Time versus Money
What is more valuable............Time or Money?
Many here on the SS community (including myself) are keen on investing to build up a portfolio of real estate assets to provide growth style assets with income to offset holding costs; income (cashflow) type assets where growth becomes a bonus, or; a combination of both, sometimes by varying the portfolio assets themselves or even in the same asset by being creative with value add or buying very prudently in the first place.
It is the income streams that follow (or capital by portfolio sell-off in part or in whole) that provide us with choices in our life. Those choices then allow us the discretion to reduce working hours in a J.O.B. or fully remove ourselves from the active workforce.
This then allows us the freedom to reclaim some of our time. Many of us may have heard that money is more valuable than time. We can always get back lost money, however we can never get back lost time.
Likening the money versus time argument to a currency of sorts and a bank account, it helps to imagine that there is a bank that credits each and every one of us with $ 86,400 every morning. It carries no end of day balance. Every evening whatever part of the balance that is not used during the day is wiped from the account.
As prudent investors, we would draw out and utilise every last dollar. The analogy now beckons to the currency of time. Each and every person also has such a bank.....our Time Bank.
Every morning (for the sake of a fixed yardstick comparison) it credits us with 86,400 seconds. Every night it writes off/deletes whatever part of that time we did not use or invest for good purpose. It carries no balance.....there is no credit or overdraft. Every morning another new account is opened for us......if we do not use the day?s deposits, the loss is ours. There is no going back. There is not an endless supply.
Jim Rohn calls procrastination, the thief of time. I agree......the time will pass anyway, regardless of whether we utilise it to our full advantage or squander it on mind numbing activities. As Jim Rohn also says, stop majoring in minor things. This life we have is not a dress rehearsal.
Our time use extends not only to work, but also involves our health, family, purpose, recreation/leisure, relaxation, spirituality, etc. I provide no order to this list as the priorities will be different for each and every one of us according to our core values.
I have recovered an enormous amount of time over the years by watching far less TV than I used to. Aside from the news, I mostly watch comedies as I enjoy laughing. I reckon it?s very therapeutic to have a few good belly laughs per day.....get our own endorphins cracking and to offset some of the gloom from the remaining media, the daily grind, and sometimes those we meet along our daily journey.
I?ve been guilty in the past of spending too much time on minor things that whilst they pass the time, do nothing in moving me forward to be, do and have all that I have the potential to achieve. That is not to say that we don?t need to re-create, recuperate or rest, however I find that spending my time that was otherwise squandered on mindless ?hanging around? and other activities and investing it in sleep instead, I am far more productive and energetic the next day rather than just flopping on the couch in front of the screen.
There is a time quadrant that those who have read Stephen Covey?s ?The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People? goes thru priorities of putting first things first. The variables he uses in his matrix include urgent versus non-urgent and important versus not important. I was not able to format the table and paste it properly however here is a link to the matrix:
http://www.orgcoach.net/timematrix.html
In utilising time for our benefit and then the benefit of those others who are close such as family, friends and others of our choosing it requires us to stretch a little every day. That is, to not spend too much time in the comfort zone or the comfy couch.
Comfort is a welcome guest who if stays too long becomes our master. To provide us with the momentum to overcome some of the ?comfort inertia? I find it helpful to consider the following axiom (I am unaware of the source)....?It?s not what you are that?s holding you back, it?s what you think you?re not?. Fear and inertia can go hand in hand and, sometimes the only way to get rid of the fear of doing something and the associated inertia is just to go out and do it.
For those of us (myself included.........I still need prompting with this) I find asking the following question occasionally is a leveller that makes us think about whether we are spending our time credited every day on activities that are in alignment with our core values.
How long will you live?
Many of us a are probably familiar with at least one case of a young person who has pased on in their youth/prime and was denied the most valuable commodity and currency that we all have right now and that is time. There is also the quantity versus quality debate that I do not wish to entertain here. I do however find it useful to say a quick thank you every morning when I wake up in gratitude for the day ahead.
Back to property. To me, investing in property provides a means to reclaim time spent on working at the J.O.B. and achieve the point of not being pre-occupied where my income will come from, whether I clock in or not, wake up at a certain time or not and that is unaffected by my lifestyle. This is freedom to me.
All our choices, as to how we utilise our time, can be classed as either positive or negative, that either push us toward our goals and destiny or keep us from reaching them.
A Chinese proverb says, ?we are like a piece of wood that needs to be carved every morning. If we don?t carve ourselves, someone else will do it for us." To shape our own lives we should be proactive and responsible with how we use (most of) our time......there isn?t an endless supply.
I consider time to be more valuable than money. Both are necessary and to have the freedom to choose how we spend the former, we need to invest it wisely in the beginning to create the latter and lead us to further time choices.
To your (time) freedom!
Beautifully written, Player. Thought I'd repost it here in case people hadn't gone back to the beginning of the thread to read it.
