If you had several million dollars and never had to work again, what would you want to do with your time?  Party!  How one would spend their precious time is really at the heart of most people’s wildest dreams when they imagine not having to work.  But since most of us are not wealthy, how we spend our time is tangled up with how we spend our money.  Since most of us blow most all the money we earn, we are not able to spend our time as we please.  That bites.

We trade our time and ultimately much of our lives for money.  That’s the harsh and depressing reality.  Would you drag yourself to work and put up with the office dramas and divas if there weren’t some dead presidents in it for you?  Yet even piles of money won’t add any more days to your life.  The best we can do is to figure out how to squeeze more time out of each day to do the things that we really want to do.

I’m not talking about time management.  No, we should understand the true cause of why we can’t spend our time as we please.  We should hope that it slaps us upside the head.  It should, because the reason we’re time-poor is right in front of our faces.  Just look around your house, your garage, your driveway, your yard.  See all the balls and chains?

If you want more time each day to do the things that matter most to you, then you’re going to have to trade something for it – your spending frenzy and fascination with stuff.  You’ll have to grow some gonads to do this right.  For many of us our stuff, and our desire to buy more of it, is a time prison.  We are slaves in the land of the free.  Yes, the biggest irony in our society.

We have to work too much, because we’re spending all we make buying way more than we need.  Then to add insult to injury we’re spending most of our spare time taking care of it all and little time actually enjoying it.  Such is the vicious cycle living in mega consumerville.  Much of our lives, our energy, our opportunities, are ultimately traded for stuff.  And our time is squandered, flushed down the drain, out of reach.

The solution is really pretty radically simple:  Learn to tell your money where not to go and then someday it can tell you not to go to work anymore!  That would be sweet.  Your income (no matter what the level) is your greatest tool for gaining your freedom, for adding time to every day.  So get mad about being robbed of it!  Defend your money like a mother bear seeing a threat to her cubs.  What you do (and don’t do) with your money is far more important than how much you make!

Money with a plan will stick around and give you time to enjoy.  An impressive wad without a plan will mysteriously wander off and suck away all your spare time with it.  And hope.