Less Strokes In Less Time - Ep 01 : Building a home sim saves you time and money

The 30 second summary

Most people know range practice can be expensive and time consuming, and most people know that putting in a home sim would save them some time. What many people don't know is that installing a sim can be fairly inexpensive, saves you hundreds of hours a time a year, and over time can save you thousands of dollars. All while giving you a higher quality of practice.

How is this possible?

This ones for you, Mr. I'm trying to convince my spouse to put in a home simulator guy. #RealAmericanHeroes

The headline of this article for sure sounds like clickbait, but hear me out. If you have a practice station in the house, you can walk to your practice area, maybe get a quick stretch in and start hitting balls.

Within 30 min to an hour, you can have a very productive practice session, and when done, you're home and back with your family, or doing whatever is worth your valuable time.

Bonus, if you have something like Skytrak+, you'll get lots of prebuilt and customizable drills that make practice fun and engaging. And when finished the software will give you a report of your results with actionable insights you can use on the course.

Vs

If you go to the range, with all the logistics of going to the range, yes you can practice in .5hr -1 hr, but your time away from home and doing all the travel and logistics of getting to the range, could easily turn into 2-2.5 hours.

Not to mention the 10 dollars you spend on balls each time and the 5 dollars you spend on gas round trip, and unless youre lucky enough to go to a trackman range (which are pretty rare), or bring your own launch monitor, you dont get any of that automated tracking or insights.

Sure you can manually track, but short of walking down the range to see where each of your golf balls ended up, youre basically eyeball estimating your results.

#golfermath

So some quick #golfermath here. If you go to the range 3x a week to hit balls, over the course of a year you could be losing 234 hours that you could be spending time with your wife or kids, doing other errands, doing actual work that furthers your career, getting a workout in. Basically doing anything more productive than the logistics of getting to the practice facility.

Also at $15 cost per trip x 3 trips per week x 52 weeks of the year = $2340 .

If you get what I would call a premium barebones setup, you can do that for about $1500-$1600 (current price at the time this post was written).

Lets assume even after you get a sim, you still go once a week to the range. It's nice to validate ball flight outside, hit off turf etc. Then in year one your range + sim cost is pretty much break even, and in year 2 you start realizing savings of ~$1600 annually.  If you step up your setup to a skytrak+ and buy one while its on sale, you are almost breaking even after year 2. And of course you get all that time back for other things in life.

Its science

It's formulaic folks. Build a sim, get better at golf, save money and love. your. life.

If I've convinced you to take the next step, check out my post on my favorite sim setups for every budget.