I am a big fan of thinking about money in different ways. This helps put things in perspective to help me make the best decisions in life.

I like to think what I’m discussing here is the same as when Einstein showed that mass has an equivalence to energy! Maybe not quite as ground breaking as that, but awesome nonetheless!

Most of us go about spending money without ever giving it too much thought. Especially for purchases we consider ‘small’. When making these purchases, often your grey matter is completely bypassed as the hand reaches into your back pocket to hand over your hard earned cash.

But I’m Pat the Shuffler, and shufflers like to engage their grey matter to give themselves the best life possible.

What if we each made a conscious effort to think about money in terms of time? If instead of a cash economy, each of us operate on our own personal time economy.

What I mean by this is, what if you take your after tax hourly rate and we converted those dollar figures into minutes of work.

Let’s say you earn $20 after tax for every hour worked.

A $20 purchase now means a purchase that costs you ‘1 hour of work’!

How long are you working just to buy the lunch and coffee you have while at work?

Paying $15 on lunch and $5 on coffee doesn’t seem like much. But convert it into time instead. You are spending ’45 minutes of work’ paying for lunch, and ’15 minutes of work’ paying for coffee. You went to work today for a whole hour just to pay for that day’s lunch and coffee.

That’s the opposite of shuffling, that’s insanity.

How about if you bought coffee and lunch every day you work?

You are working an extra 240 hours, that’s a full 30 days of full time work a year to pay for the lunch and coffee you are having whilst at work.

If you stuck to the instant coffee at work and brought a packed lunch, you could easily save $15 dollars a day, or ’45 mins of work’ a day. So you are saving yourself 22.5 days of work every single year!

If I offered you an additional 4 weeks of holiday leave every year, all you had to do for it is stick to the instant coffee and bring a packed lunch into work. Would you take that deal?

If you consider the investment potential of that money, it becomes even more clear that investing that money instead is the only sane choice.

Let’s now apply this to a few other purchases.

Would you buy a new pair of jeans that cost $100? How about ‘5 hours of work’ to pay for that one pair of jeans?

Would you buy a new TV for $1,000? Even if your old one still worked fine? That is ’50 hours of work’, or over a week of full time work for your new TV that you probably don’t even need!

How about when making a car purchasing decision?

Let’s say Car A is brand new, has leather seats, a large engine and sleek modern looks. It costs $20,000. Alternatively, Car B is second hand and goes vroom. It costs $5,000.

Car A costs 1000 hours, or 25 weeks of full time work. Car B costs 250 hours, or 6.25 weeks of full time work. You would be working half a year to pay for that $20,000 car, I’m not even including running costs in this calculation!

I know which one I would choose!

I’m not going to work for half a year to buy a car that I own primarily for the purpose of transporting me to work.

That’s insanity, and that’s not how a shuffler handles their money.

Let’s now go back to the lunch and coffee scenario above to discover something truly astonishing. Some may be tempted to think that is worth working an extra 22.5 days a year to cover their extra lunch and coffee expenses . But what if I extend that to a full 10 years? Someone who earns $20 per hour (after tax) and pays the extra $15 a day for lunch and coffee like I described above, is working 1 in every 10 years to pay for their daily lunch and coffee.

I am truly lost for words to describe that sort of insanity.

If after knowing this, you still opt to buy lunch and coffee daily instead of bringing a packed lunch, then I can’t help you. The best I can do is recommend the best psychologist I know.

I have long thought about the time cost of money in my own life in this way. In my previous job, there was an abundance of overtime offered. I used to actively tell myself that I would just do more overtime to cover my larger discretionary purchases! I was a bit silly back then. If I had access to that sort of overtime now, I would take it and invest all the extra money I earned.

I’m retiring in 10 years , and packing my lunch today is the only sane choice.

Shuffling through dollars and time.

Pat the Shuffler

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