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When I was in college, my academic advisor used to say something fairly often that didn’t really resonate with me at the time, but now strikes me as very wise.
The gist of it was this: When you are a child, you have energy and time but no money; when you are a young adult, you have energy and money but no time; when you are an older adult, you have money and time but no energy.
The whole “energy and time but no money” thing was true for me for the first 22 years of my life. I had no money during childhood and no money during my college years, but looking back, I had so much free time and so much energy. It really saddens me that I didn’t use it more productively.
Today, that equation has shifted. I have money. I have energy. But I seem to have no time.
The demands of my career, of married life, of parenthood, of being involved in the community, of trying to maintain at least a few friendships… it all adds up to feeling like there is very, very little time available to me.
Because of that, it’s tempting to use the resources I have – especially money – to buy the resource I want the most, which is time. In other words, convenience has an enormous amount of appeal to me.
I understand the appeal of hiring someone to clear the sidewalk in the winter. I understand the appeal of hiring a housecleaner. I understand the appeal of hiring someone to mow the lawn in the summer. I understand the appeal of stopping for fast food in a pinch.
All of those things equate to convenience. I’m trading my money for the ability to use my time on other things. The $20 (or whatever the price might be) spent on hiring someone to mow the lawn gives me an hour to do other things. The same goes with clearing snow. Paying a housecleaner gives me a few hours a week to do other things at a high price.
The problem with that, though, is that paying for convenience in that way takes money directly away from savings. We could be using the money spent on those kinds of conveniences to build toward financial independence. While we might be buying some time right now, we’re losing time later on in our lives. We’ll be working when we could have been retired.
That’s why, for me, I love convenience strategies that don’t cost much of anything – or, sometimes, save us money. They enable us to find more free time today without sacrificing that time down the road.
Here are nine such strategies that I like to use.
SEE ALSO: How eating a donut could help you be better with money
Keep some reasonably healthy snacks in the car.
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On the passenger floorboard of our Honda Pilot, you’ll almost always find a box of granola bars of some kind or another. I usually pick up a variety pack as long as they include some oatmeal raisin bars, which are my favorite (and, incidentally, the favorite of my youngest son, too).
I usually just pick up a box of them whenever I’m in the store. It’s a constant item on my grocery list. Then, when I’m loading the car, I look for that box in the bags that I’m loading, grab it, and put it on the passenger floorboard.
How is this convenient? Whenever I’m rushing about on errands, it’s inevitable that I get a little bit hungry. A few hours of errands often overlaps with meal times and that means that my body is ready to eat. In that situation, I have a few choices. I could just suck it up until I get home, of course. However, I’m usually driving by a few fast food restaurants and they’re awfully tempting. I’m hungry, some of the items on sale are tasty, and I can get it without even getting out of the car in just a few minutes? That’s pretty convenient.
The granola bars offer a similar convenience. They’re just sitting there right on the floorboard of the car. At a stoplight, I shift into park and grab one out of the box. Thus, the granola bars actually become even more convenient than a stop at a fast food joint – and healthier, too. This is even more true if I’m out and about with my children and/or my wife.
How does this save money? A box of granola bars offers several quick snacks for anyone riding in the car. A single box is far cheaper than two or three stops at fast food places, thus saving us quite a bit of money while offering the same time convenience.
Move into a smaller house or leave some rooms completely unused.
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Right now, in our home with three young children, we use every square inch of our home. Yet, when our children move out, our house will quickly become quieter and at least two rooms will largely become redundant. Similarly, when we first moved into this house, there were a few rooms that really had no purpose.
It’s tempting to keep using those redundant rooms for various things. I could see the downstairs bedroom becoming a library of sorts, for example.
The problem is that having a house that’s too big is pretty inconvenient. Not only does it take time to keep those rooms clean, it also eats up money in the form of higher energy bills, higher property taxes, higher insurance, and so on.
The best solution is to simply live in a house that doesn’t have excess space for you. It’s worth noting that “excess space” includes space used to store things you don’t really need. If that’s difficult for some reason, you should simply close off unused rooms completely by turning off heating and cooling in there and eliminating electrical use in that room.
How is this convenient? The less active living space you have, the less time you’re going to spend cleaning it and taking care of it. It also keeps you from accumulating a bunch of stuff that you rarely use, which takes time to sift through whenever you need a particular item.
How does this save money? A smaller home has smaller bills – lower property taxes, lower insurance rates, lower energy bills. Even if you’re just closing off rooms, you’re enjoying the benefit of lower energy costs.
Make a double or triple batch of any meal you make and freeze the extra batches.
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Dinner time can sometimes be a challenge at our house. All of us have various evening activities – martial arts practice, soccer practice, community groups, and so on. That can sometimes mean that it’s hard for us to meet up together all of the time. It’s similarly hard on some evenings to even find the time to cook a decent meal at home.
That’s why, on evenings where there’s time to make a meal, we’ll make one or two extra batches of that meal and freeze them. Let’s say I’m assembling a pan of lasagna. I’ll just make two or three at once, put lids on the extra pans, and stick them in the freezer.
Doing this only adds a little bit of time to the meal prep. I’m already cooking lasagna noodles, so just cooking twice or three times as much in the same pot doesn’t add much time. I’m already setting up an “assembly line,” so just assembling two more pans doesn’t add much time.
How is this convenient? If it adds time to meal prep, how is it convenient? In reality, it only adds time to meal prep on evenings where I can afford that extra time. On other evenings, when we might consider ordering takeout or delivery, all I have to do is pull a meal out of the freezer and pop it in the oven (usually, we’ve thawed the meal in the freezer overnight). It’s actually quicker than ordering a meal or stopping to pick it up.
How does this save money? For us, a meal from the freezer replaces a meal that would be delivered or picked up. Since a meal for five that’s delivered or picked up costs at least $20 (and usually more) and a meal from the freezer costs maybe $5, we save money each time we do this.
See the rest of the story at Business Insider
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