10: Wealthbuilding Tip - Can you really buy time?

Welcome to the Purpose Driven Real Estate podcast. This is where passion meets purpose in an ever changing real estate market. I'm your host, Steve Valentine, former real estate agent turned real estate entrepreneur, speaker and guide to all things real estate. And this is my co host, Paige Tons, former D1 college athlete turned real estate adultrepreneur. Whether you work in the industry or you are a consumer of real estate, with each episode we intend to raise the bar in our industry and show you the purpose behind every piece of real estate in your life. What's up? What's up, everybody? It's Steve Valentine, and today I'm flying solo on the Purpose Driven Real Estate podcast. And actually, today we're gonna talk about a little something different. I want to explore the myth that you really cannot buy time. And I believe that's bull crap, because you actually can. And here's where I'm gonna start. I can't even remember the book that I was reading at the time, but it made me realize how much time people waste standing in line going to the car wash. Those are probably my two biggest pet peeves. I'm gonna give you some examples on that in just a minute. But here's the first thing you need to know if you want to have the goal. And this is where you'll get to whether you want to make $100,000, $500,000, or a million dollars a year. If you reverse engineer that to be, you divide it by 48 weeks, because you know we don't work 52 weeks. And then you divide that 48 weeks into 50 hours. And on a half a million dollars, if that's what you wanted to make, your hourly rate would be $208 an hour, and your quarterly hourly rate would be $52aminute or $52 a quarter. So here's where I'm getting with that. It gets even worse when you do it on a million dollars, because Obviously it's times two. So if your hourly rate is $416 an hour, that's what your time is valued at. So now you have to stop doing things that cost you that type of money. And I remember my. And we walked through it, and I started looking at things, and one of the things I realized was I walked into Starbucks one morning, and I see the same people in the same line every morning as I walk past them, I grab my coffee out of the mobile bucket that's over there and I walk back out. So I'm in and out. I've timed it a couple of times 30 seconds, no time wasted, right? It's the one thing I don't understand. Starbucks spent millions of dollars developing an app to buy you time. You don't even have to pay for it, you just have to use it. And I asked somebody recently, like, why don't you use the Starbucks app? They're like, well, I don't like to get out of the car. I'm like, so you're gonna waste 10 to 15 minutes in the Starbucks drive thru line? So let me give you the equation of this, okay? If you get Starbucks six days a week and you stand in line for an average of 10 minutes a day, that's 60 minutes a week, that's one hour a week, right? You do that 52 weeks in a year, that equates to 52 hours, which is two and a half days you stood in line for coffee. So do you want to know what that equates to? If you're making $416 an hour or more, your coffee standing in line would have cost you $21,632 in time that year. So can you imagine adding up the time standing in line that you stood there? 52 hours? You wouldn't stand 52 hours for anything, not if it cost you $21,000. But in fact, that's what it's actually costing you to stand in line for your coffee. That's just one example. Just like the roller coaster amusement parks, I hate standing in line. It drives me crazy. So I will buy fast passes or any means necessary to get somewhere sooner. Here's another example that I found of buying time. We all get our cars washed depending on what you do. Whether you go to the $3, do it yourself or go to the car wash place if it takes you 15 minutes. And this is where people do not equate their time. If it takes you 15 minutes to drive to where the car wash is, and it takes another 45 minutes to an hour to be there, and it takes another 15 minutes to drive home, okay? That's an hour to an hour and a half out of your Saturday morning that you could be spending time with your kids, your dogs, your pets, your loved ones, maybe just sitting the pool, right? So now you take those same hourly rates and apply it to what you just did, and it costs you $520 in time to go get your car wash, right? Pretty expensive car wash. I realized a couple years ago when I saw one of my neighbors getting his car mobile detailed at his house. I'm like, hmm, I wonder how expensive that is. That must be nice. It wasn't until I reverse engineered my time to figure out what the value of my time was versus the cost of it. Actually, someone coming to me, I don't even get up. And on a Wednesday morning, Mario will come to my office, wash my car, bring my keys back, and it's done. I don't have to leave. It's the same thing with people may not equate this. It's the same reason that I'm a big Cadillac fan and consumer. My wife and I both drive Cadillacs. The reason being is that Cadillac buys us a lot of time. I can call Jimmy, my service rider, and he will come pick up my car and take it back to Cadillac and wash it, detail it if need be, and do oil changes, do repairs, whatever has to be done. And so that buys time. That buys convenience. You start realizing what your time is worth and you start cutting things out. Because here's the other thing. I can buy time with my kids, with my family, with my wife. And it's allowed us to buy enough time to spend time at our second home up north. It's allowed us to continue to do the productive things that we're good at rather than the things that not necessarily we don't want to do, but they're not producing income when it comes down to the time that we have allotted. So I encourage you to take account or record of what you're spending your time doing. Is it the best use to mow your own lawn? You may like that and that's cool. Nothing against that. I personally do not. I don't like to do my own pool, that those are things that other people we hire great services to do. And it's me buying myself time, whether it's two hours, three hours. And those are important either for family, for kids, for work, whatever you're doing it for. But you can absolutely buy time in a lot of different places in your life. And I encourage you to look at that and do that. And I'll leave you this one last tip. I had a choice the other day to. I had to go out to Chandler. It was an hour drive out, something I was going to. And my choice was, do I drive all the way out there or do I take an Uber? Now, an Uber from Peoria to Chandler was, I think, a hundred bucks there and back. But my quarterly hour rate is more than $400 an hour, which means I got several hours worth of work done in that drive to and from Chandler. So the Uber really didn't cost me anything. Some people might say it did, but it really didn't. And the work that I got done. And so I leave you with that tip. Go out there, take notice of what you potentially can buy time back with, and start figuring out what your quarterly hourly rate is and what you really want to accomplish with that time. Peace out guys. Have a great day. And remember, Purpose Driven Real Estate podcast. We hope that you're sharing it, liking it, leaving a review and and of course following us on social media where we're giving you wealth building tips and showing you what the purpose of real estate really is. See ya.