Way More Time Than Money

Gardening: Eat Well and Save Money

2009-04-23T19:48:00.000-07:00

Grow Your Own

Shopping at groceries and farmers’ markets is how most people find their food, but some take things a step further by growing their own food. This is nothing new, of course; during the Great Depression of the 1930s and the war years of the 1940s, many families grew gardens and fed their families from them.

Many Americans gave up gardening over the past 25 years or so of relative prosperity. Others picked up on upscale gardening (for show and as a hobby, as opposed to food for survival) as it became a popular fad in more recent years. They figured out ways to spend a small fortune on tools, seeds, and supplies for gardening, even though it’s been done since time began and without all the designer accoutrements.

The fact is that growing your own food has been around since Adam and Eve. All it takes is sun, water, seeds, and dirt. Add a shovel and you’re all set. All the fancy gardening supplies you see in stores, catalogs and online are just window dressing.

From Containers to Fields

You don’t need to have acreage in order to grow your own food. High-rise dwellers grow plants in containers on their balconies (there are many books available on container gardening) or rent a small plot at their local community garden. Expect community gardens to pop up everywhere as the economy continues to tank.

Those who have even a small piece of land will find that a modest raised-bed garden can produce more vegetables than they can consume.

And if you do have a large piece of land, you can grow food for your family and extra to share with family and friends, or to sell to others in your community and increase your income.

There are many good resources for gardening information online and at your local public library. Gardening is not hard to do, but it can be hard work and good exercise, too.

Saving Money When Gardening

Gardening is not always a low-cost activity. If you’re not careful, you can spend so much on supplies that you’ll end up with tomatoes that cost twice what they would in the grocery store. But if you use your head and try to solve your problems with thought instead of money, you’ll be able to raise a lot of food for a minimal cost.

For example, don’t assume you need to buy a rototiller to till your garden. If hand-spading or tilling is not an option for you because of your garden’s size or your back’s condition, borrow a rototiller from a friend or neighbor, or rent one from a local rental center. Not only will you save money, but you’ll save space in your shed as well.

Good tools can be found at auctions and estate sales. Many of the tools sold new today are imported and cheap in every sense of the word. Find good tools and take good care of them; they’ll be worth their weight in gold to you.

Watering your plants can be done with a hose or a bucket when you haven’t had enough rain; you certainly don’t need an expensive watering system. Watering too often isn’t good for plants anyway. Their roots will grow deeper if they don’t get watered too often.

Save on your water bill by setting up rain barrels. If you have gutters on your home, reconfigure the drain spouts to rain barrels and use that to water your garden first, then supplement, if necessary, with a hose connected to the house.

Seeds can be found cheaply at dollar stores, but don’t use those for food, just flowers and ornamental plants. You’ll come out way ahead in health and cost by buying heirloom seeds. These are non-genetically engineered seeds, and rarer than you might think. The food you grow with them is healthier, and you’ll be able to harvest seeds from the plants each year and dry them for use the following year (you can’t do that with most hybrid seeds and expect to get good produce each year). For that reason, buying heirloom seeds is actually an investment.

Stretching Your Harvest

Once you harvest your produce, what will you do with it? Three things:

1) Eat some fresh produce
2) Freeze some for the future
3) Can some for the future

Freezing requires some preparation and canning is an art in itself. You can learn the fine points of both by contacting your county agricultural agency. Again, public libraries and Internet sites are also sources of information.

Selling Your Harvest

Growing more produce than you need is a great way to bring in a side income. Sell produce from your front yard or at the local farmers’ market. If your area has a free “shopper” newspaper, take out an ad offering your produce for sale.

Don’t just think in terms of growing vegetables. Flowers are fun to grow and can be huge sellers at farmers’ markets. Each spring, grow more seedlings than you’ll need for your garden and sell the spares as garden plants for others.

If you have the room, plant some fruit trees (check with the county first to see which varieties grow best in your area). Several apple trees will produce enough apples for you and your family to eat, for you to sell, and enough bruised fruit to make applesauce and apple juice for you to can. Since most of the applesauce and apple juice currently sold in this country comes from China, and they’ve taught us not to trust what goes into their products (do an Internet search with the terms “Chinese product safety” if you don’t believe me!), you’ll be doing yourself, your loved ones and your community a real service by making good, healthy, locally grown apples available.

Gardening Makes Sense

Those with way more time than money have the time required for setting up and caring for a garden. They realize that, done properly, it’s time well spent because of the rewards. In addition, gardening doesn’t have to be an expensive proposition, and can actually save them money in grocery costs as well as the doctor bills they avoid by eating fresh homegrown food.

