Money can buy time

We all know the adage that money can’t buy time, happiness, or love (although some people might disagree on that). But what are some creative ways that you have found money can actually buy time? Manfreed Kramer said, “Of course money can buy you time! If you have it. It should be obvious that if you have enough money on your hands that you do not have to work that this will effectively buy you the most time.”

“I’ll give you an example: I have to work 40 hours each week. This means that I am gone from my home for 10 hours each day for five days in a week.

“That translates into 50 hours of time each week which would be mine to spend if I would have enough money to NOT go to work,” said Kramer.

According to Susan Kaveny, there are plenty of ways money can buy time: “The most obvious is that you simply pay others to do work that you would do yourself if you had less money.”

“Other than that, you can spend money to acquire the very best medical care available in the world and you may just live longer.

“You can also pay others to adhere to your time schedule so that you have less down time at work, assuming that you do work.

“You can schedule back to back meetings and then take the time that would have been in the middle and have it as a block of free, useable time.

“Finally, you can retire at a younger age and do whatever you like with your time and money,” said Kaveny.

But Peter Baskerville says, you can buy time “as long as you don’t spend it on physical assets.”

“Physical assets are time ‘sink-holes’ with their insatiable demands for urgent attention, maintenance, repair, upkeep and protection.

“But money does give you the chance to buy experience and experience is time expanded in depth and breath by the freedom of new adventures, of pursuing your dreams and in overcoming challenges.

“Trouble is, if you spend your money on experience you soon won’t have much. But while no person gets more than 24 hours each day, some are seemingly able to live those hours to the full while others seem to just fritter it away.

“My bet is that the person investing what money they have in experience is the one most likely to be living life to the full and consequently buying themselves far more time than the person whose only concern in life is the accumulation of physical assets,” said Baskerville.

Just yesterday, a story about a young couple buying time was published and they did it through property investments. Scott and Mina O’Neill quit their jobs two years ago and replacing their income through property investment has given them the freedom to travel — they recently spent six months travelling Europe and are off to Fiji in a few weeks.

“We always said it was for ourselves,” Mr O’Neill said. “We didn’t do this to get rich; it is about buying our time back.”

Perhaps buying time does not mean getting more time than we have but having full control of how we want to spend it – buying the right to control our own time. It might be increased time during the day, a lifestyle change that results in more free moments. After all, time spent doing meaningful and fun things is time well spent. What do you think?

Ryan Lion made a strong point about the concept of buying time. He said, “My dad used to say this a lot… Money buys you time that has not passed yet,”

“Think of it this way: you gotta get from A to B. You can:

“Take a bus (slow, cheap)
“Take a cab (faster, costly)
“Buy a car and drive (expensive short term)

“However, money cannot buy time that is lost.

“The time wasted doing stuff you regret? Money can’t take that back…

“Treasure your time mate.”

Do you think there is a real way to buy time?