TIME investment

[Paul]

“Time isn’t a commodity, something you pass around like a cake. Time is the substance of life.  When anyone asks you to give your time, they’re really asking for a chunk of your life”.

~ Antoinette Bosco.

You will find the majority of people value their time at zero.

Most don't ever think about it

Most think It’s free. Like the air we breathe, they’re convinced that time is abundant and in endless supply. They live as if they were immortal. They are certain that time, the fuel of their life, never runs empty.

Take a look around. How do strangers, friends, family, and peers value their time?

• Are they standing in line to save £5 for a shirt in the Next sale ?

• Are they driving 30 minutes to save £10?

• Are they parked on the sofa anxiously waiting to see who wins X-Factor?

   

The average UK person watches more than four hours of TV each day.

In a 65-year life, that person will have spent nine years glued to the tube.

Why?

Simple. Life sucks. Life needs an escape. Life is no good.

Show me someone who spends hours online playing CandyCrush or Farmville, and I’ll show you someone who probably isn’t very successful.

When life is crap, escapes are sought.

You shouldn't need television because you invested your time into a real life worth living, not a fictitious escape that airs every Tuesday night at 8 p.m.

Again, majority thinking yields mediocrity, and for that majority, time is an asset that is undervalued and mindlessly squandered.

People standing in queues to save money ought to hold a picket sign announcing to the world,

“I value money more than my life.”  That choice is a primal mistake.

A great example to time’s reigning dominance over money comes from the 1997 movie, Titanic.

As the ship sinks and few lifeboats remain, Caleden Hockley, a wealthy steel industrialist played by Billy Zane, bargains for his life with a ship’s officer and offers cash in exchange for a lifeboat seat. The officer rebukes the tycoon’s proposition with a certainty:

“Your money can’t save you anymore than it can save me.”

Reflect on that for a moment. Your money can’t save you any more than it can save me.

Powerful. In those eight seconds, the true value of time is exposed and we intersect with the certainty to our own ticking death-clock.

You see that once your time is gone, you’re dead.

When your clock ceases to tick, no amount of cash will save you from the end.

Time is the greatest asset you own, not money, not the 1969 restored Mustang, not grandpa’s old coin collection. Time.

The fact is all of us are on a sinking ship.

Is your time treated as such? Is it treated fairly or carelessly?

Or is your primordial fuel squandered as if the tank will never run empty?

YOU WERE BORN RICH AND WILL DIE BROKE

Time is the great equalizer.

You were born with a full tank of petrol.

There are no petrol stations, and your one fill-up occurred the moment you took your first breath. Time can’t be created outside of your mortal limits.

Sure, we might be able to stretch a 76-year lifespan to 82 with good health and diet, but within mortality, time is transformed from infinite to finite.

The greatest theft of all humanity is to act as if our time on this Earth is infinite when it isn’t.

Yet when it comes to money, we treat it scarcely when it is actually richly abundant. While that might seem backward, it isn’t because our time is fixed.

The reality is that time is deathly scarce, while money is richly abundant.

On any given day, $3 trillion is exchanged in the world currency markets.

That’s $3,000,000,000,000

It is not hard to earn yourself a six figure income if you have invested your time right on the right things, whether its self employment, writing a book, getting better education, self betterment, expansion, learning. GOOD use of time will reward you back ten-fold

You can always acquire more money, but you cannot defy mortality.

The irony of financial fortune is that no matter how much you have, you’ll die flat broke.

You cannot escape the continual combustion of time as your tank drips time every second. You can live in blissful happiness or in a miserable depression—time is indifferent and it just bleeds away.

There are two types of time that will make up your lifespan:

Your free time and your indentured time.

• Your Lifespan = Free Time + Indentured Time

 

• “Free time” is yours to spend as you please:

reading, cooking a new meal, a jog in the park, a walk in nature, sleeping, eating, holidays.

If you’re like most, your free time is lumped on evenings and weekends, where time is not exchanged for money.

 

• “Indentured time” is the opposite:

It’s the total time spent earning money and the consequences of that spent time.

When you awake in the morning, shower, dress, drive to the train station, wait, ride to work, and then work for eight hours—this is indentured time.

When you spend your entire weekend “recharging” from the work-week, this is indentured time. Indentured time is actual work and the work you must do for the work. Morning rituals, traffic, compiling reports at home, solitary “recharges”—whatever time spent earning a buck is indentured time.

If you won the lottery, you’d quit your job because indentured time is no longer required and is suddenly replaced with free time.

 

Money buys free time and eliminates indentured time.

However, the irony of your free time is it isn’t FREE

It’s bought and paid for by your indentured time.

• You enjoy a two-week holiday because it was paid for by a year of indentured time.

• Relax with a cold beer on the sofa because you paid for it earlier in the day with eight hours of indentured time.

Indentured time becomes the ransom of your free time.

THE RIGHT TIME VERSUS THE WRONG TIME

There’s the right time and the wrong time.

