Why People Say Selling Time is Bad (The Usual Reasons)#

Folks give a bunch of reasons why trading your time for money is supposedly a bad deal:

• Limited Income: You only have so many hours you can work, so trading time limits how much money you can potentially make.
• Financial Vulnerability: If you can’t work (get sick, lose your job), you lose your income, making you financially unstable.
• Hard to Sell Courses: (Okay, maybe don’t say this one out loud) It’s tough to sell a course telling people to just trade their time for money, unless you’re a college.

The usual alternatives people talk about instead of selling your time are investing, starting a business, living some kind of alternative lifestyle, or mixing these together.

But Here’s the Real Deal: It’s Not So Bad#

Honestly? While that phrase (“don’t sell your time for money”) might make sense in some specific situations, most of the time, it’s complete nonsense. You really shouldn’t take anyone who says it too seriously.

At best, it’s just “hustle Bros” putting down regular jobs, which are how most Americans make a stable living. It also pushes the idea that a full-time job isn’t enough, and you need a side hustle or even a whole extra business just to get by these days. Maybe they’re right about needing more these days, but we’ll get back to that.

More importantly, the core idea behind “don’t sell your time for money” is just plain wrong. Unless you’re lucky enough to be a trust fund baby, you have to invest some time to reliably make money. And actually, trading your time for money can be a genuinely great way to build wealth, if you do it smart.

So, let’s talk about how money really works and why you should absolutely sell your time for money.

How We Already Sell Our Time for Money#

The most obvious way is by working at a job. The deal of getting dollars for hours is super clear because it’s in your job contract and your paychecks.

• The person at Starbucks gets paid by the hour.
• The person at the gas station gets paid by the hour.
• But guess what? Most doctors and lawyers also get paid by the hour, essentially.

An employer buys an hour of time from an employee for a set amount of money. This amount can be minimum wage or hundreds of dollars an hour for folks with high skills and lots of experience.

Another way people are selling their time is through gig work. This isn’t always as clear-cut as a fixed dollar amount per hour, which means sometimes workers might make less than minimum wage for the hours they put in. Exploitative or not, gig work is still selling your time for money. The gig economy could be way better if we fixed the protections and benefits that are currently tied mostly to full-time jobs.

Okay, you probably know how jobs work. So why the basic explanation? Because jobs aren’t the only way we sell our time for money.

The Hidden Ways You Sell Your Time (Maybe For Too Little)#

People often spend hours doing things like:

• Clipping coupons
• Avoiding toll roads
• Spending weekends trying to sell used junk from their house

They do this to save a few extra bucks, but they don’t realize the time they spent was worth a lot more than the money they saved or made. If the goal was just to have more money at the end of the month, they’d have been much better off just working a few extra hours at their regular job.

I get it, some jobs have fixed schedules, and you can’t just add hours whenever. But with the boom in gig work, that could be an option. If you’re someone who earns a high income, gig work might not match your usual pay, but clipping coupons and most other saving activities will probably put you even further behind compared to just working more at your main job.

High Earners Make This Mistake Too: The “Sophisticated Idiot”#

Among people who earn a lot, there’s a type of investor sometimes called the “sophisticated idiot.” A sophisticated, or “accredited,” investor is someone with over a million dollars in assets (not including their main house) or who makes over $200,000 a year. Financial regulators in America figure people making this kind of money are smart enough and have enough security to handle riskier investments that aren’t as regulated.

Medical professionals like doctors and dentists fall into this category all the time. They often make big investments that eat up tons of their time. A dentist who decides to develop an apartment complex might eventually make good money, but projects like that demand countless hours of planning and keeping an eye on things. Even if the investment works out, they often end up making less money per hour spent than if they had just taken on a few more cases back in the operating room.

Doctors and dentists are super smart people, but because they don’t see these investments as “selling their time for money,” they often don’t value the money they could have made by just doing more of their highly-paid work instead of chasing “passive income.”

Now, look, if you genuinely love flipping properties, selling stuff online, or seeing how much you can save with coupons at the store, go for it! Enjoy it. But just remember, if the only reason you’re doing it is to save money, you’re still selling your time for money, just in a different way, and probably not getting a great price for your time in the process.

Overvaluing Your Time? The Opposite Mistake#

People who don’t realize they’re always selling their time for money can also make the opposite mistake: they overvalue their time for certain tasks.

There are things you could do right now that might only take an hour but would save you way more money than you’d earn working an hour at your job. Things like:

• Renegotiating insurance policies, utility bills, or mortgages.
• Canceling subscriptions you never use anymore.
• Applying for a new credit card with a sweet sign-up bonus.

These take a bit of time, yes, but they can put much more money back in your pocket than doing an extra hour in the office. Why? Because you waste time not doing things that would actually pay you well for the time invested.

Investing Time Wisely: Skills vs. Stocks (Especially When You’re Starting Out)#

This leads us nicely to another reason why selling your time for money is smart: for many young people, it’s a better way to invest early on.

Some investments are more hands-off than others. For example, if that doctor we talked about had just put their money into a bunch of dividend stocks, it would likely only take them a few hours to research and buy them to build a balanced portfolio that could pay them for years.

Let’s say a dentist earns $1,000 an hour working. They spend 5 hours consulting a financial planner who charges$1,000 to help them set up a $1 million stock portfolio. The dentist needs that investment to make up$6,000 ($5k time cost +$1k planner fee) just to break even on the time/cost invested. A $1 million portfolio *should* make between$50,000 and $100,000 a year over the long run. So, it might take roughly a month for the dentist to get ahead on this investment compared to working. For this high-earning dentist, spending time on this investment was a good way to sell their time for money (getting a big potential return for a small time input), even using generous figures for their work income.

