What Do You Buy With Your Time?

Today as I browsed a shopping website and I thought about buying another Obag purse, just because it was pretty and white, it got me thinking that I am about to trade a day of work for a piece of rubber that I don’t need. So what are you buying with the time you sell to your current employer?

Since I am spending 8 hours a day in front of a laptop, I easily get drown to shopping websites when I take a break and since right now commercials are EVERYWHERE,  you have no chance of escaping them. But if we were to represent every stupid thing we buy on time, would we become more responsible?

So let’s start breaking this up into time, I will use my own example and I will split a month’s time into what I am buying with it. Please note that I am from Romania, where we usually have 21 working days in a month and we are receiving the net worth, this means we already paid the taxes:

• 4 days for food
• 0.5 day for my cat’s food and litter
• 1.5 days for rent (I have a small studio and an amazing landlord)
• 2 days for my credit card rate
• 1 days for my amenities
• 1 day on fuel for my car
• 1 day for unforeseen expenses (car issues, pipe issues etc)

So I work 11 days out of 21 for the basic necessities. I am left with less than half of, for all the other things that I want to do and I am a LUCKY one since I have a VERY well paid job. So when you get to think about every little thing you buy from the perspective of the time you spend working for that money, do you still feel the same urge to buy it? I know I sure walked away from that stupid purse, that is definitely not worth a full day at work.

It’s very easy to spend a lot of money when you are not thinking about what you have to sacrifice in return. Nowadays banks offer us the magical credit cards and when using them we don’t even see the money. All you have to do to get all you want is wave that piece of plastic, but nothing is really free and you end-up picking some extra hours or even a second job because someone told you that you NEED to have the latest phone and laptop.

We are a generation of consumers, we absolutely need to have it all, no matter the costs, but unfortunately we trade our youth and instead of spending our time on experiences we lose ourselves in work only to buy things, that we don’t need. We are told that we need them, there are so many commercials that use psychology to make us want to spend. So next time you are tempted to take out that credit/debit card or cash, think about the time you are about to spend, that is the ONLY thing in life that you cannot buy, so spend it wisely since it’s not coming back. 

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