114 | Limited Time, Unlimited Money

Time is a finite resource. Once it’s gone, it’s gone.

Money is infinite. We have unlimited access to money.

But we typically treat our time and money as if the opposite were true.

In this episode, let’s talk about trading time for money and how you can use your money to buy back your time instead.

Topics Discussed

• trading time for money vs. trading money for time
• an effective analogy to look at how you’re using the time you have left in this life
• why money is unlimited
• how what you do with your money impacts your time
• how you can trade money for time

Listen to the Episode 

Resources mentioned

Devotional: What’s Here Now?

The Joy of Missing Out: Live More by Doing Less – Tanya Dalton

Work with me

If you’re ready to learn the mindset and strategies to master your money, let’s schedule a call. 

Connect with me

Social media: Instagram and LinkedIn

Email: hello@rhothomas.com

Recent Episodes 

Lightly Edited Transcript

You’re listening to Wealthyesque. We are a community of lawyers who believe that true wealth is having control of our time. I’m Rho Thomas, and as a busy wife, mom and former Biglaw associate, I know all too well the tension between the culture of the legal profession and pretty much everything else you want to do in life. That’s why each week, I’m bringing you the information and tools you need to improve your money mindset and manage your money to create true wealth. Because ultimately, it’s not about the money. It’s about the freedom and flexibility the money affords.

