The Ultimate Goal: Be a Time Millionaire

Disclaimer: Nothing in this article should ever be considered advice, research or an invitation to buy or sell securities. I am not a financial advisor.

In 2016, Nilanjana Roy wrote a column for the Financial Times and coined the term time millionaire.

In a nutshell, a time millionaire is an individual who measures their wealth in terms of how much free time they have to do what they want. To a time millionaire, money is only seen as a tool in order to regain as much time back as possible (usually denoted in seconds).

This represents a fundamental shift from what we have been taught from an early age: our worth as humans is more than just how much money we have in our bank accounts.

In reality, we can always make more money. However, the same cannot be said for our time – once it’s gone, it’s gone. We can never get it back.

What does it mean to be a Time Millionaire?

According to the World Bank, the average life expectancy in the United States is approximately 79 years or 2,492,999,208 seconds.

However, let’s pull on that thread a little bit.

Let’s assume the following is true:

• I am currently 26 and will live until I’m 79.
• I work a standard 40 hour work week until a retirement age of 65.
• I get on average 8 hours of sleep a night.

Of the 1,672,518,456 available seconds that I have left to live, 292,032,000 seconds will be spent working and another 557,136,000 seconds will be spent sleeping.

Therefore, of the 53 years that I thought I had left, the reality is that I only have 26.1 waking years left.

In other words, I have already lived half of my life.

This highlights a sobering truth: we don’t have as much free time as we think we do.

To be a time millionaire is to understand this reality. Furthermore, they take the necessary steps to add millions of seconds back to their life clocks.

With that being said, let’s now examine 5 strategies on how we can accumulate more time wealth.

How to become a Time Millionaire

Choose a type of financial independence that fits your lifestyle

The most effective way to be a time millionaire is to become financially independent.

This may sound like a daunting task. However, there are actually many different types of financial independence that can facilitate all sorts of different lifestyles.

Let’s look at some examples.

If you are someone who wants to spend more time with your family today and are not a fan of the idea of working a full-time job forever, then Lean FIRE or Barista FIRE might be a potential path to consider.

However, if you don’t mind working a little bit longer to increase your lifestyle later on in order to do things that you really love doing (traveling more, etc.), then Fat FIRE may be an option to consider.

Regardless of what path you choose, achieving financial independence can result in recouping millions upon millions of seconds back into our life bank.

View purchases in terms of how much life it costs you

The 19th century American author Henry David Thoreau once said:

“The price of anything is the amount of life you exchange for it.”

Due to how interwoven consumerism is in our culture today, it’s difficult to view our spending like this.

That is because Marketing and Advertising companies do an amazing job at disguising their products as the path of least resistance to happiness. Just spend X dollars on this and you WILL be happy.

This results in us associating these products and services as an essential part of our pursuit of happiness. Therefore, why would we question how much life energy we spend? It will make us happy!

When in reality, at a certain point, spending more money will not necessarily make us any happier. In other words, we can’t buy our way to the top of Maslow’s pyramid.

We should instead be more thoughtful with our spending as opposed to viewing things as ‘only’ costing $10 here or $50 there.

We need to listen to original time millionaire Thoreau and view our purchases in the currency of a time millionaire: how much life is X costing us?

As an example, someone who makes $15 / hour and wants to buy Apple’s highest specked iPhone 14 Pro Max, would have to trade approximately 107 hours or 385,200 seconds of their lives for it. Is it worth it?

The short answer is maybe. Everyone has different interests and hobbies.

The key piece here is that we need to be more deliberate with our spending and not just take a company’s word that their products and services will guarantee our happiness.

Decrease your big 3 expenses

While we are on the topic of spending, let’s talk about the big 3 expenses.

In the United States, 64% of our total spending goes towards the big 3 expenses: housing, transportation and food. In other words, focusing our attention on cutting these expenses will give us the most bang for our buck in terms of getting our time back.

Don’t fall for the trap of cutting out budget items that are an insignificant % of your budget. If you enjoy getting your nails done once a month or going out with your friends on a Friday, then do it!

That is time/money well spent.

Increase your streams of passive income

Active income is money earned from directly trading our time for a specified hourly rate or salary.

Furthermore, we are not in control of growing our active income. We can work hard all year long and still not guarantee that we’ll receive a wage increase equal to inflation.

This is in direct contrast to passive income where we do not have to actively trade our time for money. In fact, we can earn it while we are sleeping!

As a result, passive income is the preferred income of time millionaires.

That is because passive income is constantly buying back our time whereas active income is only received after trading our time.

Doing more meaningful work

The truth is that most people spend a majority of their time at work.

And as you can probably guess, a lot of people dislike the work they do.

A Gallup Poll found that only 15% of employees worldwide feel engaged in their jobs. In Japan, that number grows to a staggering 94%.

Therefore, it shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise to see why trends like the antiwork movement have been growing in popularity.

As a result, we need to have that hard conversation with ourselves in order to strike a balance between earning an income and finding meaning in our lives.

By doing more meaningful work, we are not just trading our time for a paycheck. Instead, we are intentionally spending our time doing something that gives us a sense of purpose and fulfillment in our lives.

This strategy focuses less on gaining time back and more on spending our time in a more meaningful way.

Stretch Goal: Become a Time Billionaire

Most of us can become time millionaires in our lifetime.

However, the real fun challenge is getting to the next level: become a time billionaire.

Coined by Graham Duncan, a time billionaire is somebody who has one billion seconds of free time left in their life. This equates to having approximately 31 years of free time available.

While a money billionaire can buy anything they desire, a time billionaire has the time to continually create and enjoy meaningful life experiences.

As a result, becoming a time billionaire represents the ultimate form of wealth that we can pursue.