There is one thing in this life that is most valuable above all other resources. Once it is gone you can never get it back and as you get older, it tends to run out faster. Find out what you should hold onto.

We are all here on this Earth for a limited time. You never know when your last day will be. We fill our lives with activities and spend most of our adult lives working. How you spend your life can make a big difference on your quality of life.

What do you do with your time?

The one thing we cannot EVER get back is TIME. Time should be considered our most valuable resource. But how many of us just throw it away spending countless hours each day looking at Facebook, watching low quality tv shows for entertainment?

What is your time worth to you? That may depend on where you are at in your life. Whether or not you have children. When we are young it seems like we have an eternity in front of us. I remember being 16 thinking that 40 was old and I would make the most of life so that I could be retired by then.

My plans did not come to fruition. I do not feel however that I wasted my time, I just didn’t know any better. I have never been the type to sit and watch hours of television every day. I rarely watch any tv. I like to feel productive so I always look for something to do. Whether that be fixing something around the house, exercising, learning something new, or in this case, starting a blog.

Before I got on my path to FI, I would generally just spend more time working. I worked an average of 55-60 hours per week. I wasn’t necessarily getting paid an incredible salary to make it worth it, but I would rather work than sit around doing nothing. And the extra money wouldn’t hurt. What I didn’t understand was that I was trading TIME for MONEY.

Trading Time for Money

Trading time for money simply means that you spend time working for a set pay for that time. You work for $10/hr so you work 5 hours and get paid $50. The problem with this is that your time is limited. Not just your lifetime, but your time in a day. You have to do other things besides just work. And most of us would rather be doing something else other than work. There are some of course that love their work and even if they had unlimited money, they would still work for the enjoyment of it. And that is completely fine.

For me, once I realized my children were growing before my eyes and my oldest was soon going to be leaving the home as an adult, I understood that my priorities were misplaced. For those that have children you will understand. Once our kids reach 18, our time with them is about 80% used up. Once they leave the house and start their own families we will spend less time with them and therefore we need to appreciate the time we have with them while they are young. Give them lasting memories with you.

Once I started producing additional income through rental properties, I could pull back on my overtime hours knowing that there was additional income if needed so that I could spend more time with my family. I still work full time at the moment, but I feel less stressed by working less hours. My time with my family is more valuable than the overtime rate I get paid.

The Lifestyle/Debt Trap

Of course the problem facing most people these days is we are trapped. Trapped in a lifestyle that we have built up over time with raises or higher paying jobs and bought the things we wanted on credit which we now have to work to pay for.

We have to trade our time for the money to fund that lifestyle and pay those debts. It is a shame that our world has been taken over by consumerism, but at the same time, our consumerism is what creates jobs for those companies that make and sell the products we buy. So it is good for them, but potentially bad for us if we can’t control our spending and not make emotional purchases. Anytime you are wanting to buy something at the spur of the moment, have some control and leave it. Take 48 hours to think about it and decide if you really need that item. Then if after 48 hours you still feel you need it, then buy it if you must. But if in that time you realize you really don’t need another thing to clutter your space or if that money could be better spent on something more important, than do that.

But don’t put yourself in a position where you have to work not just to survive, but because you have no other choice because you have dug yourself into a hole.

Passive Income

Rather than trading your time for money, you should try to find ways to make money work for you. When you are able to create other sources of income that bring in money without you spending much if any time at all to produce it, then you can start to enjoy more of your life.

This is the whole purpose of the FIRE movement (Financial Independence Retire Early – see my earlier post). When you are not tied down to a job that you have to work you are free to enjoy your life. Spend time with family, care for elderly family members, travel the world, volunteer in various charities, the list is endless.

The best ways to get additional income streams is with passive income such as Rental Property income, or maybe publishing a book, starting a business. Of course starting a business will require work and effort, but the plan would be to only put in what is needed to get it going and then fire yourself. Hire capable people to replace you so that you are no longer involved other than maybe as a consultant or to check in once in a while. But if you can build it so that you can be out of it, that would be the best way to do it.

It’s up to you to decide what you want to do with your time. For me, every time I sit down to relax a bit, I don’t get stuck in the trap of wasting my time doing nothing. I will motivate myself to get up and read another book on investing or add another post to the blog, or search for another rental property to add to my portfolio. Or get on YouTube to learn how to fix whatever just broke so that I can learn something or do something productive that will help me achieve my dreams.

What do you value your time at? Talk with a highly skilled CPA or Attorney and you can bet they will charge you $500+ per hour of their time. Would you sell your time for $10/hr? What about for the small tasks that take up our time? Often we want to do things ourselves to save money. But is that money worth our time? If I value my time at $100/hr because if I spend an hour searching for a great rental property that I can find that will produce $1000/mo in cash flow, my time is very valuable. So why would I spend an hour shoveling snow or mowing grass if I can get a neighborhood kid to happily do it for $10/hr?

I recently made this mind-shift myself. My first rental property that I manage, every time there is a vacancy I drive there to do the cleaning and prepping for the next tenant. It takes me about 45 minutes to drive there and 45 back plus the time to actually clean, we’ll say 3-4 hours. So if my time is worth $100/hr that is about 5-6 hours of my time or $500-600. I found a great handyman that has a cleaning business that can clean for me at $40/hr. He can get it done in about the same time 3-4 hours and probably do it better than I can anyway. So for spending $120-160 is actually saving me hundreds of dollars and frees up my time to do things that are more productive and more valuable to me than driving to clean.

It was a hard mind-shift for me because I have always did things to save “money” not ever considering my time was more valuable than money. But once you van get your mind to understand this, then it becomes easy to pay someone to do the small tasks so that you can be involved with the more valuable tasks. Don’t do a $10/hr job when you should be doing the $100/hr job.

Don’t waste time. You can’t get it back. Spend it wisely learning new skills and building other sources of income to allow you the freedom to use your time to its fullest.