On Time, Money and Health · Today PurposeToday Purpose
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On Time, Money and Health<br>Jul 27, 2024What would you do of your $1+ million dollar sitting in your bank account or index funds in your dying bed?<br>There is something wrong with all those financial gurus out there. They only focus on accumulating wealth, instead of what truly matters: happiness. People drinking the kool-aids sometimes end up with situations so absurd, and start being so frugal they also forget in order to retire early. At the other end of the spectrum, we have some entrepreneurs or employees working 12+ hours/day simply for chasing the next million. And this at the sacrifice of simply living and enjoying life .<br>An average person has a lifespan of 72 years. It might sound quite long, but in practise, how much of the 72 years can we truly use? I’ll touch in this post about the 3 principles that, I believe, are keys to put into perspective to make the most of our life: Money , Free Time and Health . All 3 increase or decline the more we age. Most of us focus (too much / or only) on the money aspect. This is why we spend all our days working. Health and Free time are too often the forgotten ones. We assume money we accumulate during our young age will contribute to some sort of fulfillment when we will have plenty of free time when we will retire. Our society is actually designed around that timeline. But is it how we should live our life? What if once you retire, you don’t have the necessary health to travel? What if you have an incident tomorrow?<br>Time, your scarcest and most precious resource<br>A typical timeline of someone’s life looks like:<br>Under 25, we’re getting into schools, have plenty of time playing around with friends. Our health is at its best. But we’re usually low on money and depends on our parent’s money<br>At 25, we get our first jobs, and start accumulating money. Now our time is usually stuck in our jobs. We’re still really healthy and try to balance activities and work<br>At 40, we might start having these lower back or knee issues. We continue accumulating money, and our job is still what take the most of our attention<br>At 50, we continue accumulating money, and start thinking about retirement. However, we definitely know that our body aren’t as great as in our 20s<br>At 65, we retired (ideally) with a lot of cash. We have plenty of time on our hands to do whatever we want. However, our health has significantly declined and we might not have as much motivation to do activities or see the world.<br>In “Die With Zero”, the hours and energy we are “awake” to do things is referred to as “Life Energy” . There is just a limited amount of it. The main question is how do you spend that life energy? Is this life energy constant no matter our age?<br>From 18 to 40 is, in my humble opinion, the best years of our life. . Our health is at its peak. and we start making money, so can use it to do any kind of activities we wish. However with age, our health declines, and we start seeing its undesired effects starting in our 40s (some might argue 30s). We start saying no because of [ back - knees - bones - etc ] conditions. One diagram that stuck with me was the “Life in weeks” from “Wait But Why”, where we can see weeks represented in squares. I’ve adapted it to illustrate my point:
This diagram summarizes how much Free Time, Money, Health we have depending of our age:
The “best years of our life”, when our health is at its peak, and we can start to use our money, are from 18 to 40, so 22 years . For someone with a 9-5 job (or study), this is how time is split during those 22 years:
62,000 hours (33%) of our time is spent in bed. 50,000 hours (27%) is spent working and commuting. That leaves us with 57,000 hours when we could experience the world at our “maximum” potential .<br>Our Free Time is limited . Think twice before saying “no”, to delay an activity because of “saving” for the future when you probably can’t do it. Think even more when you work over-time. No-one ever said “I wish I worked more” in their death bed .<br>Spending Money as soon as possible (in the right things)<br>The (sad) truth in today’s society is that money is needed to contribute to your happinessess. Even though some might argue that money isn’t doesn’t make you happy, it definitely contributes to happinessess, to fund a pleasant , engaging and meaningful life:
What’s wrong with saving too much?<br>Most people working think about making money to save for retirement. When time comes, that money will be used for enjoying life and they’ll have more free time. There also exists now many F.I.R.E (early retirement) gurus that keeps talking about living frugally to a...