Don’t waste your time stressing about making more money

“Time is money“…. right?

But when you take it too far, you end up hearing conversations like: “I hate it when people are late even 5 minutes, because they’re wasting 5 minutes of my life, in which I could have been making X amount per minute.”

Now, don’t get me wrong — I HATE (with a passion) people who are consistently late without a good reason. If they know that they’re late birds, then rise up earlier, or switch the time to be half an hour earlier so that you trick yourself into leaving ON TIME.

I don’t even accept traffic as an excuse. They know better.

What I don’t like about that logic of “time being money”, is that they find ways to justify why they don’t want to cut back in their budget or do things for themselves at home.

I am still a firm believer of: Do what you want in life, and that gives you the most pleasure and happiness.

Which means, if you are into being a workaholic and you THRIVE on being in a work environment… then by all means, embrace it, but only if you don’t regret what you’re doing.

But don’t knock on people who like to clip coupons, or cook food from scratch, because we all need to learn how to cut back in our budgets some time.

Sure, it only saves them a couple of bucks (if that) when they clip a coupon or two, after going through stacks of fliers, but it makes them happy to do it.

Sometimes I think they go too far, like counting toilet paper squares… but if they wanna make their own soap, then let them rock it out and save $5.00 for 15 minutes of work, or whatever. It’s their life!

If you subscribe to thinking that 15 minutes of work to save $5.00 is a waste of your time because you could be spending that 15 minutes working on polishing your career… then I’d like to challenge you to really assess what you’re saying.

There are 24 hours in a day.

Let’s assume 8 hours for sleeping. That leaves us with 16 hours being awake.

Are you really, honestly, going to spend every single minute of those 16 hours of being awake, focusing on your career and trying to make more money instead of cutting back as well?

I highly doubt it.

When you say “concentrate on my career”, it’s too vague to be quantifiable.

No one is going to come by and plonk down $3 saying:

Good Job FB, here’s $$$ for concentrating on your career for 15 minutes.

(I WISH!)

If you want to continue along the path of thinking that clipping coupons or making your own soap is a bunch of hogwash being spread by hippies, then I want to ask you:

No. You’re not. At least I hope not!

Strange for a PF blog to say, but money comes and goes and the road to wealth is two-fold:

You cannot just keep making more money. You will reach a certain threshold of your abilities, availability, or resources to be able to make more money.

So the answer is to cut back as well.

I’m not talking about spending 4 hours to save a penny. I’m talking about spending those 10 minutes or less to save $2.00 when you happen to chance across a handy 2-for-1 coupon.

Or spending time cooking from scratch and making a great meal for $11 that when eaten, would have leftovers for a second meal, instead of buying food from a store and getting charged $35 for a single meal.

If you want to say: Hey, I don’t buy it. I make $150 an hour, so why would I even consider spending an hour (essentially) to chop up chicken or to make a meal from scratch when I could buy it for $35? Mathematically speaking, why would I even want to consider that? I’d be SAVING money by eating out.

I’m telling you to consider cutting back, and to keep yourself in check because you’re going to end up living an inflated lifestyles where the more you earn, the more you spend.

If you don’t want to think about cutting back in the budget at all but are taking on new lifestyle changes with every growing paycheque, you’re essentially going to need MORE money to do what you want in life.

But if you do cut back in your budget, you will need less money to do more in life, and maybe even have more time to boot.

I mean, why are we all working and saving all this money in the first place?

So we can have a comfortable retirement when we STOP working, and need the money to survive right?

But if you were cutting back here and there during your life, you’re going to have low expenses to begin with, you won’t need as much in a retirement fund to live.

However, if you work all the time and don’t want to think about cutting back in your budget at all, just to get this cushy nest egg in the end, you’re wasting your time, and your money by not managing it properly.

There is nobody in this world who would not give a billion dollars (if they had it) to reverse time, have more time, or to be young again.

You may be wasting your best resource, and end up at the age of 70 wiser and sadder at having wasted your time working instead of spending time with your kids, watching them play soccer and grow into young adults.

So why waste all of your time and life for (excessive amounts of) money if you are going to just go into debt with your time?