But the math is different for most people. Most people earn much less and have less to invest. Someone making $15 an hour with$1,000 to invest probably shouldn’t overthink it. Even if they somehow made amazing 100% returns a year by day trading using tips from some guy online (which, spoiler, isn’t realistic), that’s still only $1,000 a year. And before you start talking about compounding in the comments, remember the greatest hedge fund ever only averaged 60% returns a year before fees. If you think some random online tutorial will get you 100% returns, well, then I haven’t taught you how money works yet!

The problem is that because working for money gets slammed, and passive income is held up as the ultimate goal, a lot of people make small investments with money that would be way, way better spent increasing their ability to earn money from their time.

$1,000 can pay for qualifications to get lots of jobs that pay much more than minimum wage. I'm not talking about random online courses or multi-year college degrees here. I mean real, practical work qualifications for jobs needing specific training. If you have technical skills, a **coding bootcamp** could get you an entry-level software engineer job. It might not be Google, but you could still be earning significantly more than minimum wage. That potential increase in *earned* income from a skill is often much higher than the passive income you'd see from a$1,000 stock portfolio.

Working on getting qualifications and skills that are in demand isn’t as exciting as trying to pick the next hot stock, but it’s a much more reliable way to make money. And hey, once you’re selling your time for more money, you’ll have extra cash to start building that passive income later.

Selling Time When Starting a Business#

Maybe you want to speed things up by starting your own business. If so, understanding that you are always selling your time for money becomes even more important.

In my job as an investment banker, I’ve talked to many successful company founders about how they made it work. Starting a business always takes a ton of time and energy. As an early founder, you have to accept you’ll do basically everything, from the cool stuff like designing products and marketing to the boring stuff like accounting.

As a business grows, a big mistake owners make is either trying to keep doing everything themselves or only delegating the boring tasks and keeping the fun stuff. A business can only get so big before one person can’t run it alone. Letting go of control is hard, but the finance gurus are right here: you need to leverage other people’s time and experience to scale a business.

But here’s the key: this isn’t an excuse to avoid the boring stuff yourself if that’s where your time is most valuable to the business right now.

• If a business owner has a background in design but no experience managing a business, they should hire a business manager to handle the day-to-day operations. Why? Because the owner’s time is better spent designing new products, where their skills are most valuable.
• Similarly, if an owner has a decade of experience as an operations executive but zero design experience, they should hire a designer and delegate that work. Even if they think thinking up cool new products sounds more fun, their time is worth more leading operations.

Understanding you’re always selling your time for money helps you stick to the tasks where you are worth the most to the business and delegate tasks you can’t do at a professional level, even if you really want to do them.

Despite the stories about college dropouts starting billion-dollar companies, the average age of a founder with a billion-dollar company is 47. That’s because they often spent decades in a career building skills that allowed them to leverage their time effectively to build that massive company.

So Why Do All the Gurus Bash Earned Income?#

If selling your time for money isn’t bad, why does seemingly every personal finance expert online trash it? Even someone famous like Warren Buffett is quoted saying, “If you don’t make money while you sleep, you will never be wealthy.” Damn. So, are all these guys wrong?

Not exactly, but they aren’t explaining things well, and they’re definitely misjudging who they’re talking to.

Let’s start with the Buffett quote. I couldn’t find proof he actually said those exact words, so maybe someone just made it up and everyone else ran with it. But he has said similar things. And he’s totally right: wealthy people should have passive investments that make money while they sleep.

But here’s the catch: that doesn’t mean the best way they became wealthy was by focusing on those investments from day one. It’s like the classic saying: “Rich people eat caviar, but eating caviar won’t make you rich.”

When Buffett gives speeches, he’s usually talking to audiences of Berkshire Hathaway investors or people who could afford expensive event tickets. These are, by and large, people who are already selling their time for lots of money. For them, passive investing is the logical next step. Nobody in that audience is seriously choosing between a quarter-million-dollar investment in Berkshire stock and taking an online course that might help them earn an extra $20 an hour.

Now, what about the rest of the financial influencers online?

• At least 50% are probably just saying earned income is bad and passive income is great because they want to sell you a course on how to make passive income. It’s the internet; scams and dubious claims shouldn’t shock anyone anymore.
• The other 50% are probably genuinely trying to help, but general financial advice can only go so far because… well, it’s general.

“Invest in a portfolio that makes passive income” isn’t bad advice. And yes, eventually, if you want to retire, most of your money will need to come from sources that don’t require much of your time. The problem is that broad statements like this make it sound like one way of making money is inherently good and another is bad.

This “good” advice doesn’t consider your specific situation: your age, skills, income, what you own and owe, your responsibilities, how long you have until you need the money, or your actual goals.

You wouldn’t watch a Dr. Mike video instead of seeing your actual doctor for a checkup, right? So don’t watch a Graham Stefan video instead of making a plan that’s personalized for your financial situation.

Truth is, not everyone can make money for doing nothing. The world needs people to work. No matter what you do, you are always, always going to be selling your time for money. Your goal should be to do everything you can to make the hours in your day a highly sought-after product.

Speaking of highly marketable products, have you ever wondered why colonial empires were so obsessed with Tea and Spice? Like, willing to build navies and fight wars across the world for this stuff? Well, you can find out why it was so special…