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.
How Much is Your Time Worth?
Financial freedom comes from being free from having to work for money and instead having your money work for you. By investing your money in a business, real estate or dividend paying securities you’re freeing up your future time. But money isn’t the only thing you can invest to escape the trap of trading your time for money.
Using time now to free up more time later is another valuable resource. How you spend (or invest) the little “free” time you have now, can also be used to buy you more “free” time in the future. While you keep your 9-5 job so you can continue to pay your bills, you can use your extra time to create a product or service that can generate an income with less of your time, once it’s up and running.
“Making money is a hobby that will complement any other hobbies you have, beautifully.” – Scott Alexander
The difficult part for most people is the many hours you will spend creating your product or service without compensation, but if you’re patient long enough, the efforts you put in will multiply ten-fold over time. It’s hard to imagine and even more difficult to go through not being rewarded for months or even years for the effort being put in to create an income source from scratch.
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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