The most important bank account you have is your time account.
Pretty much all other bank accounts you can invest in, make savings and stock things up that will probably be there after you're gone. As far as your time bank account is concerned, you've already retired and stopped contributing - that happened the day you were born.
You can make investments in this to try and make it last longer; investments in health, investments in exercise, investments in well being but of course the market can just crash (cancer diagnosis or otherwise) where circumstances outside your control clear your account.
Those things aside though and all things being equal, it's very important to decide where you 'spend' your account. The first thing you can do is spend it at work. Spending at work is effectively transferring time out of your account to put money into another account. As long as you always understand that that's the case then you can do what you like but don't be mistaken in thinking it's any other way.
You can kid yourself on that spending the time at work allows you to do great things in the time you're not at work but you've given an awful lot away to get the money to get those things.
The second thing you can spend your time on is your family. You can take time that you would have been at work making money to go into that account and you can spend time with your family putting it into your family account. It depends what gives you joy and I guess that perspective changes with circumstance and changes over time throughout your life.
The third thing you can spend your time on is yourself. This is perhaps the thing that disappears when family and job come along and the thing we give up mostly freely but is probably the most important.
When the realisation comes that you have a diminishing, limited bank account of time yet the opportunity to have an almost infinite bank account of money if you try in that area, the money becomes less valuable and the time more.
One of the side effects is that you don't suffer fools gladly but you become more and more controlling over how your time is spent and what you feel is valuable but it's all a matter of perspective.
Blog Post Number: 1145
Leave a comment