A lot of us have been sold the idea that we need to go to school, attend college, get a 9-5 job that we end up working for years until we can (hopefully) save enough money to retire, leaving us to do what we enjoy when we’re old. Who the heck wants to live like that!? Well…guess what? We don’t have to. We need to aspire to break the norm. That way of thinking came from the time of the industrial revolution, which if we haven’t guessed it, is long gone. The idea of trading time for money…OUR time for someone else’s money is backwards. Time isn’t money. It’s the other way round. Money buys us our most valuable asset. That asset is…you guessed it, time! I know most, if not all of us, might be trading time for money right now. That’s fine…we’ve got to start somewhere. We all have bills to pay, and we need to have the money today to get them paid. The fact is that the concept and application of trading money to buy time is something that doesn’t happen overnight. First, we have to start with changing our mindset and then come up with a game plan on how, where and when we will start investing our money in order to buy us time in the future.
No matter how much money we’re paid, our income is limited by the number of hours we can work. We all have the same 24 hours in a day and there is only so much of our time that we can dedicate to working for pay. Trading time for money isn’t an isolated trap to those of us that are employed by someone else. Even those of us that are self-employed are trading time for money, the only difference is the value of our time is potentially greater, so if we breakdown our hourly earnings, we may be earning more per hour than if working for someone else. But even then, our earnings are still limited by the number of hours we can work. This is why we need to change our mindset from trading our time for money to trading our money to buy us time. Just to be clear, buying time is a misnomer, because we know that we can’t buy time. Every minute we spend is gone forever and we can’t get that time back, so we’re not actually buying time, but we are freeing up our time. By investing our money into things that will produce income is how we will be able to free up more time to do the other things we enjoy doing outside of work.
By investing our money in a business, real estate or dividend paying securities we’re freeing up our future time. But money isn’t the only thing we can invest to escape the trading time for money trap. How we spend (or invest) the little “free” time we have now, can be used to buy us more “free” time in the future. While we keep our 9-5 jobs so we can continue to pay our bills, we can use our extra time to create a product or service that can generate an income with less of our time, once it’s up and running. The difficult part for most of us is the many hours we will spend creating our product or service without compensation, but if we’re patient long enough, the efforts we put in will multiply tenfold over time. There is definitely no instantaneous gratification and there are no guarantees when it comes to investing time now, in order to have more time in the future, but the efforts can be well worth it. Even investing money now to buy future time takes patients to build. This concept is the cornerstone of wealth building and the path to financial freedom!
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