What Would You Do With 19 More Hours of Free Time During the Week?

January 31, 2012

Instead, most of us use a lot of our time to work to earn money to buy things, things that we may believe are essential to our happiness and the way we live.  These things include a nicer house, a nicer car, a nicer tv, and other stuff we might not be able to see ourselves living without.  The problem is that most of us (myself included) aren’t able to afford the luxury of having both more things and more free time.  And often when we buy more things, we ignore the hidden price we pay, which is the time we give up to work to earn the money to buy them.  A good example is the common practice of buying a larger, more expensive house farther from where we work instead of a cheaper, smaller house that would be closer.  We get excited about the bigger house but ignore the hours wasted in traffic commuting back and forth, as well as the hours needed to earn more money to pay for the higher gas, tolls, and maintenance for our car.  The happiness that the house may bring us is often outweighed by giving up the time we’ve spent to pay for it

That’s why it’s so useful to try thinking specifically about what you’d do with nineteen more hours in your life, rather than just dreaming of having more free time.  Try comparing the value you’d expect to get from  what you’d be able to do with that much more time to the value you’re getting now from the things you’ve given up your time to buy.  Where do you think you’d get more value?  Do you think you’d feel richer from having more time or more stuff?  If you said more time, you’re probably not alone.  Research has suggested that we tend to overestimate the happiness we get from buying things, which is usually temporary and fades quickly, but underestimate the happiness we’d get from having more time to do what we want.  If you think about your own life, there’s probably very little you’ve bought in the last month or year that has as much value as things you enjoy doing but don’t have enough time to do, like practicing hobbies or spending more time with loved ones.

I was catching up with a friend from high school this week, and after telling me about the three jobs he’s working to support his lifestyle choices, he said with a heavy resignation that working more and spending more was apparently the only path in life.  I felt terrible for him and wished there was a way I could show him and everyone else that there is another way to live. The good news is that even if the forty hour work week isn’t changing right away, you can start taking back control over your time right now by making better choices about how much you’re spending.  If you’re able to live on less, you won’t have to work as many hours to support an expensive lifestyle.  You’ll also be able to save money you otherwise would be spending.  Eventually you’ll have enough savings to work only part time if you want to, or if you prefer retire early altogether.  Imagine what you could do with that much time.  I even read a blog post today that said that saving just half your income while living on the other half could allow you to retire in just 17 years.

But hold on, you might say.  Wouldn’t reducing spending hurt too much?  Now that we’ve learned to see richness not just as owning stuff but also as having free time, I’d suggest you’d ask yourself instead whether not buying something would hurt more than the time you give up to buy it.  Before I buy anything, I always ask myself whether the thing will make me feel happier and richer than the time I have to work to pay for it.  For example, when I told the friend I ran into from high school that I don’t own a car, he gave me a strange look and wondered how I could do things he felt you needed a car for, like getting to work or buying groceries.  I told him I lived a five minute walk from a grocery store and I enjoyed taking mass transit to get where I was going because it freed my hands and my mind to read or do something else.  That’s when he started to understand some of the perks that come with not owning a car, like not spending money on gas, tolls, or maintenance, and not spending time in traffic.

Not owning a car might not be the solution that’s right for you but my point is that you shouldn’t feel bound to anyone’s expectations of what you need to own.  Don’t be afraid to challenge any purchase in your life by asking yourself whether it’s worth the time you gave up to get it.  If we all made better financial decisions that gave us more control over our time, we’d probably be all feel a lot happier and richer for it.