Enjoy Real Wealth: Own Your Time

Money is not wealth.  A consumerist society tries to convince us that accumulating the most money possible is the optimal goal.  But having Scrooge McDuck amounts of money does not make you feel wealthy.  Learning how to trade resources to maximize your happiness is how you feel wealthy.

A misunderstanding of wealth is why so many lottery winners end up broke or in debt.  They suddenly have an abundance of money on their hands and want to use it to enrich their lives, but they have never considered how to best improve their lives with this new tool.  Rather than pausing and reflecting, the common tactic is to spend like rich people spend, emulating the purchases of the wealthy.  This means buying a new car, a big house, and a boat that they never needed before realizing none of those purchases actually increase their happiness in the long run.

The best explanation I know to consider the difference between financial wealth and true wealth is to watch Selling Sunset, my guilty pleasure reality TV show.  Each member of the cast spends hundreds of thousands of dollars on accessories, fashion, and cars.  However, they are all stuck in these high-stress lifestyles that demand expensive purchases to keep up and allow them to sell fancy houses and gain followers on social media so they can keep making excessive amounts of money to then spend to level up again.  They are stuck in a cycle of high spending.  Despite the fact that their wardrobes are worth more than my home, they are completely owned by the real estate industry, an industry that never takes a break.

The cast of Selling Sunset wears six-figure jewelry, walks in five-figure shoes, drives six-figure cars, and spends five-figures a month on beauty services, but nobody on the show owns their time.

Owning your time is real wealth.

The Misleading Wealth Ladder

Most of us are not on the cast of Selling Sunset with a need to wear extravagant outfits to sell $20 million homes, but most of us still do not own our time.  We are blindly taught to earn as much money as possible at a day job so we can eventually save enough money to retire comfortably at age 65.  Our perceived wealth achievements between the major stops of starting our career and retiring at regular retirement age are whether we can buy the home we want, go on annual vacations, and pay for college for any kids.  Some of us may even consider whether we can buy a truck, landscape the yard, or buy the fancy watch stops on the wealth ladder.

But that wealth ladder keeps you tied to a job, allowing an employer to control your time.  You have a boss who can tell you that you are not allowed to take a vacation when you want to even if you have the money to pay for that vacation.  What is the point of having the money if you cannot use it to build the life you want?

The best way to use money to generate wealth is to earn just enough to trade money to control your time.  That is the whole idea of early retirement—saving and investing enough to take back your time to allocate how you wish.  If the nicest weather of the week is on Tuesday mid-morning, you do not have to sit in a meeting gazing out the window wishing it was Saturday because you own your time and can decide to make Tuesday the day you adventure on a mid-morning walk.

Wealth is still related to money because we need enough money to support our basic needs over time in order to buy back our time.  Existing costs money.  The consumerist money-wealth trap is when individuals believe they need to earn money for the sake of earning money rather than determining what amount of money they need to support their lifestyle and control their time indefinitely.

So How Do I Own My Time?

Generating enough money to own your time is the fastest way to become wealthy, but the journey is not simple.  Achieving financial independence by accumulating enough money to support your lifestyle in perpetuity is one way to own your time, but there are simpler ways that get you closer.  

Entrepreneurship is a huge step to a wealthier life because while you still have to work, you own your time.  You can take that sunny Tuesday off because you have to work sometimes but not at specific times as decided by an employer.  While entrepreneurship is not complete freedom, it provides time control.  Any day can become a Saturday!

There are some employment opportunities that allow more time ownership than others, allowing employees to live a more fulfilling life.  Professors that teach only a couple classes while conducting research in areas of interest on their own timelines may experience this kind of freedom while still being tied to a job.  While they do not completely own their time, they own enough of it to feel empowered and wealthy.

That sense of empowerment is what most 9-to-5 employees lack.  Employers control eight hours of an employee’s day, sometimes more when there is a commute.  Nobody can feel they are living a wealthy life when one-third of their time is spent working towards someone else’s agenda.  The path to wealth is regaining control.

The Fake Wealth Trap

Consumerism only works if most consumers buy into the cycle of earning more money to buy more things.  If you remove yourself from the cycle through disinterest in buying things, you can escape the cycle.  However, the engrained mentality of the need to earn more can still give individuals pause when they consider using money to gain wealth by owning their time.

Some employees who have accumulated financial wealth forgo true wealth because they fear missing out on their highest earning years.  We generally earn the most money in our 50s, the later part of our careers.  Age 50 is also around the point when it becomes a bit more normal for those accumulating wealth to realize they may be in a position to retire early.  Instead of deciding to control their time, many opt to work because the opportunity cost of leaving the workforce when they could be earning their highest salary is terrifying.

This mindset is a consumerist trap because we rarely consider the other opportunity cost:  At age 50 we are far healthier and more mobile than we will be at any point after age 50.  Maintaining muscle mass becomes more difficult, and our recommended peak heart rate is lower.  At age 60, we cannot do the activities we can at age 50.  And if you have the opportunity to own your time sooner, this rings even truer for age 40 or age 30.

The opportunity cost of owning our time is missing out on earning our highest salaries in our career.  But the opportunity cost of working through all our healthy years is missing a chance to pursue every adventure, achievement, and memory that requires youth, health, mobility, and energy.

True wealth is pursuing your dreams while you have the ability to achieve them.  Having more money at the end of your life can never come close to remembering every adventure and knowing you lived your fullest life.