Reading Yaro Starak's The 2-Hour Workday: What Is A Travel Buffer -post today got me thinking about money, time and the concept of being rich enough. It's a concept I've been looking at for a while, probably since I read The 4-Hour Workweek by Tim Ferriss and started thinking about the possibilities to "design my life" back in May this year.
When one is rich enough? Is being rich all about the money? I don't think so.
Who Is Truly Rich?
Let's look at three individuals, making different income working different hours for it.
Which of these persons you consider to be rich?
- Person A. $500000 a year, 80 hours a week.
- Person B. Makes $30000 a year working 12 h / week.
- Person C. Makes $50k a year, 40-hours workweek.
The former is often considered rich, the two latter are not.
I beg to disagree. In my mind, being rich has nothing, or very little, to do with money.
The Value of Free Time
Is someone making $500k a year with 80-hour workweeks truly more rich than someone making $30000 annually by working 12 hours a week for that money?
Time to make some calculations, keeping it real with 24 hours days and assuming the standard 8 hours of sleep that most people need.
- There are 168 hours in a week, and
- We have 112 hours awake.
Our Person A, kicking in 80 hours a week for work, has 32 hours a week for his non-work related hobbies, family and friends. And the Person B, with the 12-hour workweek, has 68 hours more every week to do whatever he/she wants.
That is 3536 hours MORE free time a year for the Person B. What would you do with 5 months of free time?
Our "rich" workaholic has a whopping 1664 hours free time a year (+ some vacations probably spent partially for work-related matters) compared to the 5200 hours of our "non-rich" person B. Our perhaps most average "worker", Person C, is somewhere in the middle with about 2000 hours more free time a year than the Person A and about 1500 hours less than the Person B.
But The Person A Can Retire in Couple of Years!
True, but is the money really worth the "wait"?
What if these people had children? Let's say two each. By the age of ten, the person A would have missed about 8 years from the life of his/her children (4 years each).
What is 8 years in the life of your children worth to you?
I don't think there's a price-tag big enough for that.
Rich Enough
It's about enough money. It's about having time of your life. It's about friends, family and happiness.
At the moment, I work for 40 hours a week on my day job and use my free time doing other things I like -- hobbies, friends, blogging and such. I'm not earning half a million or even near that, but I'm happy where I am.
I also put quite a bit of hours into my work and my endeavours in the blogosphere, so in a sense I am not rich, not financially or time-wise.
For me, rich enough means that I have enough money to get everything I need and I don't sacrifice all my time for that money. And in the future, I'm not so much looking to make more money, but I plan to make enough money with lot less time spent.
I make a good living and I have good amount of free-time to do whatever I want, even that I can be considered a "cubicle slave" working 9-5, 5 days a week. I use quite a bit of my "free time" for building up my blog, which can be seen as a part-time job. I look at blogging as something that's partly an investment for the future and partly an hobby, something I enjoy a great deal.
So I use my hours to learn and develop myself, both at work and off, and I'm able to do the things you like and are passionate about. With all this, I'm building a foundation and working towards my goals, and getting rich enough.
Time > Money
In that sense and what I wrote above, working 12 hours a week and making enough money is more appealing thought to me than making a million a year but killing myself doing it.
I think having a million dollars in the bank would be great, but it's not something I need to feel rich. I value my time and spending time doing the things I like. Being with the family and friends is far more important than adding a digit to my annual paycheck.
Why? Because five years from now, I can't buy back time. There is no money in the world that can give you something that happened last year. (If you're reading this on the year 3300 or so and life as we know has changed because of time travel, come by and say hello, I'll edit the post a bit.)
I'll end this post with a partly modified quote from the 1946 film, It's a Wonderful Life -- one of my all time favorites, by Frank Kapra featuring James Stewart.
No one is a failure who has friends.
Words of wisdom and something to remember when things don't go as you've planned.
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