How to Outsource Your Life Like a Star

In Hollywood, the rich and famous have always outsourced their dirty work. In fact, the popular book and movie "The Devil Wears Prada" is based on the trials and tribulations of a personal assistant.

In real life, Sean Combs, aka P. Diddy, was seen being catered to at one point by his trusty butler Farnsworth. And Naomi Campbell wouldn't even carry her own purse during sanitation duty. She had an assistant to do that dirty work.

But now, someone doesn't need rock-star status or a bank account to rival Donald Trump's to get someone to do your dirty laundry, thanks to Web sites like www.domystuff.com.

"You don't necessarily have to be a celebrity to have a personal assistant anymore," domystuff.com founder Omri Cohen said. "It used to be limited to the rich, but now anybody can have someone else do their chores."

With people busier than ever, the site offers a bidding system similar to eBay. Consumers around the country post a task they need completed, from things as menial as waiting in line for a new iPhone to cleaning up life's bigger messes.

Bidders from high school students to professionals compete for the job, driving the price down.

Michelle Levi, a recent college graduate struggling to make ends meet, drops off laundry, feeds cats, even grocery shops.

"The little jobs add up," she said. "And then I have extra cash to use for supplies or going out. It's pretty good."

For the really desperate, outsourcing can be a life-saver. Josh Minney, 20, found himself running out of money in Europe, so he sold a week's worth of chores on eBay in exchange for a plane ticket home. "Some people had e-mailed me to see if I was interested in doing something like agriculture, if I could do something on a farm, construction work, something like that," he said. "I had no idea I would be bought by a psychic in Quincy, [Mass.]."

His services were purchased for $935 by Darlene Anderson, whose family runs Regina Russell's Tea Room in Quincy, where Minney will work at the host desk and gather details about customers' psychic reading requests.

Other Web sites also are in on the action of letting people outsource their lives -- including craigslist.org and elance.com. Brickwork India will even provide you with a remote assistant who will pay your bills from halfway around the world.