I have read quite a few books on finance and the recent one which I have to start is "Your Money or Your Life" by Vicki Robin. Before starting I was going through some of the reviews or prologue about the same and almost everyone was quoting some quotes as below
“Money is something you trade your life energy for. You sell your time for money. The only real asset you have is your time. The hours of your life.”
PC: Pixabay.com
Now, this is so apt because whatever money we get today is because of the time we put into it to earn. Like if you have a 9-5 job you have to go to that job for 8 hours (for a lot of people it's not only 8 hours but can stretch to 12 hours too). That means we have given 12 hours of our life to get the money and thus we can easily say that time is money. That means the real asset is not the money (money is just a number), the real asset is the time which we trade to get the money.
So in simple terms, if we are wasting money, we are wasting our life energy which was needed to earn that money. If you are waiting for others' money that is again the life energy someone has spent to get that money for you. Say if I earn 100$ per day from my day job, that means if I go and buy shoes for myself which is $200, I am spending 2 days of my life energy in that shoes. Looking at the money for just a number it seems that it is just $200 but again the amount of time spent to earn that money is huge too.
This is the reason we should not waste our money because what we are doing is wasting our time which is more valuable and can be used to earn more money too. This is why the saying is that money makes more money. When you have spent time to get money, your money can also work for you to make more money for you. With this, there will be a situation where you don't have to work anymore because money is working for you. It is just like a factory where the boss is making money because all his labour is working hard.
I am not saying that we should not spend money on anything because everything will look wasted. But think about it again before buying, is there any cheaper variant available, can we wait till the discount or do we really need it now? When you ask these questions, you will surely find out the answer yourself.