“Time is the fire in which we burn” – Delmore Schwartz

Frugal, as my mother used to say, is not about being cheap. It’s about focusing your efforts on what’s worthwhile. There are many things that you can do to chase money around the world. If you chose, you could spend all your days and nights earning or saving money, quantifiable and additive, world without end.

But in reality, we have a finite life. And because of that end, our physical end, you can’t get all the money. So now you realize that time, which is finite, will create a limit to how much money you can make, which is theoretically infinite and you might be tempted to think that time is money. Yes and no. It’s often traded for money when we accept an obligation to work for a set number of hours for a set wage, but it’s not the same as money. Many self-employed people, investors and other capital-savvy people will know that it’s quite possible to exit that cycle and get money for things other than your time.

I actually think that time is the opposite of money. It’s the only thing that is free for us to have and invaluable at the same time. We are given the gift of life in full measure, but it flows from our fingers in a constant stream we can’t control. It’s the counterweight to money, the thing that we buy back with good salaries, wise choices and investments. So time then flows into separate pools ‘“ our free time that we use to conduct our life and hopefully enjoy pleasure and leisure activities, and our paid time, which we try to maximize to earn as much as possible.

So, I have a few comments about the scales of time and money and how people propose to save it for you. I think it’s the heart of frugality to simply realize that sometimes you can spend free time on something in order to save money, but that you must avoid making it seem like work in the process. If it’s time spent solely for the purpose of saving money, then you have to compare it with paid time, and judge accordingly.

The math to doing this has several logical layers. I use my after tax income to calculate my per hour worth. For example, if I earn $20,000 a year after taxes from working 2000 hours a year, then I need to save money at the rate of $10 an hour for it to be worthwhile. Next, there is the marginal value of money. There may be $50,000 in theoretical money-saving activities that I could undertake to recapture $10 an hour, but I’d have to give up sleep, personal hygiene and family life (see my previous column about too many DIY repairs on my house). I run out of free time to convert into paid time at some point (and where that point lies is a personal, quality-of-life kind of decision). So, the next step is to figure out how much free time you might have available and triage your options to pick from the top, say, 200 hours a year of money-saving habits in order to maximize return.

Unless you enjoy it, of course, in which case it’s a form of leisure and all bets are off. You may even want to use some kind of pleasure factor in calculating your choices. Here’s one example of my logic:

1. It’s logically good to haggle for the price of a car or a house. I can save hundreds of dollars for just a few hours of research and bargaining.

2. I hate haggling and I suck at it.

Therefore: It’s equally as good for me to pay a haggle-fiend friend of mine to do the dirty work for me and split the savings. I’ll either keep the saved time as free time and enjoy myself while still saving money, or I’ll invest the time in happier activities that earn me roughly the same amount of money.

You might feel otherwise about haggling. You might love it (in which you should call me – we could work something out) and it’s therefore worthwhile for you to haggle for a half hour over a $3 mug at a yard sale. That’s a recreation, and I find more people are skilled are figuring out how to prioritize their recreational time to get the most out of the limited time we have.

If you apply this principle to your budgeting, and remember to include your income and your time, you will hopefully get more of what you want in life and less of what bugs you.

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