Your Money or Your Life: Where is the balance between Time, Health, & Money
Your Money or Your Life
Table of Contents (Jump Links)
Your Money Or Your Life is a book I find myself coming back to again and again. It’s an easy read that touches on some core truths about life and money. Originally written in 1992, then updated in 2008 and 2018 it’s clearly a book that’s resonated with millions of others.
It has a way of calmly reminding us that we don’t need “More” and that everything we buy is part of our life energy we are giving away, so spend your life wisely!
One of the core ways this book changed my thinking was realizing that money is a representation of “Life Energy” after all you likely worked for that money trading your literal time for money.
One of the things I often think about is clutter.
Clutter represents wasted money, things you bought on a whim or impulse, The junk in your garage or attic collecting dust used to be money. Money. You worked hard for and traded your literal time for.
Therefor clutter is lost time, or life energy that you’ve wasted or thrown away. I was recently over at a friends house and was shocked by the amount of clutter they had (Note it wasn’t that bad, I’m just very anti-clutter in my life). I couldn’t help but feel I was looking at a graveyard of life energy! Every item was hourse they had worked at their job just to be thoughtlessly discarded on junk.
How many extra days did they have to get up early to go to work for that novelty bat he never sued. Or the goofy hat from the fair ground? Those books on the coffee table nobody reads, or toys in the garage left unopened?
All of this used to be time! Kind of painful to think about! Now this isn’t to say you should never buy anything and live a minimalist life with only 5 worldly possessions.
But we should strive to be mindful of what we accumulate and recognize that everything we buy is a form of lost life energy.
Thanks to this book I’ve come to see money as captured life energy. When we waste time we get annoyed or frustrated, we know we can’t get those moments back. But money is time we were able to store in the hope of trading it in later for something we may need or want.
The way I Calculate life energy is Yearly Savings / Days in a year = $$/ day
So if you make $100K per year and save 20% of that then the price of your lifes energy is $54.79/ day
The reason I calculate it this way is we have living expenses that we can’t ignore, We must pay rent or a mortgage to live, you have to buy food pay for transportation, utilities etc.
Also lets say you don’t work weekends you may argue your time is actually worth more than $54.79/day. I would counter that argument because days you don’t work you don’t make money. It ends up averaging out.
Either you could use these days to make more money, or if you need the time to recharge and enjoy your hobbies or family that’s an opertunity cost you must account for.
The only life energy we can capture is what we save. In my example above for every $54.79 spend will delay your retirement 1 full day.
Lets break this down a little further.
$54.79/ day
$2.28 Hour
$0.038 Minute
These are painful numbers because it reminds you how much even a small purchase is costing you.
That $6 Coffee? = 2.63 HOURS
That $600 Rooma = 10.95 days
That $60,000 Truck you don’t really need= 3 Years
It really makes you think about the things you spend your money on.
Now on the flip side of this conversation I think it’s important to recognize that there are things that are very much worth your lifes energy. Maybe you want to go on a vacation that costs you $4,000 which may represent 2.4 months worth of life energy.
But that vacation will create life long memories, give you a sense of purpose bring joy to your family. And overall help you create a life worth living. That 2.4 months is a price you gladly pay!
And this is the point of viewing money in terms of life energy. It’s not to villainize spending and say you need to horde it to make the bank account number go up.
It just forces you to decide if what you spend your money on is truly worth the energy it took to put that extra cash in your pocket.
In the book “Die with Zero” the author takes a look a the flip side of this conserving life energy mindset outlined by your money or your life.
You see there is another way to waste your life energy than spending all your money on foolish things.
That by never spending it at all. You can’t take it with you when you die. So if you trade your time for money and never sepnd it that was time wasted.
Many of you have probably heard of the janitor Ronald Read who died in 2014. He became famous not for the life he lived but the $8 million he left behind after he died. After he died he donated it to his local library.
The book Die With Zero points out that this seems like a waste. Think of the causes, family, and friends he could have helped over his life time with some of that money. Or better yet the experiences he could have had over the years to live a more full life.
People tend to gravitate toward penny pinching everything or spending far more than they should at the expense of their future selves.
Another thought provoking section of the book was where you break your life down into phases, where you must balance your 3 assets. Time, Money, & Health.
In early life you have lots of Time and Health but little Money
In mid life you have more Money and Healthy but Typically little Time
In late life you tend to have more Time and Money but declining Health
This is an useful way of looking at the cycle of life. Instead of just prioritizing for money we need to recognize that Time and Health are also assets in our life that are in limited. supply
The book “Your Money or your Life” does a good job highlighting that fact that money = time for many people at least until they are able to get investments working for them. Eventually we have to start prioritizing our health and time over a large bank account, or else we never truly life a full life.
At the end of the day dying with zero is an interesting concept to ponder and how we hope to optimize our 3 phases of life and balance Time, Money, and Health we have in each.
However I feel this concept overlooks overlooks 1 key point about money. While we can’t take it with us we can use it to buy assets and make more money. This is important because over a long period of time if you put money to work for you early, it can far out earn you over your life time.
So if you die with zero you likely didn’t have as much money to spend because you over spend early in the process. To truly optimize these 3 categories you probably want to be a little heavy on money because it is the only one that can replicate itself. Your health, and time once spent are gone forever.
It’s a tricky balance though and the math will work out differently for everybody. Especially since we don’t know how long we have of how our health will change over over our lifetime. Some of us will be healthy into very old age, others will have health issues that limit them before they reach old age, so we must tread carefully.
Once again I’ve written a post that starts out as a simple money concept and by the end of the read is an article about life! This is why they say personal finance is, well personal.
For me I’ve already retired so my main goal is to stay retired which gives me plenthy of time. But my health, specifically my eyesight is getting worse and there are things I’d like to do while I still can.
Such as buy a beach house! While money isn’t unlimited I know with some planning I can make this a reality and maximize the years that I am still relatively healthy and have plenty of time thanks to my early retirement.
Let me know in the comments below what you’re doing to maximize your time, money ,and health!
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