One of the best things about personal liberty is the amount of control it gives you over our most precious resource: time. 

The freedom to proactively direct your own time and energy to a purpose you truly believe in is immensely satisfying. 

Today’s post discusses the practical steps to setting this up. 

How to buy your own time

As discussed at the start this chapter, any good investor will make sure they always have surplus income to invest. Putting this surplus income into tangible assets is the default choice. 

However, you can also choose to buy your own time with your surplus income. 

In practice, this means reducing your responsibilities at work in exchange for a lower salary. 

What, willingly take a pay cut!? Sacrilege!

Yep, for those stuck on the hedonic treadmill, this is a totally ridiculous thought. But there is method behind the madness 😉

Financing your own inspiration

When you put money into the stock market, you’re essentially financing other people to follow their inspiration and purpose. 

Buying your own time simply means that you’re redirecting this money to your own inspiration and purpose. 

If you trust in your purpose to create value for society, this move should make you much more valuable in the long run, increasing your earning capacity. 

And a greater earning capacity allows you to buy more of your own time, creating a beautiful virtuous cycle. 

A life satisfaction bonus

When you buy your own time by giving up some salary in exchange for reduced responsibility, you’ll certainly have some say in which responsibilities you give up. 

This gives you the opportunity to exchange your most unpleasant responsibilities for some additional time of total freedom. 

Such an exchange is guaranteed to strongly increase life satisfaction. 

Earn your freedom

To be safe, I would recommend such a move only after you have accumulated 1-2 years of financial resilience (see previous post). 

And when you reach that goal, only use your excess income to finance your freedom. In other words, don’t go down in salary beyond the point where your reduced salary can still support your lifestyle. 

Then set about proving that you’re a good investment 🙂