Money is Stored Time
Mo' Money, Mo' Time? 💸
Sydney, October 2024
TL;DR: What if money and time are the same resource, just stored in different containers?
I built this into an interactive tool. Try it: mist.huliwood.com
We tend to think of money and time as two separate resources. They’re not.
Money = Stored Time.
Money being just stored time is the idea that every dollar represents hours of human life already spent – and every purchase is a decision about how to redeploy that stored life.
Imagine money as a battery. To charge the battery, you plug yourself into the machine (a job). You trade your limited, non-refundable hours for a storable charge (cash). Later, you discharge that battery to buy back your time.
Need someone to clean your house? Cha-ching. You just traded a few dollars to get your Saturday morning back. Buying that painting? Cha-ching. You didn’t just buy a canvas, but the stored hours of the artist’s practice and talent.
The goal is to charge the battery without being plugged into the machine forever.
“The men who can manage men manage the men who can manage only things, and the men who can manage money manage all.” – Will & Ariel Durant
The Trap of Linear Time
Most people default to the Linear Method: Work one hour, get paid for one hour.
It feels safe, but it is a trap. It’s like trying to fill a bathtub with a teaspoon.
You can work harder, get a bigger spoon (a raise), or scoop faster (overtime). But you are still the bottleneck.
If you stop scooping, the flow stops. You are a business with limited inventory, and that inventory is your pulse. Once you run out of hours, you are out of business.
The Escape: Exponential Assets
True leverage comes from owning something that stores time for you.
Assets are time machines.
A product lets you build once and sell ten thousand times – one burst of stored time, exponentially discharged. An investment goes further: your capital compounds while you sleep, the one employee that never calls in sick.
Assets decouple your inputs from your outputs. Instead of trading time for money, you build a system that harvests value. You stop watering the hourly wage and start planting the orchard.
Assets let your past time work for your future freedom.
The IKEA Test
But wait. Before you outsource everything to “buy back your time”: are you actually saving time, or just wasting money?
Apply the “IKEA Test.”
The IKEA Test is a decision filter: before outsourcing any task, ask whether the time you’d spend doing it yourself is labor (costs you) or leisure (rewards you). If it’s leisure, keep it. If it’s labor, buy it back.
You buy a bookshelf. You can pay someone $50 to assemble it, or you can do it yourself.
Scenario A: You hate assembling furniture. Two hours in, you’ve called the Allen wrench four names, threatened to buy everything pre-assembled for the rest of your life, and your relationship has survived by a margin thinner than the particleboard. If your time is worth $50/hour, congratulations: you just paid $100 to lose a fight with Sweden. You lost money.
Scenario B: You love building things. You open a beer, put on music, and treat it as a puzzle. This isn’t labor; it’s leisure. The time wasn’t “spent”; it was enjoyed. You saved money.
Life is finite. We only have so many hours in the battery. The tragedy isn’t running out of charge; it’s wasting the charge on things that don’t matter.
How to Apply This:
The framework boils down to three questions:
How many hours of life did this cost?
Am I charging the battery or draining it?
Is this task labor or leisure?
It doesn’t tell you what to buy. It tells you what you’re actually paying.
I’m running this experiment right now.
No salary. No employer. A laptop, a portfolio, and whatever time I don’t spend writing these articles. The battery metaphor isn’t theoretical for me – I liquidated seven years of corporate charge and I’m watching the gauge.
Some months the returns justify the freedom. Other months I stare at red candles and wonder if I should’ve stayed plugged into the machine. The honest answer is that I don’t know yet whether I’ve escaped the bathtub or just bought a fancier teaspoon.
But I’d rather bet on building assets than on the guarantee of trading hours for someone else’s quarterly report.
Viewing money as “Stored Time” changes how you spend it.
Every time you tap your card, ask yourself: How many hours of my life did this cost me? Every time you engage in a task, ask yourself: Is this worth the hourly rate of my life?
Money won’t solve all your problems. But if you understand the exchange rate –hours in, freedom out– you’ll stop selling your life at a discount.
That’s the game. Charge the battery wisely.
Cha-ching!
The investing philosophy that follows from this framework: ⬇️
Plus, the narrative-driven market view: ⬇️
Yes, but remember that the exchange rate for the time-to money-and-back is always very unfavorable, no matter how you look at it. When in doubt, just check out the Zeitwertkonto descriptions :-)
you can always make more money but you will never make more time