Time, Money, & Wishing Our Lives Away

Time, Money, & Wishing Our Lives Away

Here are all the things I have learned about time and what you can do to create more of it.

When you are young, you put things off because you believe that you have plenty of time. When you are old, you wish you had done so much more when youth was on your side.

So many of us put our lives off because we just don’t have enough time. We work to buy things like houses and cars, and we pay mortgages, student loans, utilities, and credit card loans. We work and work to keep up with our never-ending need to have more things. All the while, we are wishing our time away, hoping the week will pass so we can have the weekend. We wish we could hurry up and retire so we can do the things we want to do and travel to the places we want to see. We work, and we live for tomorrow.

Everyone around you talks about not having enough time in the day. If only there was more time. Unlike money, time cannot be saved, stored up, hurried up, or even stopped. Money, on the other hand, can be saved and stored. We can always have more of it, but we can never have more time. However, here’s what I’ve learned about time.

You can buy it! That’s correct. That’s what I said. You can buy time. Once I decided that I no longer wanted to put my life off—that I wanted to travel the globe—I had to find ways to buy more time.

One of the first things I gave up in my business was bookkeeping. This was because I found myself working all day, coming home to cook dinner, putting my kids to bed, and then heading to my home office to work all hours of the night doing bookkeeping.

I was terrified even entertaining the thought of letting someone else see my financials and take care of my accounts. On top of that, I wasn’t sure I could really afford it. That being said, it turned out to be one of the greatest choices I’ve ever made. I suddenly found myself with extra time—time to be with family and to take part in more profitable activities.

My bookkeeper saved me money because my books were so organized. This was because the CPA—at $125 per hour—spent less time in my accounts. My bookkeeper has saved me more than enough time and money to help pay for her keep. Because of this, she’s still with me today, and she manages every facet of both my business and personal financial life. She is and has always been worth every penny I’ve ever spent on her.

Use your money to buy more time, not more stuff. How much stuff do you really need anyway? The more you have, the more time and energy it takes from you.

  1. Calculate the value of your time. Take your gross income and divide it by 2000—the average number of hours Americans work per year. If your hour is valued at $75, $100, or $200 per hour, you will soon begin to be more aware of how you are wasting that time.
  2. Take a look at all the things you are doing and begin to place a value per hour for those things if someone else were doing them. For instance, my hour was worth $100 and I was spending 7-8 hours on the weekend cleaning, mopping, grocery shopping, doing laundry, and all other things we try to get done during the weekend. Once I did the math, it did not make sense to use my time to do those things that others could do for less money in less time.
  3. Hire people to do things that you don’t like to do or that could be done in a cheaper, faster manner if you let someone else do them. If my hour is valued at $100, then it made more sense to hire someone who would charge me $20 per hour to do the same job I was doing for five times that much.

When you hire others to do things for you, you put money into circulation. You are putting money into their lives, their family, and their community. This is an abundance mentality.

Rmber this: You can make more money, but you can never make mor e time. Use your money to buy your time and to help yourself others.

What are the things that you could give up? What would you do with your newfound free time?

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