The right time is free time; indentured time is the wrong time.

Most people ransom time - time at the job and time invested in the markets.

Remember, five indentured days for two free days is a bad trade!

A financial plan with time as the adjudicator is not a good financial plan.

If you were born into slavery, your life would be 100% indentured time with 0% free time.

While total time can’t be manipulated, we can manipulate our time ratio.

Wouldn’t it be nice to have one day of indentured time and six days of free time?

If you can steal free time from the hands of indentured time, life will have more of the “right time” versus the “wrong time.

”DUMP THE JUNK”!  If you follow motor racing, you know that every ounce of weight counts.

Racers remove everything none-essential to make the car as light as possible.

This increases efficiency, speed, and performance, resulting in faster finishes.

Unnecessary weight forces the car to work harder.

Yet on our road trip of life, we’re guilty of forever adding weight.

Your life vehicle is burdened with 'junk-in-the-trunk' that coerces you to work harder

When you work harder long enough, it wears you out and breaks you down.

Then there is debilitating weight is parasitic debt.

Parasitic debt is everything you owe the world.

It is the excrement of Lifestyle servitude.

• Your shiny new 80” LED flat-screen financed at 60 monthly payments

• Your overly big, home mortgage financed over 30 years

• Your fancy designer clothes four months removed from out-of-fashion

• That insidious furniture that seemed like such a good idea at the time.

  All of this crap creates servitude and forces indentured time.

When you’re 'forced' to work, you limit choice

Parasitic debt is a counterweight to your road trip; it’s a bloodsucker that steals free time, energy, freedom, and health—all foes to true wealth.

PARASITIC DEBT DEVOURS FREE TIME

The leading cause of indentured time is parasitic debt.

You’ll have heard the phrase” thief of hearts.”

When it comes to parasitic debt, it is the “thief of lives.”

Parasitic debt is a gluttonous pig that gorges on free time and shits it out as indentured time. Parasitic debt is the mother of indentured time. Any debt that forces you to work plunders from free time and shifts it to indentured time.

Parasitic debt is expensed by your free time. Debt needs a constant drip of blood, and that blood comes from your petrol tank of life: Time. And since time is fixed, an increase in indentured time comes from only one source: your free time.

THE COST OF PARASITIC DEBT

The average UK citizen owes more than they are worth. Last year it was around £29,000 owed per adult citizen

Having a lifestyle built on credit creates lifestyle servitude in the form of indentured time because total time is finite, indentured time grows by pilfering from free time.

The next time you buy some fancy gadget on credit, know exactly what you are buying.

You’re buying parasitic debt that eats free time and excretes it into indentured time.

For example, if you buy a mega high end audio system that costs £4,000 and you make £10 per hour, what’s the real price?

That price is 400 hours of your free time, since you must work 400 hours X £10 per hour to repay the debt.

Add 10% interest and your final cost stacks up to 440 hours of your free time added to your weight burden.

So next time you whip out the Visa or sign on the dotted line, calculate the real cost.

How much free time is this going to cost me?

Everything we buy hasn't one cost, but two:

1.The actual physical cash ££ cost

&

2.The free time transformed into indentured time.

When I first moved out on my own, I quickly learned the Law of Chocolate Chip Cookies:

If the cookies don’t get into the grocery trolley, they don’t get home, if they don’t get home, they don’t get in my mouth, if they don’t get in my mouth, they don’t transform into a belly fat.

Parasitic debt follows the same law.

Control parasitic debt by controlling its source: instant gratification, a trait of the majority and NOT the minority

The next time you feel compelled to buy some trinket at Debenhams, ask yourself:

Will this be obsolete in six months and land in the garage with the rest of the junk?

In six months, will this stupid tribal T-shirt be relegated to that dusty side of the wardrobe reserved for painting smocks?

Again, when you purchase the next greatest fashion fad without truly being able to afford it, you open the floodgates to parasitic debt that flows you  downstream 

If the cost of that product doesn't make it to your credit card, it doesn't become parasitic.

You become a protector of free time! Think!    Will this purchase TAKE MY FREEDOM?  Will I own this or will it own me?

While some choose servitude behind iron bars, others choose servitude behind call centre desks or laying bricks daily. Both are one in the same.

The ultimate wealth is having the free time to live how you want to live.

A POOR VALUATION OF “FREE TIME” LEADS TO POORNESS

Rich or poor, time is equally possessed, shared, and consumed by all.

Every day, you use it. I use it. Your neighbour uses it. No one gets more and no one gets less. No one escapes it.

Twenty-four hours for everybody. And guess what?

You don’t get 25 hours. You don’t get 21. No one has an unfair advantage.

You, me, we all have 24 hours to consume, expire, and spend.

Time is the ultimate equalizer.

Then why do so few get rich while the rest wallow from payday to pay day?

The distinction lies in the valuation of free time, your life choices and the acquisition of parasitic debt.

