If you do what you love you’ll never work a day in your life. So if you don’t like your job, why do you spend so recklessly? This should make you want to save your money even more. This is why we shouldn’t let our liabilities control our lives. Think about it like this. You can either have an extra day off, or you can have a new car. Personally I would prefer an extra day off, but to each their own. You can also literally buy your time back. Let’s say you don’t like cooking. You can spend more time working, then go out to eat with your family more times a week than usual. You bought time back by buying some quality time with your family.

Figuratively Buying Your Time Back

This is basically spend less work less. You cut out the things you don’t necessarily need and you can work less. If you cut out that $600 a month car payment, you could take a week off work. Even if you work those hours, saving those $600 a month for 12 months. You could use that money to pay yourself for 3 whole months. What a great emergency fund! (or tiny retirement)

Literally Buying Your Time Back

If you get paid $20/hr and you can find someone to clean your place for $15/hr you can buy your time back that way. You’ll make $5/hr all while avoiding a task you don’t like. This is just an example but you get the idea. Maybe doing your job is less stressful than doing housework. This goes the other way around too. You have to learn to value your time. For example if you have the skills to repair your own car but it will take you 5 hours and you earn $20/hr that will be “$100” of time. If a mechanic will do it for $500 it will cost you 5x as much time at work just to fix your car. You have to think of the value it will bring. Maybe this mechanic is very skilled and guarantees his work.

How Many Hours?

Obsessing time to money isn’t very healthy. You earn it this way though so you need to start seeing how much of your time these items are actually costing you. You want that new $200 jacket? You’ll have to work for 10 hours to be able to afford it. Don’t get me wrong, sometimes a good expensive piece of clothing is a good thing. If you wear this jacket every day and it’s good quality then in the end working those 10 hours for it isn’t so bad. In my opinion it’s more expensive to keep buying fast fashion that you’ll end up throwing away after 3 wears.

Rule of 3

When spending discretionary money I usually go by the rule of 3. If on day 3 I don’t have the desire to buy it anymore I won’t. Also keep in mind there will always be a sale. Don’t let sales control you. There will always be an opportunity to get something at a lower price in the future. Think of the holidays. Every holiday on the calendar you have every store emailing you about a special “once in a lifetime” sale. (spoiler alert they bring back the sale every month)

Hopefully this helped change your perspective on money a little bit. You work hard for it, so the person you should be paying first is… yourself.

Thank you for reading and see you next Sunday,
– Pablo