How to Save Money by Saving Time

You have undoubtedly heard the old saying, “Time is money (and you’re wasting my time)”. People don’t always add that last part in but in many conversations that is clearly the implied meaning. I do believe that “time is money” because if I am not making money I may be spending it or saving it. How you use your time affects your budget in many ways.

What led me to think about this were the tips articles on TimeManagementPlans.Com, a small Website that helps people think about ways to improve their use of their own time. One of the recurring themes in these tips is that you need to organize how you live to save time on every possible routine task.

In other words, if you learn to do things efficiently by habit they don’t become such a chore and so you are more likely to do things efficiently. Making efficient use of your time may include reducing the amount of time you spend commuting to work, reducing the amount of time you spend cleaning your house, and the amount of time you spend preparing food.

But doing things efficiently does not mean compromising on the quality of your results. You still want to prepare a good meal but you don’t want to take twice as long as necessary to prepare it. Some of the advice on the Website, like using your smart phone as a day planner, don’t have immediate payoffs in saving money. But the article Skip the Waiting Line in Restaurants offers at least two money-saving tips that caught my attention right away.

In fact, I even wrote about one of those topics in my own article How to Eat at a Nice Restaurant for about Half-price Anytime. I am talking about the Happy Hour meal option. This does save time (usually) and it saves money (literally). We can call that a Power Savings Tip and there aren’t many of those.

Here is another Power Savings Tip from the Orlando Informer: Buy your Theme Park Tickets in Advance. More importantly, you can buy a low-budget ticket and upgrade once you get inside the park at the Guest Services booth. That way you can look first before you decide to spend a lot of money.

Any time you can get a discount and save time you should consider the value of that opportunity. It may not always be the right opportunity for you. For example, if you’re tempted to spend money on something that was not in your budget because it’s a great (time and money saving) deal, you may need to pinch yourself and ask, “Do I really need to do this?” In case the answer is often “no”.

Companies will offer you all sorts of great deals in order to make you a customer, but if you don’t have a need for their products and services in your life then you are SPENDING time and money, NOT SAVING them.