our lives slip away between our fingers.

(Hat tip to my fellow PMA’s for their assistance in this article).