On this episode of The Passive Income Attorney, Seth discusses what your time is truly worth. He encourages you to look away from trading time for money and look towards creating a passive income to make money while you sleep. Enjoy!
“Many times, we find ourselves married to our careers with seemingly no escape, that 550i, and that big house, they are shackles. If we’re lucky, maybe we’ll step away for a week or a weekend once or twice a year. Otherwise, we’re shackled.”
HIGHLIGHTS:
0:00 – Intro
0:51 – We typically place a value on time, like a billable hour
1:54 – Professionals spend a disproportionate amount of time working as if time is a transaction, when the transaction is over we need to do it again
2:51 – Seth felt he deserved to live the big-budget lifestyle and was encouraged to buy a house he could barely afford
3:37 – We find ourselves married to our careers with no sight of escape
4:00 – Is your time worth $100? $500? Is it worth it being away from your family?
4:44 – There’s more to your life than just your career
4:59 – How do we stop trading time for money? We need to find a way to make money disproportionately to how much time we put in
5:40 – To make money in your sleep, you need to maximize the income, limit expenditure and use the difference to invest in passive income streams
6:50 – Eventually you’ll be able to buy back your time and become financially free
FULL TRANSCRIPTION:
Come one, come all. Welcome ladies and gentlemen to a new episode. Law nation, I am once again honored that you’re spending your wildly valuable time with me right now to allow me to help you further your passive income knowledge. Today, we’re talking about time. More specifically, the value of time.
As attorneys and other high-income earning professionals, we typically hang an exact dollar amount on our time in the form of a billable hour or chargeable hour. But it doesn’t matter whether you’re billing at a $100 an hour or a $1000 an hour, our time is our most precious asset, and we should not spend it lightly. Each and every one of us only has 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year, and a finite amount of time on this earth.
Do you spend it wisely? When you look back on these days and wonder why you were doing what you were doing right now. We really need to ask ourselves important questions before freely spending our most precious commodity on just anything. Is this a good use of my time? Will this help create memories that I’ll look back on for the rest of my life? If I dive in and devote time to this, will it be meaningful? Will it move the needle? These are some of the questions I ask myself before venturing into something that will inevitably use up my time.
We as successful attorneys and doctors and dentists and professionals spend a disproportionate amount of time billing hours or chasing cases or chasing clients, it’s always feast or famine. It’s transactional in nature. We get paid X dollar amount for each hour or X dollar amount for each case, but then the transaction is over, and we have to do it again and again and again. We directly trade our time for money. And as soon as we stop giving up our time, we stop earning money.
We then exacerbate the issue by shackling ourselves in the golden handcuffs, by buying a fancy suit or a Louis Vuitton purse, buying the newest five-series or upgrading to that big house with all the extra rooms that we don’t even need or will never even go into. Once upon a time, I did this. I remember getting my first big law job, billing crazy hours and receiving my first big paychecks. I felt like I somehow deserved to live that lifestyle. So, I bought a brand-new BMW 550i and really thought I was something. It’s funny because I actually still drive that car to this day. I remember when people at my firm used to tell me to buy a house that I could barely afford now because I’d eventually be able to afford it later and grow into it. Looking back at that advice now, that’s absolute insanity. Robert Kiyosaki would slap me in the face if I ever said that to him.
So where does all this leave us? What does that do to our freedom? Many times, we find ourselves married to our careers with seemingly no escape, that 550I, and that big house, they are shackles. If we’re lucky, maybe we’ll step away for a week or a weekend once or twice a year. Otherwise we’re shackled. What is your time really, truly worth? And I’m not talking about a billable hour. I mean, is your time worth a $100 or $500 or more? You have to ask yourself why you’re doing this, why you’re working late hours, why you’re spending time away from your family and friends, why you’re eating sushi delivery in your office at 10:00 PM.
And I hope the answer is that it’s fulfilling. I hope that being an attorney to a certain extent gives you a sense of purpose, a sense of identification, you know, a sense of pride. I know that you’re good at what you do. And I hope that gives you motivation, satisfaction and fulfillment. But I also hope that, you know, deep down inside that there is more to life than just your career. There are relationships and experiences that need attention.
I hope you discover this before life passes you by. And the big question is, how do we stop it? How do we stop trading time for money? We have to find a way to start making money disproportionately to the ton that we put in. As Warren Buffet famously said, if you don’t find a way to make money while you sleep, you will work until you die.
Fortunately for you, you’re probably making a good living already, which means you have some disposable income. So that gets you a leg up on everyone else. If not, we’ll have to talk in a later episode about how to live within or under our means to maximize our investment dollars. But for now, in order to make money in our sleep, we need to maximize the amount of money we make in our career or our active income, minimize our expenses and use the difference to invest in passive income streams.
Those passive income streams can be in the form of traditional investments like stocks, bonds, mutual and index funds, which most of you likely invest in through your 401k already, but that’s not enough. Those funds are meant to be accessed at retirement. I’m talking about investing in passive income streams that start producing cashflow right now, so that you can start replacing your earned active income with passive income that you make while you sleep and start buying back your time. Some of those investments include precious metals, businesses, private lending, and real estate. I’ve invested in just about all of these items. And I’m looking forward to sharing with you my insights and experiences, as well as bringing in experts to talk about these investments, so that you can get a full picture view of the options you have.
The idea is to practice law first and invest for freedom second. Eventually you’ll be able to buy back your time and obtain financial freedom, whatever that might mean to you. For me, financial freedom is being able to choose to stop working at any point in time and still being able to pay my expenses and living my life to the standard that I set up for myself. Right now, you may not have the freedom to leave and not bill your time or chase the next big windfall or at least not for very long. And that’s okay. Most of us are in that same boat. We’re going to change all that though. We’re going to take back the power, take back our time and take back our lives.
All right, this was a fun show today. I hope that you come away today with a little bit of internal reflection about the value of time and not necessarily what you charge per hour, but more akin to the value of time in connection with how you spend it in your lifetime. Let’s carve out more time for you so that you can spend it how you want and really start making some memories.
Are you a passive income attorney? Come share your strategies and insights with our law nation. Come on the podcast and share your story. Do you want to become a passive income attorney? If you want to learn more about passive income through private equity, real estate or other alternative assets, go check out my website at www.passiveincomeattorney.com and snag the free passive income guide, which will only be available for the next few weeks. Also, if you enjoyed the show, please leave a five-star rating and a positive review right now. Catch you on the next one, enjoy the journey.
