It is a common saying… time is money—but it seems apparent to me that people do not actually think about it that much. They do not usually translate time into money or money into time.
They sometimes think or dream about making a lot of money in a short time.
My father was very much a do it yourselfer. He would much rather spend his time (and my time, as I got older) than money. Initially it was because he simply did not have a lot of money. Later, I think it was just habit.
Case in point: My father wanted to fix the transmission on his riding mower (it ate itself one day). He was retired at the time, so he had lots of time (but he also wasn’t exactly low on cash) and he got me to help him. We both have a fairly strong mechanical background (he was a millwright and I was a machinist mate in the Navy—although I am a far better plumber than vehicle mechanic).
He ordered the parts and we spent a day tearing the old one apart and replacing the parts and putting it back together. Problem is that it still did not work. We did this a couple times without success.
The time that I alone put into that was worth several hundred dollars. A brand new transmission cost about two hundred dollars.
I got fed up and bought him a new transmission (cost around $200), installed it in less than an hour and it worked fine. Never did figure out why we could not get the other one to work. Didn’t much care at that point.
This happened because he did not value his time or my time correctly. The time wasn’t money to him. It had no actual value in his mindset. It was “free.”
I have seen a lot of this over my lifetime. It is a common error that people make. It doesn’t matter as much if your time isn’t worth a lot of money (if, for example, you work a minimum wage job)—but it does matter when your time IS worth a lot of money (and my time at that point, was worth about $70-$80 dollars an hour).
That was the last do it yourself job I did. I refuse to do that any more. My time is worth too much (especially when combined with my lack of experience or expertise in getting the job done right). I would rather spend the cash, get the job done correctly and quickly, and spend my time doing something else—either something more enjoyable or something more remunerative.
But I have that luxury… because my time IS worth money and I know it… and I make enough that doing such is viable. Too many people’s time is not valued enough to put themselves in that situation.
One of the things that people lose sight of is that the vast majority of value in the world is the result of human labor—a combination of time and skill (which is also based, you guessed it, on time).