MONEY OBEDIENCE

Setting up a budget for time

There are two things that run out easily: time and money. You set up a budget so that you don’t run out of money, but most of us don’t set up a budget for time so that we don’t run out of time even though our days always seem to be too short. If time is indeed money, then it makes a lot of sense to budget time, too. But even if time cannot be easily translated into money, it’s probably worth it to budget our time. Each day we get to spend only 24 precious hours. We’d better be careful how we spend this time. Also, no matter how much money we have or make, each one of us has only those same 24 hours. It makes sense to time-budget, doesn’t it?

How do you set up a budget for time?

It is even simpler than setting up a budget for money. The maximum we can ever spend is, yes, 24 hours, so that’s our “income,” and it never goes up, or down. (Fellow geeks, take note: This outside boundary is not entirely valid if we subscribe to Einstein’s relativity theory.)

Budget time just like you’d budget money. Once we know the “income” we have to make choices about how to use it – here, we divide our limited hours among the different things we might do with them. First, look at the time that we must spend on certain activities. (In the realm of money-budgeting, this would be your fixed expenditures.) Most of us perform some sort of work either in a job or at home, and for most of us, having hours devoted to work is not optional. Some of us even spend time on getting to and from work – and although you may have flex time, you likely have to do some kind of commuting. And then we all must sleep. All these things that we must do without fail will take up a majority of our time, just like our fixed expenses in a money budget (like rent, transportation, household maintenance and utilities, personal maintenance and grooming) take up a significant portion of our income.

Let’s pause for a moment and let’s think how much time we have left over now. Work, commuting, sustaining ourselves (eating, grooming, etc.), and sleep can easily take up 20 hours each day. There is almost no way around it. That means we are left with a cool 4 hours a day that we can spend on “fun” stuff. This is just like the money we can spend on things we don’t need but that give us pleasure. It is not much, but it is better than having no time for fun at all. How do you fill these hours? What are your needs? What and who gets your time? TV, books, friends, family, sports, …?

Sit down and set up a budget for time. While you can’t do much about the hours you must spend on certain things like work, make sure that you fill the hours that are totally your own so that the time spent in these hours makes you feel good. These few hours that are your own are even more precious when you think about how few of them you have each day. You would not want to waste them now, would you?

How do you budget your time?

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Our post “Why Use a Retirement Planning Calculator?” was included in the Carnival of Personal Finance hosted by “Budgeting in the Fun Stuff” and our post “Save Money at Any Income Level” appeared in the Carnival of Money Stories hosted by Squirrelers.

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