A Personal Finance Post #1: “Time is Money”

     First off, by reading my personal finance posts, you’ll become a millionaire.  Yup, a millionaire.   “How can simply reading your blog make me a millionaire?” you are definitely asking right now.  The answer?  It can.

   Over the past year, I’ve become increasingly interested in personal finance.  I’ve read dozens of personal finance books, read hundreds of posts on personal finance blogs, gotten advice and shared lessons with others, researched nearly every aspect of personal finance, and even wrote a twenty-one chapter outline of a personal finance book – all because I’ve realized the importance of money; not of money itself, but what it takes to earn that money. 

   When you frivolously spend, you are actually frivolously spending (or wasting) your time; i.e. your life.  When you spend $30 on a new book at Barnes and Noble instead of $5 for that same book on Amazon, you just spent $25 of your time/life frivolously.  If you make $10 an hour at your job, you just spent 2 1/2 hours at work (to earn $25)  because you wanted the instant gratification of buying the book at Barnes and Noble, instead of spending 30 minutes at work (to earn $5) to buy that book on Amazon.

    If you spend $5 on the book rather than $30, you could spend those extra 2 1/2 hours that you saved doing… anything you want!  You could even spend that time not working because you now don’t need that extra $25 for the book!  Imagine that!  If you spend conscientiously, you will actually get to work less!  This lesson applies to every single area of spending.

   The old adage, “Time is Money,” is certainly true.

   I’ve practiced everything that I preach, and all of it has worked.  Now, it’s all second nature to me, but it wasn’t always that way.  It’s taken me a long time, tons of discipline, and lots of focus to institute these practices into my daily life, but it has been totally worth it.

   Spending money wisely relieves an unbelievable amount of stress.  For example, imagine not having any credit card debt.  Imagine paying off the balance each month and never paying interest!  You could finally put that money to something more useful and fulfilling than interest on your credit card balance.

   As some of my readers know, I have been working on and off since September of 2007 due to illness.  I’ve worked for only about 4-5 months since then.  Still, I have been able to easily cover my monthly expenses because I’ve taken advantage of most every money-saving and wise-spending opportunity presented to me.  Admittedly, many of the opportunities presented to me were done so by family members, so I’ve been very lucky.  However, I still had to implement and rigorously follow my methods with even more money than I’d have otherwise if it weren’t for my family.   It’s been proven that the more money one earns, the more he or she will go into debt, so I knew I had to be even more disciplined.  In the end, staying disciplined has drastically reduced my stress levels and has saved me much energy that instead of devoting to stress, I can devote to my health. 

   Everyone can save.  I will teach you many of my methods and mindsets necessary to become financially worry-free in a series of topical personal finance lessons, for you, my billions of loyal readers.   So, keep an eye open for these posts!  Better yet, subscribe to my RSS feed to have the posts delivered directly to your email account!

   Finally, the two lessons from this first personal finance post:

• Time is Money.  Simple.
• Simply by reading my blog you’ll undoubtedly become a millionaire.  Very quickly. (by quickly, I mean slowly).