.How Much is Your Time Worth?

April 20, 2021 by Ben Carlson

In his final letter to shareholders as CEO, Jeff Bezos took a victory lap by calculating all of the time Amazon Prime has saved for its customers:

Customers complete 28% of purchases on Amazon in three minutes or less, and half of all purchases are finished in less than 15 minutes. Compare that to the typical shopping trip to a physical store – driving, parking, searching store aisles, waiting in the checkout line, finding your car, and driving home. Research suggests the typical physical store trip takes about an hour. If you assume that a typical Amazon purchase takes 15 minutes and that it saves you a couple of trips to a physical store a week, that’s more than 75 hours a year saved. That’s important. We’re all busy in the early 21st century.

So that we can get a dollar figure, let’s value the time savings at $10 per hour, which is conservative. Seventy-five hours multiplied by $10 an hour and subtracting the cost of Prime gives you value creation for each Prime member of about $630. We have 200 million Prime members, for a total in 2020 of $126 billion of value creation.

.Classic “Money Rules” Applied to TIME

FIRE is not a single point in time. It’s a lifestyle. If you follow a basic set of money rules it will lead to a financially successful life. The same thing can be said about TIME. To me, 5am is not a single point in time, or a number on a clock face. It’s a lifestyle. Similar to FIRE, following a simple set of time rules will lead to a satisfying and life well spent.

I’ve written before about how the Pay Yourself First rule is similar to getting up early each day. (I pay the first few hours of every day to ME, not others – more here). It doesn’t matter if it’s 5am, 6am or 7… Paying yourself first each morning ensures you never lose out on personal time.

So this got me thinking…. What other classic money rules can we apply to TIME?

. A Thought Experiment from Warren Buffett

By Kyle Kowalski

Being born at the right time and the right place

The “Ovarian Lottery” is a short thought experiment popularized by Warren Buffett.

The idea is borrowed from John Rawls, a Harvard philosopher and author of A Theory of Justice. There are also earlier references like “Ovarian Roulette” from Dr. Reginald Lourie in the 1960s.

In The Snowball by Alice Schroeder (Amazon), Warren Buffett is quoted as saying:

“When I was a kid, I got all kinds of good things. I had the advantage of a home where people talked about interesting things, and I had intelligent parents and I went to decent schools. I don’t think I could have been raised with a better pair of parents. That was enormously important. I didn’t get money from my parents, and I really didn’t want it. But I was born at the right time and place. I won the ‘Ovarian Lottery.’“

.The Art of Spending

Sanjib Saha | April 17, 2021

I GREW UP IN a middle-class family in Kolkata, India. Like most folks, my relationship with money was shaped by my parents’ financial habits. They were on different sides of the saver-spender continuum. My homemaking mother strove to live beneath our family’s means and never seemed to feel deprived. By contrast, my father—even with a modest salary from his government job—was focused on the art of spending.

At my mother’s insistence, my father bought most of our household supplies from wholesalers and cooperative stores, instead of the pricier local bazaar. Branded condiments and drink concentrates were missing from our grocery list, because my mother considered them overpriced. Instead, she joined a community food-processing center to learn how to make tomato ketchup, rose syrup and the like. She used to make enough for our family, as well as neighbors and relatives. My childhood friends still reminisce about the homemade mango-flavored drinks that she served them on hot summer days.

.Final Thoughts A Legacy Letter

Kathleen M. Rehl | February 12, 2021

YOUR ESTATE PLAN specifies what you want done with your money and possessions after your death. But your life’s treasures extend beyond these material items—to your values, heritage, relationships, hopes, dreams, memories and stories. You can share some of this with family and friends through a legacy letter, sometimes called an “ethical will.”

Not long before my mother died, she wrote her legacy letter. She asked that it be read during her memorial service. Her letter began: “To you, my family, who are reading my legacy letter, please know how important you are to me and how much I love you. Life has been such a fascinating and interesting adventure. I apologize for the times I wasn’t the Mom you would have liked me to be. Please know that I really tried my best. Forgive me if I have hurt you in any way.”

.Overnight Millionaires

Posted April 13, 2021 by Ben Carlson

It’s basically impossible to discover new TV shows, music or movies before anyone else these days because everything is dissected immediately by some corner of the Internet, social media or podcast But back when Mad Men came out in 2007 my wife and I were into the show before it became a huge success.1 I wore this as a badge of honor as people eventually played catch-up on Netflix. It remains one of my favorite shows of all time.

The star of the show, Jon Hamm, took some time to find his own success as well.

Hamm was 36 when he got cast to play the ever-mysterious Don Draper. Despite being a struggling actor for many years before finally hitting it big, Hamm credits finding success later in life with his ability to cope with his newfound fame:

I think if you find crazy success at a very young age, then it can be quite dangerous. The road to celebrity is littered with people who got too much too soon and weren’t equipped to handle it.

.Fit But Not Healthy, Wealthy But Not Rich

Your Money Life – Fit But Not Healthy

By Dave @ Accidental Fire · Published April 13, 2021

I took my training too far and became super-fit but not healthy. It got me thinking then, can you take the accumulation of money too far and end up in the same situation?

Can you become wealthy but not rich?

Let me give you my definitions of those two words for the purpose of this post. Being wealthy means having tons of money, plain and simple. How about being rich? If someone asks you “Do you lead a rich life?” most folks (I would hope) do not directly equate being rich to a monetary net worth or income level.

A rich life is defined by one’s relationships, happiness, and how much they give back and engage with others in the world.

.What To Do When a Teenager’s Tastes Turn Expensive

Trent Hamm March 24, 2021

Somewhere along the line, the toddlers and youngsters that used to fill my house with noise grew up into preteens and teenagers. The toys they once yearned for and constantly played with have slowly been packed away and given to charities, and their tastes have changed. They now want gadgets — cellphones, tablets, higher-end PCs — and our oldest is yearning for a car in the near future.

While a small weekly allowance used to work great for helping them buy the occasional toy that they wanted, a few bucks a week doesn’t really get them to the point of being able to buy the things they want. Sarah and I don’t want to simply hand them fistfuls of cash, either. Should they get a job? What’s the solution?