There’s a psychological component to gardening as well. Not only does it lift your spirits to work out in the fresh air and sunshine, but if the reason you have way more time than money is that you’re unemployed, it’s an extra blessing that gardening makes you feel useful. It gives you a place to go and work each day, at least until the end of the growing season.

What to Eat? Part 2

2009-04-20T18:24:00.000-07:00

When you need to keep your food costs down, the best thing you can do is take advantage of the fact that you have way more time than money. Prepared foods came about because people had less time and more money. But before prepared foods became popular, people cooked for themselves.

It’s ironic that televised cooking shows became popular in an era when people weren’t doing much cooking for themselves. What most were doing could more accurately be called hobby cooking. Cooking aficionados go to the store and buy what they need for a given recipe, no matter the cost, and put a lot of time into one meal. But most days, they don’t cook for themselves.

When you have way more time than money, taking time to cook for yourself is a great use of your time. Not only will your meals cost less, they’ll also be healthier. You’ll know what went into the food because you made it. You’ll be able to adjust the salt, fat and sugar in order to make your meal healthier while still tasting good.

Cooking for yourself takes time, but you have plenty of that. Let’s look at some activities in cooking that take time and save money:

Roasting

Small, precut pieces of meat that cook quickly cost more per pound than big cuts of meat that must be roasted over several hours. But once cooked, the big roast can be divided into smaller sections and frozen. Now you have cooked meat waiting in your freezer for future meals. Buy your roasts on sale and you’ll come out even further ahead.

Stewing

This uses the same money-saving principle as roasting, but adds the element of assembling full meals. Stew a whole chicken in a pot of water, remove it from the water (which is now broth), strip it and return the meat to the pot, add some vegetables, dumplings or noodles, and after a little while you have a complete meal. Leftovers can, of course, be frozen for future meals. The ingredients of a stew, added together, will always come out cheaper per serving than the microwaveable equivalent in your grocer’s freezer.

Frying

Buying the economy size of fresh ground beef, frying it all and then packaging and freezing it in smaller quantities takes time, but will result in several future meals that only require reheating in another recipe. Add frozen cooked hamburger to pasta dishes or pizza for quick, money-saving dinners.

Baking

Baked goods are expensive, and baking mixes don’t save you much money. But baking from scratch saves plenty of money. Bake in big batches and freeze the results. Making the dough for ten dozen cookies takes only a little longer than doing so for three dozen (a standard recipe). It will take longer to bake all those cookies, but you won’t have any extra dishes to do than you would have had for three dozen cookies, and you’ll end up with lots of cookies for far less per cookie than those found in bakeries or grocery stores.

These are basic skills that you can learn without taking classes. Go to the public library and get yourself a good basic cookbook or a cooking show on DVD. Invest a little time in learning these skills and you’ll be on your way to saving money on food every day.

Finding Food

After you become a good cook, you’ll have to learn to become a good shopper. Learning to get the best deals on food, using coupons, and shopping multiple grocery stores for their sale items are all ways to eat well while saving money. Learning your prices is also a very valuable skill.

Some people have had enough practice in these areas that shopping this way not only become second nature to them, but also a fun challenge: as they prepare their shopping lists, they think, “What kind of deals can I score today?”

Instead of feeling sorry for themselves for having to shop for the best deals, they realize that having the time to find the best, most inexpensive ways to eat well is very satisfying and a wise use of their time.

What to Eat? Part 1

2009-03-30T18:41:00.000-07:00

When you go from having way more money than time to having way more time than money, you find that you have to change some of your habits to reflect the new reality of your life. Nowhere is this more obvious than in the area of how and what you eat.

Paying Others to Cook for You

So many people have become accustomed to eating food prepared for them by others. In the hectic lifestyle of the late 20th/early 21st century era, who had time to cook every day? Working parents picked up family meals on the way home from work. Singles grabbed a bite at local fast food joints or met friends at restaurants. Even those who preferred to eat at home found almost anything they could want available, prepared and ready to heat and eat, at the local supermarket.

For most people, this made sense. You have to eat several times a day, but you don’t have time to make food several times a day. So you pay extra to buy prepared food.

But this only works when you have more money than time. The average working adult with a demanding job (and in these days of ever-increasing productivity, aren’t most jobs demanding?) has a steady stream of income and a limited amount of time.

Cooking for Yourself Pays

But when that steady stream of income shrinks or even disappears, paying someone else to cook for you is a steady stream of outgoing cash that you have to stop. The only way to do that is to cook for yourself.

