I am currently more than halfway through reading The Random Walk Guide to Investing by Burton G. Malkiel, which I will post my impressions of as soon as I am finished with it. One of the chapters starts with the heading “Time is Money”, and talks about how saving early gives your money more time to percolate, per se. This is one of the common themes I’ve noticed mentioned in nearly every investment article.

Today though, I’d rather bring up the inverse: Money is time. Advanced Personal Finance brought this up today with an entry about paying for household services. This is not quite as popular a maxim with personal finance, as it implies spending money instead of saving it. As can clearly be seen, a lot of personal finance websites, blogs, books, and personalities are into saving every single penny.

Yet I think there has to be a line drawn between responsible saving, and enjoying life. I was listening to the Dave Ramsey Show podcast yesterday on my way into Boston to see a concert whose tickets cost $110 on eBay. On the show, a listener called in to scream “I’m debt free!” and having paid off their mortgage at age 55. In order to accomplish this, they had done things like not had cable television and high speed internet, went out to dinner only two or three times a year, never went out to the movies, etc – for the past several decades.

This, in my opinion, is a prime example of going to extremes when it comes to saving or paying off debt. Is it really worth sacrificing that many amenities to be debt free? Of course, we would need more details about their specific situation to answer that question, such as are they happy without those things, and were they paying high enough interest on their mortgage that had they continued they would have sacrificed their retirement money.

I am a firm believer that money is time. When my wife and I were looking for apartments in the Boston area, we found several that were about $100 below the average price range. The apartments themselves were fairly decent, but they lacked nearly all the amenities that would make our life easier, such as a garbage disposal, dishwasher, and washing/drying machine. In the end, we decided on an apartment at the max end of our price range that, among other things, offered some of these amenities.

I had just finished graduate school and would be working 9 to 5, as would my wife. I planned on either doing martial arts or going to the gym most nights after work. We decided that in this case, the time and hassle we would save would be worth the extra expense of living in an apartment with a washer / dryer.

These types of questions come up a lot in life, and I find the key is balancing your decisions to place yourself right in the sweet spot of saving enough to be responsible, and spending enough to be happy.