Time is money---or is it?

I’ve heard this a lot in life; I don’t know that I have ever believed it.

To me, time is a lot more than just a chance to earn money. An hour of time is an hour of life. It has immeasurable value. To equate time with money is to cheapen it. Time is life. When we run out of time, we run out of life and become food for the worms.

The value of my time is determined by me, and by me alone. What someone will pay for an hour of it has no relationship whatsoever to its value. To be quite contrary to the philosophy that time is money, I dare say that the time I have spent on making money has been the least valuable of my time.

As I said earlier, time is life. To me, the value of life is in making memories, not in making money.

I agree with you competely in that time is life and infinitely more important than money. I do though think that saying is only appropriate in context, namely when pertaining to business / commerce, and it doesn’t translate well when it’s taken out of it.

In business time is money. You have costs that will accrue whether you’re producing or not and if you’re not then you’re losing money. Time also represent the opportunity to make money. Use it and you’ve a chance to succeed. Squander it and you’re in peril of failure. Context is everything.

I agree. And thanks for a new topic.

People on salary don’t get paid for extra hours. If traffic vanishes, and I work an hour more a day, I get no money for it. Now my work might get more out of me, but not if I spend my extra hour in the break area.

If I use it to spend more time at home I’ll be happier, but I don’t know how to assign a dollar value to reading the paper more closely, or even getting more sleep.

There was a book 20 years or so ago called “Competing Against Time” which said that while money can be increased, decreased, hidden or otherwise hacked, time cannot be, and a time budget is more accurate than a dollar budget for some things. If you look at a development project in terms of money you might or might not hit your schedule (because of Brooks’ Law, for instance.) If you do it purely on a time basis you’re more likely to succeed.
Maybe money is time?

In a previous life I was working a lot of overtime. The plant had us working 12 hour shifts to repair production machines that were down. The objective was real close and I had tickets to a concert. I asked my supervisor if I could have the night off to attend the concert. My co-workers couldn’t believe that I was giving up over $500 in pay to go to a concert. I still remember the concert. Whereas if I had worked, there would have been no memories of any great value.

How much would you pay for another 10 years? For a 36 hour day? For 60 weeks a year?

Time absolutely is money. Just not in a naive dollars per hour worked interpretation. Time has value, because life has value. And things that are valuable can be at least theoretically exchanged for money.

Sure it does. The amount they are willing to give you for your time is how valuable it is to them. The amount you are willing to sell your time is how valuable it is to you. When you work, you are selling your time. It’s that simple. That is the definition of “value”.

There is no other resource that is quite as limited as time. You can never get more of it and frankly you never know how much you have.

It’s not true in the way that a scientific formula is true, but it is true in the way that a proverb is true—i.e. true to some extent, in some circumstances, pithy and memorable, and worth considering as long as you don’t overthink it.

The OP argues against his own premise in the OP.

We all value our time. And we all have different subjective values of our own time. But by placing a value on it you, unless you barter in chickens, you have ascribed a monetary value to it.

Think of it in this simple way. Your need a fence in your back yard. Whether you build the fence yourself or hire someone else to do it, the material cost will be the same. Let’s say it will take you 12 hours to build the fence over the weekend. But you could hire a contractor to come in and build the fence in 5 hours for $60 an hour or $300. The quality of the work would be the same, because even though you are slower than the professional contractor, you can do the job to the same standards, albeit slower. So you have to decide if your personal time is worth more than $25 per hour. If you decide yes, then you should hire the contractor.

Sure there are all sorts of other factors, such as you may value and enjoy doing those types of projects so that would factor into it. You may not have the $300 therefore that would factor into it.

But definitely time is money.

Look at the simple concept of saving for retirement. Contributing $500 a month to your 401k account over 25 years will result in more money, than if you just put $150,000 into an account at the end of the 25 years. It’s the same amount of contribution, but since in the first example you started putting it in at the beginning of the 25 years, if you only earn an average 3% annually on your contributions you would have almost $74,000 more in your account, just because of time.

Money is a medium for exchange of value.
Time is time. It is not generally a medium of exchange, although money is almost universally used to compensate people for expenditures of their time (wages being the big example).

Some people consider their time to have value in more or less aspects than other people. Some people place an over-emphasis on the monetary value of their time, somtimes to the point of distorting their entire life. (hint: If you start thinking of the monetary value of your time when interacting with friends and family, you’re completely fucked up as a Human being.)

To recap: Time is NOT Money. Although Money is frequently used to pay people for their time.

Trivially true, but this does not count for different valuations of our own time in different contexts.

Say you are a freelancer who can make $100 an hour working from home, and have plenty of work. Would you ever watch a movie from Netflix if every hour of your time was worth $100? $200 for a movie? No movie is worth that. It has been demonstrated that people have different buckets for money, and people treat money gotten outside job related activities in a different way. In the same way we have different buckets for time.
That is why using time as a metric is so interesting. Mitt Romney might be able to buy anything he wants, but he still has only 24 hours in a day, just like you and me.

You are exactly right, but does not diminish the statement that time is money. In the same manner in your example, if someone wouldn’t trade any amount of money for time with their children, then one might assume that that individual would never work, but just spend all their time with their kids. But that’s not realistic. Different allotments of time have differing values, but that doesn’t mean that they don’t have value.

I think marginal utility works here as it so often does. The first 40 hours or so of work are really valuable to you, in that it lets you have enough to live on. Hour 80, not so much. The first few hours with your kid are very valuable too, but 24 hours a day, not so much (as any SAHM or SAHD can tell you.) You can probably plot the utility of time spend in any particular endeavor, and predict how people choose to use their time by seeing where the curves intersect, realizing that money for time is just a rough measure of value and each person has a different curve,

Time is definitely money. Not even a debate.

That is a brilliant point. I use the same logic when justifying expenses that others question. Great experiences are the gift that keeps on giving. Many years later I still look back on things I have done and feel happy about them. For example: yes, the flight I took on Concorde cost me a fair bit (although I paid way, way less than full retail thanks to a lot of research) but it is an experience which I will remember for the rest of my life. And the cost was a small fraction of the money I’ve lost to con artists and opportunists since.

Time is a human construct and so is money. Neither has a truly objective value and they are only as valuable as the individual perceives them to be.