Oct 27 (edited) • General discussion
Time Wealth: Why Free Time Is More Valuable Than Money
Most guys spend decades optimizing for the wrong fucking metric.
They grind to six figures, then seven, stacking cash while their calendar fills with obligations they can't escape. Golden handcuffs. They call it success because that's what they were told to chase.
But here's what nobody explains when you're climbing: once you hit around $75K-$100K (depending on your location and lifestyle), additional income stops buying freedom and starts buying complexity. More overhead. More people depending on your time. More meetings about meetings. More obligations you can't walk away from without blowing up the whole structure.
I know guys pulling $300K who have less autonomy than I did at $80K. They can't take three weeks off. Can't ignore their phone for a day. Can't turn down projects they hate because their burn rate requires constant feeding.
Here's the actual metric that matters: How many hours per week do you HAVE to work to cover your fixed costs?
Not your income or net worth. Your required working hours.
If that number is above 15-20 hours, you're not building wealth. You're building a job with better pay.
And every dollar you add to your lifestyle that increases that number is making you poorer in the only currency that actually matters.
Calculate it right now. Take your monthly fixed costs (mortgage/rent, utilities, insurance, minimum food, transportation). Divide by your effective hourly rate. That's your freedom number. Everything above that is optional leverage.
The guys who get this right are structuring their income around assets and systems that don't scale linearly with their time.
Rental properties generating mailbox money for minimal oversight. Digital products that sell while they sleep. Equity positions that pay regardless of hours logged. Service businesses where they're not the primary deliverable. Dividend portfolios covering baseline costs so they never have to be a W-2 slave again.
I'm not talking about the FIRE crowd retiring to Thailand on $30K/year eating rice and beans. I'm saying build enough fuck you money that your baseline survival doesn't require trading 40+ hours every week.
Once you hit that threshold, every additional hour you work is a choice, not a requirement. That's when work becomes interesting instead of suffocating.
Most guys do this backwards. Lifestyle creep is real. They increase spending to match income, locking themselves into higher and higher required hours. The $50K guy needs 40 hours to survive. Gets a raise, upgrades his life, now needs 45 hours at the new rate to cover the new baseline. Keeping up with the
Joneses. Repeat until death or burnout.
The play is to hold your required hours steady (or decrease them) while you scale income above that line. The gap between required and actual working hours is your real wealth.
This week: Calculate your actual required working hours. Be honest. Include everything you can't walk away from without consequences. If that number is above 25, you have a structural problem, not an income problem.
Then ask: What's the next decision I'm facing that will increase or decrease that number?
New car payment? Increases required hours. House poor because you bought at the top of your approval range? That's years of trapped hours. Moving to a cheaper area? Decreases required hours.
Taking the higher-paying job that demands 60-hour weeks? Depends if it builds toward assets or just higher lifestyle.
Every decision either buys you time or costs you time. Most guys don't realize they're selling until they can't buy it back.
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Time Wealth: Why Free Time Is More Valuable Than Money
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