Hey friend. Welcome back to the show. I hope you’re doing well and having an amazing day so far. So today we are talking about limited versus unlimited resources. And specifically, we’re talking about time and money. So a lot of times we talk about money in this limited fashion as if there’s only somebody around and we act as if we have all the time in the world. But in reality, the opposite is true. The only truly limited resource we have is our time. Once it’s gone, it’s gone and you’ll never get it back. Money on the other hand is unlimited. There is so much money all around us and there are so many ways to make more money. Money and time are related. So most people trade time for money by going to work to earn money, right they spend time at work and in exchange for that time they receive money. But just like we trade time for money, we can also trade money for time. Part of that is the financial independence piece that we talked about before. So you manage your money in a way that you can use some of it to improve your own financial position. And eventually you get to the point that you no longer need to spend your time to earn more money. Another part though, is paying for services that free up your time to other things that you need or want to do. So an example of this for those of us who are parents is paying for childcare so that you have time available to work. With partner or go out with friends. And so when you’re thinking about how you’re spending your resources, you want to be more mindful of how you’re spending your money and how you’re spending time. So think about that relationship book out. In the last few weeks. The subject of how much time we have left to live came up three times. It was in a devotional idea are we gonna present a motivational YouTube video I watched and a book I read called avoid missing out by Tony Robbins. down to how many weeks we have left the YouTube video on to analogize the time we have left to many in a bank account. So for example, let’s say you have 50 years, there are 52 weeks in a year. So that’s 2600 weeks. 50 years feels like a long time, but how do you want to spend those 2600 weeks? If you had $2,600 to your name, how would you manage it? You’d be a lot more careful with how you spend that $2,600 than you probably are with the way that you spend your time that analogy was really eye opening to me because it’s so true. We spend our days it’s we’re gonna live forever and waste a lot of time living last night we’re supposed to be living rather than the one we actually want. So when you think about the life that you want to be living your money, this unlimited resource that you have access to can help you to conserve or to spend your limited resource your time in the way that you want to. So now let’s talk about this point about money being unlimited. We think about money as this finite thing in our lives. This is how much I made the end right but there are so many ways to get more money. I used to sell stuff we were no longer using online. My husband got a second job. At what point will you hit certain metrics at your law firm or company or your bonus or I started a business while I was still practicing and I was making more money that way. And each of those instances is trading more time for more money right? But the key man is what you do with that money. Most people view money as a way to buy more stuff. So we get more money and we go spend all or nearly all of it. So we’re in this endless cycle of spending more time to make more money and spending that money on more stuff. And it’s been in more time to make more money and so on. A lot of people think about it this way. So if this is you, you’re not alone in that. And of course we all buy stuff and I’m not suggesting that that is bad in and of itself. But what if you shift your view of money so that the primary purpose is not to buy more stuff, but to buy more time. When I happened, I was reading more of our time for more money. We weren’t using that money to buy more stuff. We use it to improve our finances, which ultimately led to us being able to have more control of our time and spend more time doing things that want to do. So let’s look at this. paying down your debt decreases your monthly expenses because it decreases the amount of money that has to go out each one. So my minimum student loan payment was almost $1,000 a month, my husband was about 3500 So that’s $4,500 a month that we no longer need to cover our living expenses now that paid off those. Looking at minimum payments, if they were lower, you could have more money available to accelerate your other financial goals. You could take a job paying less if your firm or your company offers a part time policy like my former firm did, you could take advantage of that and spend less time earning money because you need less money to sustain your minimum living expenses. You can also use the money that you make to invest so rather than spending it putting it to work so your money makes more money, which also helps you buy back your time. This is the whole premise of retirement and the financial independence movement. Right when you invest your money, which you may already be doing through your retirement accounts. Like if you have 401 k or IRA. Sometimes my clients don’t realize that’s investing and feel like they need to get into investing like you’re already investing that’s investing. We invest enough money, you get to the point that you no longer need to spend time to make money, which most people aim to do by 65 years old. But even before that point you may be able to free up some of the time that you would spend during money actively because you have money coming in from another source like from these investments you’ve made. Also, some people are aiming to hit that point before traditional retirement age right before age 65. So you can do that as well. Another way you can trade money for time is paying for services that allow you to free up your time to do other things. We talked about the childcare example but there are so many ways you can outsource things in your life by giving a little money to be able to have that time back to what you want. There’s nothing wrong with doing it as long as you fit it in your budget. I talked before about how after we had our second child we were struggling with cleaning our house regularly. We used to get up on Saturdays and clean the whole house. And after the second baby we were exhausted and we were exhausted with the first baby too but I feel like the second takes it to a whole new level you know and so we hired a cleaning service and they come every other week. And it’s been the best investment that we made because we used to spend most of the day to clean the house on Saturdays. And when we hired a cleaning service, they cleaned it top to bottom and we did like two or three hours and they’re done. So we get all that time that was in the cleaning system with our kids to relax, to hang out with each other to do other things that we need to do and we were willing to trade that money to get that time back. So often especially when we start paying more attention to our finances and managing them better, we become so focused on holding on to every dollar and trying to do the most efficient things with our money. And it’s not to say that we have that right like Is there anyone who is great, making sure you’re being more intentional in your money. But you also wanna make sure that you’re looking at the trade offs to hanging on to that money versus spending some of it to free up some of your time because as we talked about already, time truly is your only limited resource. So if there’s a task that you don’t particularly like that you can outsource, it doesn’t hurt to at least look into how much it would be to have someone else handle it. People at work had been telling me for years about having people come in to clean their houses. And it seemed like such a foreign concept to me. I thought it wasn’t the right people and I wasn’t rich. I was actually feeling quite broke in those days and felt a lot of scarcity around money, which stemmed from the way that I was thinking about the debt that we had and save our finances. And so I never even bothered to look into it. I felt like we were doing fine with cleaning anyway. But when I actually looked into it, like when it got to the point that we were having trouble cleaning regularly, I looked into it and I was surprised to find that it was pretty affordable. Like if we had looked into it sooner, we might have done it sooner. So if there’s something that you may want to outsource, get some actual data on the potential cost. If it works for your finances, there’s nothing wrong with making that investment to free up your time. All that said let’s be more mindful of the way we manage our time the same way we’re being mindful of how we manage our money. Money is much more available than you might think. And the way that you manage the money available to you can lead to you freeing up more time or it can lead to you needing to continually spend more time to make more money. If you’d like to learn to manage money in a way that leads to freeing up more time I am here to help you so just head to rho Thomas.com slash call and let’s schedule some time to talk. Alright, so that’s it for this week’s episode. Come connect with me over on social media. You can find me on LinkedIn rho Thomas and Instagram I am rho Thomas. Subscribe to the show and leave a review, which help people to find it and please think of a friend or two who could use this information and share this episode with them. As we close out. Friend I pray that you take the information you learn here apply it in your life and open up to the realization that wealth is available to you. As you do that consistently week after week you continue to take steps to regain control of your time, build wealth, and live the life of freedom and choice. You deserve. Talk to you later.