For an audio version of this post, please click on the speaker icon (top left).

 

Before you think that Suze Orman has somehow hijacked my blog, let me explain.

The average lifespan of a man in the United States currently is hovering around 76.1 years.

That works out to 27,776.5 days + 19 extra days for Leap Years for a grand total of 27,795.5 days or 40,025,520 minutes.

Given the, potentially unrealistic, goal of sleeping 7 hours a day you can subtract 11,674,110 minutes, leaving a time awake balance of 28,351,410 minutes.

Given that I just turned 50 years old, my expected time balance is 13,754,160 (and with 4,011,630 of that lost to sleep I have an estimated 9,742,530 minutes of awake/usable time).

Each day we live we are forced to withdraw from our time bank 1,440 minutes.

If you had a net worth of $15 million and you had to spend $1,440 a day (or $525,600/year) how would you feel?

Some might say this is acceptable as the nest egg is sustainable with a “safe” withdrawal rate of 3.5%.

However, unlike the above net worth example, we do not earn interest on our time nest egg so all results from the Trinity study get thrown out the window.

There is indeed no such thing as a safe withdrawal rate when it comes to minutes remaining.

A common saying is “Time is money.”

 

 

For me time is far more valuable than money.

Time is a finite, depleting resource for each of us.

It falls squarely on the scarcity side of the Abundance-Scarcity Mindset continuum.

Even worse, we don’t have tools at our disposal to keep track of the remaining balance like we do in the financial realm.

Consider this scenario:

 

 

• You are given a checkbook and can write as many checks as you want.
• The only stipulation is that you do not know how much you started with or what funds remain.
• When the funds are completely depleted that’s it, game over.

 

How careful are you with these checks knowing the rules of the game?

Yet each of us already is smack dab in the middle of such a scenario.

We are each given a checking book of life the moment we are born and start cashing checks every minute until that last final check clears.

You find yourself constantly stuck in gridlock for your daily commute?

How does writing a check for 60-90 each time sound?

And what if you are female?

Congratulations.

You get to add an extra 5 years to your time balance (and an extra leap day to boot) which adds another 2,629,440 minutes to your coffer.

The only thing we know for certain is that time is not promised and that you indeed cannot stop father time.

“Time keeps on slippin’, slippin’, slippin’ into the future.” -Steve Miller Band

It is up to us to therefore choose what activities are worthy of using up our precious, non replenishable commodity of time.

I do hope you found this blog post worthy of the 5 min time check you just cashed to view it.

 

 

Note:

If you are in search of financial help, please consider enlisting the service of any of the sponsors of this blog who I feel are part of the “good guys and gals of finance.”

Even a steadfast DIY’er can sometimes gain benefit from the occasional professional input.

 

 

-Xrayvsn