If you think about all the overhead involved in a meal prepared for you by others, you can make a mental list of how you can eliminate that overhead so that you can eat healthy meals on an extremely limited budget. For instance, let’s think about lasagna. A lovely dish of lasagna at a local Italian restaurant will run you anywhere from $15 to $35. The expense will cover the cost of:

Growing the wheat for the lasagna noodles,
Transporting it,
Making it into pasta,
Packaging it, and sending it to the wholesaler,
Then sending it to the restaurant.

Growing the tomatoes for the sauce,
Transporting them to the factory where they are washed, peeled, pureed, cooked, preserved and shipped to the wholesaler,
Then sending them to the restaurant.

Growing the herbs for the sauce,
Transporting them, packaging them, shipping them to the wholesaler,
Then sending them to the restaurant.

Raising the cattle for the beef and pork, transporting them to the facility where they are butchered, processed, packed and sent to the facility where they are processed into sausage, then sent to the wholesaler who will send it to the restaurant.

Raising the cows, milking them, processing the milk and turn it into cheese….

By now I’m sure you get the picture. Note how many actions were involved in that description above (33, if you’re counting) and realize that each action costs money. Now add to that the costs involved in running the restaurant (the cook who makes the lasagna, the server who serves it to you, the hostess who seats you and the general overhead of the restaurant itself) and you can see why this will cost you $15 to $35 for one meal.

First Step: Warehouse Club

When you look at that description, you can see that if you move just a little ways up from the bottom, you save money. If instead of eating lasagna at a restaurant, you buy your lasagna from a wholesaler or warehouse club, you save money. Of course, that takes a little longer than eating at a restaurant: you have to buy the lasagna, take it home, and wait for it to bake (at least an hour). But the entire lasagna will cost you $10 to $20 instead of $15 to $35, and you will get far more than the one big piece you would have been served at the Italian restaurant. This means more meals in the future, which brings down your cost even further.

So it cost you a little extra time but saved you a fair amount of money. That wouldn’t have worked out that well for you if you had more money than time, but it’s definitely the right way to go when you have more time than money.

Even Better: You Make It

But let’s move further up in the process. Suppose you make your own pan of lasagna. This requires some basic knowledge of cooking and a good recipe. It also requires a trip to the grocery store to buy each of the ingredients in lasagna. Then you have to take it home, assemble it and wait for it to bake. This will take even longer than buying a premade pan of lasagna at the warehouse club, but it may cost less (depending on the prices you pay for the ingredients.)

It’s more likely to cost less if you make a really huge pan of lasagna, most of which you cut up and freeze individually for future use. If you take the time to learn prices and where you can get the best deals, you’ll come out even further ahead.

This is an extremely drawn-out version of a very basic principle: the more things you do for yourself, the more money you can save.

This is so important, it needs to be repeated:

The more things you do for yourself, the more money you can save.

This principle applies in all sorts of areas, but it’s especially applicable when we talk about food, something we cannot do without. You may be accustomed to having your food prepared by others (whether in factories, grocery store deli’s or fine restaurants), but if you now find yourself with way more time than money, this is where you need to make a lot of changes.

Where to Live?

2009-03-24T04:16:00.000-07:00

The lion’s share of most people’s incomes goes toward putting a roof over their head. That’s why you need to rethink where you live when you find yourself with way more time than money.

Even if you live in a paid-off house, it may not be prudent for you to stay there. That’s what happened to us. Our house had been paid off for several years when my husband’s business declined along with the exportation of his industry to China. We figured out pretty early on that staying in our house was not going to be a good idea.

Why not?

First off, we did not have hope of my husband or me finding a good-paying job anytime soon. With the economy tanking, his industry evaporating and mine in a similar state, (even if I could get a job in it after being a stay-at-home mom for over twenty years), we knew our hopes of keeping a decent income coming in were slim.

Why is that a problem when the house is paid off? Even paid-off houses cost money. They need to be maintained. Things break and need to be fixed. The house needs to be kept up both inside and out.

Then there were the property taxes. Ours were almost $6000 a year and rising. We knew they wouldn’t be going down anytime soon if ever.

Most importantly, the bulk of our wealth was tied up in our house. We didn’t want to tap into it with a home equity loan or line of credit because we wanted to remain debt-free (after all, why go through the sacrifice of paying down the mortgage early only to turn around and borrow money against the house again?) We could have borrowed against the house in an emergency, but we had not reached emergency stage yet and didn’t want to. We were trying to plan ahead.

