“Most people work just hard enough not to get fired and get paid just enough money not to quit.” – George Carlin
In today’s society, the vast majority of people have been sold the idea that you need to go to school, attend college, and get a good job. And that’s great! Except it doesn’t end there, because once you have the job you end up ultimately working for decades until you can (hopefully) save enough money to retire, so you can then have the freedom to enjoy life when you’re much older.
Who the heck wants to live like that!? Well…guess what? You don’t have to. You don’t have to wait for the later years of your life to enjoy the freedoms of life. We need to aspire to break the norm. That way of thinking came from the time of the industrial revolution. Which if you haven’t guessed it, is long gone. The idea of trading time for money…YOUR time for someone else’s money is backwards.
The Meaning of Trading Time for Money
Time isn’t money. It’s the other way round. Money buys you your most valuable asset…time! It buys you time by freeing you up from having to put in all the hours you spend on earning money. I know that you might be trading time for money right now and that’s fine…you’ve got to start somewhere. You have bills to pay, and you 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 you have to start with changing your mindset and then come up with a game plan on how, where and when you will start investing your money in order to buy your time in the future. It’s about getting your money to work for you, not you working for your money.
“Making money is a hobby that will complement any other hobbies you have, beautifully.” – Scott Alexander
Did you ever stop to think that no matter how much money you’re paid, your income is limited by the number of hours you can work? We all have the same 24 hours in a day. And there is only so much of your time that you can dedicate to working for pay. That’s why the idea of working for money is such a flawed way of thinking if you truly want financial freedom.
Trading time for money isn’t an isolated trap to those people that are employed by someone else. Even if you’re self-employed you are trading time for money. The only difference is the value of your time is potentially greater. So, if you breakdown your hourly earnings, you may be earning more per hour than if you were working for someone else.
But even then, your earnings are still limited by the number of hours you can work. You already know that there’s absolutely no way around that universal law. This is why you need to change your mindset from trading your time for money to trading your money to buy you time. Just to be clear, buying time is a misnomer, because you know that you can’t buy time.
Every minute you spend is gone forever and you can’t get that time back. So, you’re not actually buying time, but you are freeing up your time. By investing your money into things that will produce income is how you will be able to free up more time to do the other things you enjoy doing outside of work. This is the only way you can ever truly have financial freedom.
“Time well spent results in more money to spend, more money to save, and more time to vacation.” – Zig Ziglar
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.
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 it’s 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. 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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