5 Tips to Remove Stress From Your Finances: Tip 2- Evaluate How You Trade Time for Money

Hi, Matt Blocki with EWA. Today we are talking about five tips to remove stress out of your finances. Tip two on how to remove stress out of your finances forever is to think very intentionally about time.

And there are several ways to address thinking about your time. So the first realization I had is that everyone, every day is exchanging time for money or exchanging money for time. So just think about how this is interacting in your life right now.

Are you in a salary position? Have you hired someone to help you with lawn care? Someone with cleaning everything? You’re either spending your time to make money, or you’re either spending money to free up time.

So looking at the context of a financial plan and thinking not just about the simple things like, what do I need to save for college? What do I need to save to be financially independent, to put myself in a position to work because I want to, not because I have to.

But really thinking about this also with those decisions I make. Am I going to over or under accumulate wealth? And am I happy with my life? Am I happy with my time today? And making really intentional decisions around how you specifically are exchanging your time for money or exchanging your money for time?

Now, the other thing to think about is if you’re retired. And I think this is really important for someone that’s currently in a stressful career, because I’ve gone through this with countless exercises.

When someone says, I want to retire ten years earlier, that’s very rarely the case. So, for example, I was sitting down with a doctor the other day, and they’re really stressed lots of procedures, multiple procedures a day.

And she was very stressed out. She’s like, I want to plan to retire at 50. When we uncovered that, I just asked her one question that made her change her mind, and now the plan is still work until 60.

But really be intentional about time in advance over the next decade or two decades in advance. So what does that look like? So the exercise I recommend everyone to do is look at 24 hours a day. Break this down between sleep, maybe that’s eight, hopefully how much do you work?

Maybe that’s nine. And then you have free time of seven. So the first question is how do you currently spend your time and how do you want to spend your free time? Now imagine tomorrow you’re retired.

So you have 8 hours in a day, 16 hours free time. Money is not an issue. How do you want to spend your time? And most of the time we have these really thought out answers. I want to travel more. I do this, this and this.

Well then the question is, why can’t we build in that now? Because most people, when they get to retirement, what we found is they’re at the highest level of their careers. They love doing what they do.

It’s hard to let go. And so if we just accept the fact of looking at time not just from a simple black or white, I’m going to get to this age and then retire. Because most people that retire without an intentional look at how they’re going to spend their free time end up being miserable within two years of retirement.

That’s just statistics. So looking at this while you’re in your working career, even looking at this if you’re retired, is so impactful on a year to year basis, how do you spend your time? How do you want to spend your time?

Because just kind of like a rainfall coming down the rain or snow or dirt, it fills cracks. I think about our time as an open vacuum. And if you don’t fill your time, someone else or something else, something will fill that time for you.

This is something unfortunately, fortunately we have to be very intentional about how we want to spend our time. And I love this saying, don’t. Prioritize your schedule because most likely your schedule is someone else’s agenda for your time that’s been created for you.

Instead, schedule your priorities. So this has been a big mindset shift for me. It’s something I have to work on every year. But scheduling your priorities, everything else is just going to fit in. That’s been a huge takeaway for me personally.

And then also just asking myself through some thought exercises to figure out sometimes it’s not just a stressful day or a stressful year, it’s the lack of intentionality I have and other agendas being put on my plate and just not being happy with the choice I’ve made with how I’m spending my time.

But being very intentional about thinking about time, how you spend your time, I have found has been one of the top factors eliminating a lot of stress. We can’t get stressed down to zero, typically with money.

It’s a very stressful topic, but we can definitely limit it significantly through some of these exercises. Hopefully you found this helpful and we look forward to sharing the next tip very soon.