Today, I’m going to take a traditional phrase and flip it around. Many of you have likely heard the phrase “the time value of money” as it pertains to spending, saving, or money growing through compounding interest. By flipping the traditional phrase into “the money value of your time”, I want to take a look at how much we each value our time. How we use it. How much we get paid for it. And how the two meet by looking at how we use our money in terms of time. Recently, there have been a bunch of surveys showing that a majority of workers are or will be actively looking for a new job. There are likely many reasons for this being the case. Some of the primary reasons may be:
- People aren’t happy with their jobs.
- People don’t feel like they are being adequately compensated, and/or they are being overworked.
- People don’t live in a location they really want to be in.
- People had a great experience with remote work and want to keep working remotely.
Based on the amount of people wanting to change jobs, I think there has been a realization among many working age adults that the old status quo from before the Covid-19 global pandemic is just not going to cut it anymore. People are realizing how much of their time they were losing and how little they were being compensated for it. Are you one of them?
How much is time do we really have?
Four thousand weeks is about how long you’ll be here on Earth if you live for 80 years. Well, it’s really 4,174.29 weeks, but we never look at our lives this way. If you sleep the recommended 7-8 hours per night, which is way more important than most people think, you’ll be awake for about 2,783 weeks and asleep for 1,391 weeks of your life. If you spend 40 hours per week working for 40 years (or more), you’ll spend at least another 497 weeks at work. Add in another 765 weeks of time growing up and learning for the first 18-25 years of your life (only your awake time), and you’re left with a total of 1521 weeks (about 29 years) of time left for you to do everything else you want to do while you are alive. Also, notice, I didn’t factor in time for eating, sleeping, cooking, cleaning, commuting, or shopping for anything. Those are things we will all spend time doing, with everyone’s time spent on those items being different. On the other hand, there are plenty of distractions in our lives that consume more time than they should. Many of us could benefit from reducing our time on Facebook, playing video games, watching TV (or YouTube) or anything else that consumes a lot of time with little benefit. We all have a limited amount of time here on Earth, and we get to make many of the choices about how we want to spend that time. Many of us could probably be making better use of our time.
Wrapping Up
With the next series of posts, I’m going to integrate the concept of the “money value of your time” by looking at your money, time, spending, and saving in different ways. The goal of this series of posts will be to help you find ways of getting more time back for you and your family, whether that is today or in 15-20 years from now.
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