Happy day to you. This is Ken Kaufman and I’m thrilled you’re here for Episode 61: Time, Money, and Priorities. I want to kick this episode off with a quote from James Frick, and it goes like this, “Don’t tell me where your priorities are. Show me where you spend your money and I’ll tell you what your priorities are,” or I would add something extra in here. It’s, “Show me where you spend your time and your money, and I’ll tell you what they are.”
We all have these two currencies of time, and luckily we’re all blessed with that same amount of time in terms of that each of us has 24 hours in a day. I realize some lifespans are going to end shorter or extend longer than others, and that’s not the meaning or really the intent of this discussion. We all have the same 24 hours in a day. We have time and then we have money. We all have different amounts of money but, at the end of the day, the way we use these two currencies of time and money, it exposes what our priorities are.
You could sit down and you could make this phenomenal list of all the important things that you have in your life and that you want to try to accomplish but, if that’s misaligned with your bank account statement when you go through them and look and see what all your expenses are and your credit card account statements, when you look at where you’re spending your time, really quickly you can see how these two things get misaligned and actually can create a high degree of frustration. The goal for all of us should be to try to get a high degree of alignment between how we spend our time and how we spend our money and what our highest priorities are.
Now, Jim Rohn has a phenomenal quote on this that I love. I think it’s so direct and it’s right to the point. He says, “If it’s a priority, you’ll find a way. If it isn’t, you’ll find an excuse.” Now, I don’t mean this to sound harsh or I’m not trying to pass shame in anybody’s way. All I’m encouraging each one of us to do on a regular basis is to do a self-evaluation and say, “What is it that I think that I value the most? What is it that are my priorities? How am I getting those things done and making them a priority in terms of how I’m spending my time and how I’m spending my money.”
On the whole, “If it isn’t, you’ll find an excuse,” I hear these things often. When they say, “Oh, yeah. No, I needed to do this,” or, “I couldn’t save that money into my emergency fund,” or, “You know what? Next year, I’ll start putting money into my retirement account.” I often hear, “You know what? I just am not concerned about debt. I’ll just go ahead and make my payments as I get my bill on my student loan or mortgage or whatever it is and I’m not going to pay any extra down,” yet we may have priorities of working toward financial freedom or I should say freeing ourselves from being a slave to those debt payments into that debt service as it might exist.
So, that’s really it. That’s all that I want to talk about and cover today. Think about, if it’s a priority, how do we get our time and the way we spend our money aligned to show that that really is a true priority in our lives. If our families are priority, yeah, we’ve got to go to work and we sleep and those different things, but how are we creating time? Time doesn’t have to be a perfect balance, but how are we creating the quality time that’s needed? How are we spending our money to show that that is the highest priority? The more that we can do to list out what our goals and priorities are and then list out financially how are we allocating resources to those things. A lot of times it’s about saving money for the future, for vacation, or for education or school or retirement or those kinds of things. Lining all those things out and then it’s just an interesting exercise to then watch that go over to time and see how it is that we spend our time and how can we rethink those things.
I had a good wakeup call. It was about a decade ago, maybe nine years ago, eight years ago where I was really working a lot and I found that my work was starting to become all-consuming and my wife had mentioned it to me several times. I was in probably even a state of denial. It was a good wakeup call. It was a good time to sit down and say, “What is it that I really value and prioritize and how do I protect those things? How do I make sure I’m allocating my resources appropriately?”
Again, the two currencies we all have are time and our money. We all have different amounts of time but we have the same 24-hour day. We all have different amounts of money but you have what you have. How are you and how am I and how are we prioritizing our time and our money to accomplish the things that are most important to us? The most amazing part of this whole exrcise is it’s 100% up to you. It’s your deal. Nobody’s looking over your shoulder. Nobody’s leaning on you, telling you what your priorities should be. You get to decide what the priorities are. You get to decide what success is. You get to decide what success looks like. when you add all of that up, you get to make up every single one of those priorities and then decide how you’re going to spend those currencies of time and money to move forward toward accomplishing and focusing on those priorities.
Many, many thanks to you for joining today. This is a wrap for Episode 61. Happy day!