What I feared most was that a tanking economy would leave us with little or no income for quite a while, forcing us to rely on our savings. Once those were used up, how would we pay our property taxes? Imagine losing a paid-off house because you couldn’t pay the taxes.

Making the Decision to Downsize

So we sold the house in 2007. It took quite a while and was very stressful. But once the deal was done, we breathed a huge sigh of relief. We moved to an area where the cost of living was much lower and rented a house for only a few hundred dollars more a month than our property taxes alone had cost us.

But most people are not in a situation like ours. Most likely you either have a mortgage, or you rent. These are two very different situations, especially today, because the housing market for sellers is not good in most areas. If you rent, you can move to a lower cost area as soon as your lease is up; that may be the most prudent decision for you unless you have plenty of work opportunities where you are now. But if you have a house with a mortgage, you’re not nearly as free to make a change.

You need to look at your situation and decide if it makes sense for you to move to a less expensive home or even a less expensive area. Only you can make this decision. If having more time than money looks like it will remain your situation for some time to come, you should put the sign out in the yard as soon as you can. Price your house very competitively (10% under current market, which is not what your neighbor got back in 2005 when things were hopping) and hope for the best.

What If You Can’t Sell Your Home?

If your house does not sell within three months or so, reassess your financial situation. It could be that you can hang on for a while by renting out a room to a boarder. Many people are doing this now that the economy is wobbly. Check with local authorities to make sure it’s legal in your neighborhood. If you have a spare bedroom and a basement, you can rent to two people and bring in a steady income. Boarders also help with utility bills, which are always going up.

(Utilities are another area where you can pare down your monthly outgo. Keep your electric bill down by unplugging your television and computer every night. Yes, it will mess up the channels on your television. But you might be surprised at how much money you’ll save each month and decide it’s worth the inconvenience. That’s what happened to us. We saw enough savings that we now unplug the microwave each night. That little display on it does use a steady if tiny amount of electricity. Every little bit counts!)

Hopefully you’ll sell your house soon and move to a cheaper area. “Cheaper” sometimes means less safe, but with some study and searching you should be able to find a cheaper area that does not sacrifice safety. If a reasonably priced area looks clean and safe to you, the only way to know for sure is to live there and see for yourself.

The Rental Advantage

This is one huge advantage to renting a place to live. If you don’t like the area, you can move. But if you do like it, you’ve found a way to keep expenses down that will make a big difference to your bottom line.

If you decide to bring down expenses by renting a place to live, there’s a good chance that you’ll end up downsizing. This is nothing to be ashamed of. In fact, if you can accept that you’re living in a smaller place, you’ll find there are many benefits. For instance:

There’s not as much space to clean.
It costs less to heat or keep cool.
Renters’ insurance is much cheaper than homeowner’s insurance.
When something breaks, it’s the landlord’s problem, not yours.
You’ll likely have less yardwork to do (in our case, far less; our landlord insists on a lawn-mowing service so we do no yardwork.)

Renting an apartment or condominium also means you can leave town easily when you want to. You don’t have to worry about who will water the shrubbery or pick up newspapers left on the driveway while you’re gone. You’ll have more freedom to come and go; if anything goes wrong inside while you’re gone, there’s a landlord to take care of things.

Deprived? Not Us

I’m sharing all these advantages of downsizing and renting because they help balance out that feeling of deprivation that can occur when you’re forced to do these things. It was hard for us to give up our home of 20 years. We were the only ones who had ever lived there (we watched it being built). Many, many family memories were made there. We wondered what our family and friends thought, watching us go from a large house in the suburbs of a big city to a smaller rental house in a little town several hours away.

But once we got past that, we reveled in our newfound freedom. When you have way more time than money, you want to be able to enjoy that time, instead of worrying about the money so much. Selling our house took an enormous weight off of our shoulders, and gave us the opportunity to enjoy the freedom created by downsizing our living situation.

Best of all, it allowed us to stretch our limited amount of cash by reducing living expenses while adding to our supply of time….very important when you have way more time than money.

Life Without Debt

2009-03-23T07:54:00.000-07:00

For people with more time than money, the most important factor in living happily and contentedly is to be debt-free.

Some people define debt-free as having only a mortgage. That’s not debt-free. A mortgage is usually an enormous debt! I’m talking about living completely debt-free.

My husband and I have lived on one income since the early 1980s. The only way we were able to do so is by borrowing as little as possible, and paying off what we borrowed as soon as we could:

We bought our first home in 1981 for just under $70,000 with a 13 ½% mortgage.
We began prepaying on it soon after. When we sold it in 1988, we cleared
$70,000, and put all of it down on our next house.

