One of my regular “reads” is the Love & Money column by Jeff D. Opdyke. It is in the Sunday Business section of the Strib reprinted from the Wall Street Journal.
This week it was a comment on his families decision to explore hiring a cleaning person for their home. The basis of the story addressed how we spend our money and what our priorities are. I (as well as many others I am sure) have a difficult time separating the concept of spending money from the concept of spending time. Time truly is money and money does buy you time. The author’s conclusion was that they would spend some money on cleaning help which in turn would free up more of their time to spend with their kids. We budget our money and we budget our time and the two directly impact each other
The reason this is so relevant to me today is that I am in the midst of creating some new budgets due to my retirement. I have to do a new family budget due to a change in my personal financial status, a new business budget for my ministry project, and most challenging, a new time budget. The money stuff is quite tangible and in many regards “fixed”. However the time budget is wide open. I’ve got a lot of latitude in deciding how I will now spend my time. What are my days going to look like now that I’m no longer responsible to the city and the PD?
I don’t have the answers yet, this is my last week of my “retiring process” with four meetings scheduled between today and Friday when I get my final paycheck (or actually my final direct deposit pay notification. Just doesn’t sound the same does it?). So, I’m working on a plan, figuring time in and time out, time earned and time spent. But I am going to build in more “pause time” time for the spirit to refresh and rest. Some time set aside for spiritual fitness.
