Introduction

Human nature is funny. We always want what we don’t have. If we have plenty of money, we wish we had more free time. If we have plenty of time, we wish we had more money.

The only people who have plenty of money and time are those who inherit a fortune and those who win the lottery. Interestingly, some turn out to be the most vapid people on the earth (think Paris Hilton), and many end up destitute because they squandered both their time and money. (This explains why so many lottery winners end up broke; some even commit suicide.)

Another funny thing: Why do we complain that we don’t have enough time to do the things we want to do, yet the idea of having more time than money scares us to death?

Maybe it’s because in our society, having more time than money means you’re unemployed, or retired, or a stay-at-home parent, which also means you’re not out in the world making your mark (and plenty of money at the same time). And that’s a stigma in today’s world.

The irony is that you can make more money, but you can’t make more time. We only get a limited amount of time on this earth, which makes it infinitely more valuable than money. We only get just so much time with our loved ones, just so much time to relax, just so much time to do what we want.

Why Does the Speed of Time Vary?

Ever notice how the clock moves? For most people, time really does fly when they’re having fun. Being on vacation makes time speed up. Visiting someone you love, laughing with them, talking and joking….time spent that way makes those hands spin around the clock’s face. You find yourself looking at your watch and saying, “Oh, I’ve got to run. I’m late! Where did the time go?”
But when you’re sitting in on a dull meeting at work, time slows to a crawl. You look at your watch and think, “How can it only be a few minutes since I last checked the time? That can’t be right. That had to be fifteen minutes ago.”

When I was a child, sitting at my desk in school, bored out of my mind, I’d watch the clock and think, “Two hours from now, I’ll be out of here.” And as the teacher droned on, I’d watch that second hand make its revolutions around the clock ever so slowly, and I’d wait…..it seemed to take forever until the buzzer finally sounded. Then we’d bound out of the room, down the hall and out of the building as though it were on fire. Free at last! (Well, until tomorrow, anyways.)

Time, Money and Success

We love being free, having ownership of our time. So why are we so afraid of having more time than money? Simple: having money is a prime goal of most modern people, while having time is not a priority.

We might not want to admit it, but we love money. In America, we grow up believing that having money is good, and having more money is even better. Having so much money that we can live in a fancy house and buy whatever we want and show off to others (particularly our detractors) is the best.

Unless you’ve inherited pots of money, the only way you’re going to become rich is to work for it. To spend hours and days and weeks and years of your limited-in-terms-of-time life to make money. You have to trade your time for money, and in a society that highly values money, that’s considered the smart trade, the trade of the successful.

So if you find yourself with more time than money, you’ve obviously flunked the school of success, right?

Wrong. No matter how you got to the point of having more time than money, you haven’t flunked anything. You’ve just got a different time/money proportion than others do.

Now there are some people who have more time than money because they’re lazy. They’d rather sit around and drink beer or watch daytime television than do anything useful with their lives. You’re not one of those people. If you were, you wouldn’t be reading this right now, because Oprah’s on.

No, people who have more time than money usually get to that point by choice or by force. These days, many people (maybe you) have been laid off from their jobs and can’t find another one. They find themselves with a lot more time on their hands and little or no money coming in. To them, having more time than money feels like a punishment.

It feels that way because of our society’s emphasis on having money. But when you lose your job, you’re forced to slow down, and if you’re paying attention, you discover that having more time feels good. Of course, in order to feel that, you have to let go of the terror of being unemployed. This takes time.

Switching from More Money to More Time

It’s so easy to feel sorry for yourself when you end up with more time than money. If you’ve lost your job through layoffs or forced retirement, you’re likely in a lot of pain, in fact, you’re probably grieving. Getting through that grief is a process. But you will get through it, and once you reach the point where you feel like fighting back, you’ll discover that you have abilities and talents that you can tap into in order to stay afloat by using the newfound time on your hands wisely.

That’s what this site is about. Learn what those of us who have had more time than money for years have learned. You can live a happy life without being a slave to your paycheck, to your boss, to the clock. Does this mean you’ll never work for a living again? Probably not. But if you use this gift of time that you’ve been given to become more self-sufficient, to learn to stretch a buck, and to learn to simplify your life, you may find that you like having more time than money, and how you spend your time in the future will reflect that.

We often face unwelcome changes in our life, changes that happen due to events beyond our control. We fear them, and when they occur, they may hurt as much as we’d always feared. But once we come to accept the changes, we find that they were actually gifts, because they led us to personal growth, and things we never would have experienced had nothing changed in our lives.

For some reason, you’ve been given an opportunity to learn and grow and change in positive ways, by finding yourself with more time than money. It’s up to you whether you sit and mope, or rise to accept the challenges in front of you.