That house cost
$140,000. It was new construction, and the sales agent at the office where they
sold the houses expressed her disbelief that we were putting down so much money.
She wondered why we didn’t go out and buy a $350,000 house instead, since we had
a 20% down payment on one.

We bought our first car together in
1980. We had the cash for it ($900) but took out a small car loan at our bank in
order to establish credit so we could eventually qualify for a mortgage. It was
a 12-month car loan and we paid it back a few months early.

After
that, we only bought two cars with car loans. Both were new cars, and we kept
them for many years. We paid off both car loans early. In the years since then,
we’ve bought one new car, two late-model used cars, and one very old used car
and paid cash for all of them.

We do use credit cards, but only
when traveling, for gas, for online orders and for large ticket items. We always
pay the full amount at the end of the month. We don’t even look at the minimum
payment amount.

These transactions may seem trivial and ordinary, but together they saved us many thousands of dollars over the years, and resulted in our becoming debt-free in 2002, when we paid off our mortgage.

The Joy of Debt-Free Living

It’s hard to describe how wonderful it feels to be truly debt-free. Since the housing bubble burst and the economy began its descent into recession (and possible depression) territory, we’ve seen the devastation that has occurred among people who borrowed far more money than they should ever have been allowed to borrow. I can’t imagine what it’s like to have cars repossessed, homes foreclosed on, and treasured possessions sold to raise cash.

We were sad when my husband’s business closed down, but we were not in financial distress. We chose to sell our house and rent a smaller one (by then two of our kids were out on their own anyway) while we considered our next step. What would we have done if we’d owed a lot of money on our home, cars and possessions? We would have been wiped out.

Instead, our frugal ways bought us time to decide our next step. No one can take away our possessions because we own them. We have options. For that, we are grateful.

First Steps

If you’ve found yourself with more time than money, and you have debt of any kind, spend some of your time figuring out how to change your financial situation:

Sell whatever you can and use the cash to pay off your debts.

Commit to paying for things with cash instead of credit
cards.

If you have equity in your house, sell it and rent some
place cheaper. Move to another city or state if you have to.

Nice
car? Sell it, pay off the loan and buy something cheaper.

The more debt you can eliminate, and the more cash you can accumulate, the better off you’ll be, and the freer you will feel. As I said, it’s hard to describe just how good it feels to be free.

My Story

2009-03-22T07:52:00.000-07:00

For me, having more money than time is a byproduct of being a stay-at-home-parent. I’ve been doing this for 27 years. My husband and I chose to give up my income so that I could be home with our children during the day. I went from feeling trapped in a third-story corporate office to being in charge of each day of my life. True, my Fridays no longer included a paycheck with my name on it, but it was worth it to be able to set my own schedule.

The economy was not doing very well when I left my full-time job in 1982. We had a 13 ½% mortgage and thus a hefty house payment. But my dream job working in the corporate headquarters of a large company had become my prison. I quit because I was so unhappy, after some coercion from my husband, who was worried about my emotional state. (He had to push me to quit because, as much as I hated working there, I felt like people only a few years out of college should not quit their jobs.)

Once I was home every day, I began job-hunting. But I also began using cost-cutting measures to make up for not bringing in any income. I cooked and baked from scratch, shopped at garage sales and made gifts for family members instead of buying them.

When I didn’t find another job within a few months, we decided it was a good time to start a family. During my first pregnancy, I prepared for the baby’s birth by buying infant clothes at garage sales, while my husband built a crib.

Our first child arrived a year after I quit my job; we had another child 18 months later. Thus began the start of many very busy and happy years for me as a stay-at-home mom. We eventually had two more children, and the four of them kept me busy enough that I never had to go back to work full-time again.

Today, my children are either grown or almost grown. Raising them was a joy, and it was also a great education for me. When six people live on one income, they learn to stretch a dollar. We never lived a life of luxury, but our children have always had what they needed.

Losing Our Money Source

In the mid-1990’s, my husband became self-employed in a manufacturing-related business. He earned a good living for several years. But by 2001, his business started to slack off due to competition from China. Two years ago, he was forced to close down because of lack of available work, and a lack of ability to pay on the part of his customers. He has not been able to find work in his field anymore, and is currently educating himself in other areas in hope of becoming self-employed in another field.

When his business closed down, we chose to sell our family home and downsize to a rental home in a less expensive area of the country. We do have a side business that brings in a modest income, and are currently making plans for the future.

Introduction

2009-03-21T19:41:00.000-07:00

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.