Guess the behaviours 

• This person sleeps until noon.

• This person watches hours of reality TV

• This person drives two hours to save £10

• This person spends hours surfing social networks and gossip blogs

• This person is a Level 10 - Druid in World of Warcraft

Behind the tangled roots of poorness, you will find a poor valuation of free time, which breeds from bad choices.

“Time losers” are poor evaluators of time.

• These are the people camped out at Asda at 4 a.m. waiting to grab the early bird sales Polaroid defunkt 40” big screen TV.

• These are the people waiting outside Krispie Kreme for their free launch doughnuts that is awful for your body

   

If these people had three months to live, would they be outside the boxing day Next sale in a sleeping bag waiting?

Six months? Six years?

At what threshold will these people pack up their sleeping bag on the pavement and say,

“What the hell am I doing sleeping outside of a clothes store ? Is this a smart use of my life?”

A better person will exalt time as their primary consideration in decision-making because it’s our most valued asset. Be frugal with your time, be frugal with money

I wonder, have I wasted my 'time' by posting this ?

[ApisMellifera]

You're on it Paul!

 

Yes, totally agree. I also find it amazing to see people staring on their mobile phones. I have been cycling to work the last couple months and have to manoeuvre around pedestrians who cross the streets with their ears firmly on the screen and wearing headphones! Cars also seem to accept it and seem to let them off. Times changing ey.

 

Having said that, I might read the post when I finish work, on my phone.

 

We may save time with these new 'upgrades'

 

 

 

[HighlandTiger]

I'll read all that when I have some free time.

[sovereignsteve]

Great stuff, you're a real philosopher Paul.

"If you can steal free time from the hands of indentured time, life will have more of the “right time” versus the “wrong time."

My favourite sentence, I try to live this way as much as I can.

[Paul]

Thanks folks 

Other things with regard to wasted time to consider that have entered my head to consider in no particular random order to consider

• Why does society deem it right in this day and age for nearly all the working population leave the house at the same hour to all join the same clogged roads, to leave for the same lunch time, to leave work to re-join the same queues.  If you can embrace remote working from home, virtual conferencing, doing your shopping in the dead of night. Self employment, internet based business.  Waste as little of your own time as possible.  I've never been in a traffic jam morning or afternoon for years unless totally unavoidable.  Always planned my time around them

• Consider how people assume your time is infinite when THEY call YOU because they have unlimited land-line minutes after 6pm - when you never asked them to ring. (yadda, yadda, yadda-ing on about telling you about themselves, their postman's liposuction going bad and their neighbour who was lighting a fart and their bush catching fire).  Caller ID is a godsend for avoiding this

• Wasting time being on hold to phone to any numbers of companies banks, utilities, council,   Utilise internet, emails and ring back service for them to call you.  Don't use first point of contact if youre complaining, make your first complaint an escalated one to their executive complaints team.  Know the companies complaints regulator or ombudsman .  Addressing a personal complaint directly to a director of a big company will soon get it delegated to the best person to respond and resolve.  Get it to the organ-grinder not the monkey. They should bend over backwards to help you

• Saying 'yes' to everything & everybody asks from you because you don’t know any better and don't like to disappoint.  Extended family members, neighbours down the street, associates down the pub assume you are a resource to help them using your time to help them as they are too cheap or arrange to do it themselves, people assume you have no valuable use of your own time other than to exclusively knight- night helping others    .......hey PAUL, you've got a van, can you come with me and pick up a 2nd hand settee I've seen on gumtree, its over Gateshead, 20 miles, we can go Saturday after lunch, it will only take a few hours.  You're always off on Saturday aren't you ?   You up for it? .........errr ....NO {insert generic made up excuse}

 

[MickB]

http://bemorewithless.com/the-story-of-the-mexican-fisherman/

This sums it up as well..

[KDave]

On 5/29/2016 at 15:12, MickB said:

http://bemorewithless.com/the-story-of-the-mexican-fisherman/

This sums it up as well..

Yep heard this a long time ago and it really does sum it up well, but everything is relative. To me spending all day everyday fishing for my entire life does not sound very appealing if I am honest. Sounds like indentured time 

It comes down to what people value ultimately. What one person spends their time on may be very valuable in whatever terms they value where as others would feel it was a total waste. There are no right and wrong answers. No right and wrong times either. It all depends on what you value. Without going into specifics I like my job for example, because it is difficult, challenging and not many people can do it but ultimately I do it because I need the money. If I won the lottery I would leave work but would need to find something else that was difficult and challenging to do - in other words my work provides value. So which is the free time and which is the indentured time? Some people never retire from work even though they could quite easily do so. What should we make of that?

The answer is - who cares what anyone else thinks about how you spend your time. Life is short. Value is relative. Do what you value. 

[SilverGrain]

Yes very interesting post. Have to agree, however it did take up ten minutes of my free time reading it!!!! or should I say indentured time