Posted on October 12, 2009 - by Alex

Buying Back Your Time – A Path to Personal Freedom

Motivation isn’t my problem. I’ve come to realize that writing quality content—or producing anything worthwhile (in accordance with my own standards)—takes time. Specifically, I need at least 1.5 hour time-blocks to get real work done. And that’s tough when you’ve conceded eight hours a day, five days a week to your employer. Subtract also the time I commit to my family, and the remaining time to build my personal empire is slim pickings. So what keeps me—or any of us—from just walking away from our monotony and working on what’s important to us? Our lives are important, damnit, so what the hell!?? Oh, that’s right. We gotta pay the bills. Gotta feed our families.

Doing the Math

But what if that was taken care of? How much do you really need to pay your expenses and live in relative comfort? For me, it’s about $2,000/mo, and if I had that covered, I’d quit my job—wouldn’t you? Entertaining the thought further, if I had 10,000 in savings, I’d be set for five months. And I earned an additional $1000/mo part-time (definitely plausible), I could survive for ten months. Bills Paid, family fed. That’s what ten months could cost me. I don’t know about you, but I could do a lot with ten months.

Own Your Time

Since I’m not gonna win the lottery, it’s time to start saving up for something more rewarding than what I’ve been doing for six years. The way I see it, I’ll be buying out my time. You might say—but Alex, nobody owns your time. To which I’d say—oh, but they do. My creditors own a lot of my time because I need to work to pay them. I suspect most people are in a similar situation. We’re all a little enslaved by our debt. And it’s costing us more than the interest rate we’re being charged.

The Snowball Method

You’ve probably heard about this strategy for paying off debt. If you haven’t, the idea is to focus on paying off accounts that free up your disposable income, in turn pyramiding those dollars to the next account until that one is paid, and so forth. As you pay off more accounts, more disposable money is freed up, accelerating the repayment of the total debt—a snowball effect. I’ve been doing this for about a year, and I’m down to my last credit card. The idea here is to make yourself into a fiscally-compact free-agent with as few parties owning your time as possible. I’m making headway.

Long Term Look

Once I’ve paid off all my credit cards, I’m going to make massive payments on my car loan, then my student loans. In the next year, I hope to owe nothing but my mortgage. Next, I plan to bank up several months-worth of reserves and quit my day job to focus on building my business full time. I’m buying-back my time. I’d love to hear from anyone that has done something this, so please leave me your comments below.