Have you ever heard the expression “time is money?” In this video I flip it around and show you why it is better to think about money being time. Invest your time to make money, leverage that money to make more, then buy back your time for a net profit. The key to success.
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Full transcript:
John: Hey, John Sonmez from simpleprogrammer.com and just a question for you here. Have you ever heard of the phrase “Time is money?” Well, I think that’s a pretty valid phrase, but in this video I’m going to flip that around and I’m going to examine the other side of the coin which is money is time.
So you’ve probably never heard the phrase “Money is time” before it’s always said as “Time is money.” It’s interesting when we think about time being money. If you think about your time, if you work at an hourly rate, you probably can calculate out that your time is worth so much money, so that makes a lot of sense. But what makes a lot more sense to me is to flip that around and start thinking about money as time.
Now the reason why I think it’s important to flip this around and why it’s more valuable actually to think about money as time is because you can convert your money into time. This is something interesting to consider, right? A lot of people say, “Well, you don’t want too hard. You don’t want to work too much because your time is the most valuable asset you have.” I agree with you 100%. Your time is the most valuable asset you have.
But let’s think about this, if money is time, if you can buy time with money, if you can leverage your money, what you can do with money, right? You can’t really leverage time. Time is not something that you can borrow and gain interest on, right? Not in the form that it exists. You have to convert it to another form which is money. That’s why I say if you think about it as money is time you can buy something. You can buy time with that money.
Let me give you a good example here. This will make a little bit more sense because I’m talking in some pretty obscure terms right now. Let’s say that you have a lawn that needs to be mowed every week and you can mow that lawn yourself. It’s true. You can spend some time, you can spend an hour, 2 hours, whatever it takes to mow your lawn or you can go and you can pay someone, a landscaper, a neighborhood kid, whoever it is to mow that lawn. You can basically convert that money into time.
Another example is let’s say you have a maid service. You could hire someone to clean your house. I actually do that. I have a maid service that cleans my house. I pay them money every 2 weeks to do a full clean. It saves me probably 4 or 5 hours worth of time. You can basically buy time with money and it’s a leverageable thing because you could buy a whole bunch of time that you would have to spend doing things that you don’t want to do during your day.
What does this all come down to? When you start thinking about money as time instead of time as money then it gives me 2 things. It tells me first of all that if I don’t have enough time, the solution to that problem can be found by throwing money at it. If I am willing to spend some money I can buy back my time, right?
When we go on vacation, we essentially do this especially if you’re a contractor and you don’t get paid for vacation. You have to take the time off or you’re an independent consultant, right? Then you’re basically buying back your time. You’re losing on money. That’s definitely a true thing with mowing the lawn, with getting maid service, you can buy back that time if you want to, there’re a lot of applications for that.
The second thing is that you can basically use the power of leverage. If you are willing to spend time, you can covert, you can take time now and you can convert that to money, now that money can gain interest. It can be used in a leverage position. You can use money to make more money. You have to spend some time to get some money, but then you can take that money and combine it with a little bit more time and some wisdom, building a business, doing something that’s going to get you a bigger return and then you can acquire more money.
Now, you can take that and you can convert it back to time. When you go through that whole cycle let’s think about what happens. You start with time, you got money. You leveraged that money to get more money and then you converted it back to time. Now you have basically traded, let’s say you traded 10 hours of time for 100 hours of time. You can multiply your time using that, but you have to be thinking in that way.
That’s the way I try to think about everything that I'm doing. When I’m spending my time I try to think, “Could I hire someone to do this?” A lot of the work that I do I hire out someone let’s say on oDesk to do the work for me or can I get someone to do this task that I don’t want to do? When I have money that I'm earning which should be the best spent time of my time, whatever time that I can use to earn the most amount of money I should choose my time doing that then I can then take that money and I can convert it back. I can go on vacation. I can pay someone to do things that I don’t want to do. That’s a better way to live rather than living the other way saying time is money and chasing that. When you think that time is money then what ends up happening is you don’t see that power of leverage, you start to think one to one.
That’s my tip for this week. Hopefully that would help you out. Like I said, the best way that I think you could apply this tip is just getting into that mindset and just look at your current life right now. How could you leverage money to buy back time and how could that time that you buy back, how could you reuse that time in a way that would earn you more money than what it cost you?
Just a quick example here before I wrap things up. Let’s go back to that mowing the lawn scenario. Let’s say you make $50 an hour. I'm just throwing a number out there. If you go and mow your lawn for 2 hours that’s $100. Now, I think you can probably pay someone 20 bucks maybe 30 bucks to mow your lawn so you could net 70. You could use those 2 hours that you would have spent mowing your lawn to do some side work for a client, earn $100. You’d pay for the lawn mowing and then some.
Just start thinking in that fashion and I think you’ll start to see that you have a lot more time and you have a lot more money.
If you like this video, don’t forget to subscribe to my YouTube channel. We just hit over a thousand subscribers. This is pretty cool. I think this is one year now since I’ve been doing these weekly videos. If you like the videos definitely subscribe. Leave me a comment below and let me know what you think. Let me know how you’re leveraging your money to buy back your time. Take care and I will talk to you again next week.