What is the value of money?
For thousands of years money was just a way to exchange some goods for others. I don't want haggle and try to trade eight chickens for a cow. Money makes that process a lot easier.
But it's important to give value to the money that you have made. All the money you currently own is the time and effort you have made to get it there. It's the commuting you have done to and from work. It's all the hours at work. It's all the education you've done. It's all the frugality you've employed to not spend it.
Money is very important. And so is time. You can spend all the money in the world and not be able to get any time back. So you don't want to be wasting your time or money on things that aren't important to you.
When you put items and experiences into the context of how long it takes to make that money, it might change your perspective. Is that takeaway worth an extra hour of work rather than just making a good meal yourself? Is that fancy new TV worth the dozens of hours it takes to buy it (with after tax earnings)?
It seems quite silly to me for people to work in jobs they don't really like and then spend that money on things they don't really want, perhaps to try to impress people they don't really care about.
That's the funny thing about showing off. People can make it seem like they have a lot of money, but sometimes they're up to their eyeballs in debt. Great for Commonwealth Bank of Australia (ASX: CBA) and others, but not for our bank accounts.
You don't want to look back and think that the time you spent working was then wasted.
Money can be exchanged for plenty of awesome things like ownership of a business, valued experiences or even good philanthropic causes. Making your money worth even more over the long-term is a very good strategy.
