It’s said that there are people with a lot of time, but who don’t have a lot of money, and there are those who have a lot of money, but not a lot of time. Ain’t that the truth? On days when I feel more free to kick back and relax, I’m not as financially productive, and vice versa. There are a few ways to take a day off and still make money—if you’re the boss and have employees working for you, your company can still be productive if you step away from your desk. But for most of us, time spent at the desk = the money we bring home.
Most of the time, this is an okay tradeoff. However, there are circumstances in which you want your time to mean more than money. You want it to really count for something, to really make a difference in someone’s life. I’m talking about spending time with your family.
We all know that our families need to eat and they need a place to live. That’s why we all work so hard—we want to provide for them. But they also need our attention, the time we spend with them, and that’s where things get a little tricky. With only twenty-four hours a day, how do we find the balance between working for the money we need to support our families and still have the energy to spend time with them?
If I were given a choice of spending more time with my family and living a little more frugally, and having a ton of money and never seeing my loved ones, I would definitely choose to live more frugally. And you know what—I asked my kids one day what they needed most from me, and every one of them said that they wanted more time with me. They didn’t give me a long list of material wants or fancy vacation wishes—they wanted to do things as a family.
Is there a way to strike a balance between providing money and providing time? I believe there is. I believe it’s found, first and foremost, by keeping the family in focus. We work to provide for our families. Then when we go home, we go home to spend time with our families. They are the people on this earth who love us the most, who fulfill us the most, and mean the most to us. As we keep them at the heart of what we do, we’ll find more fulfillment at work, we’ll enjoy our times at home more readily, and we’ll get ideas for how to maintain the delicate balance of breadwinner and parent/spouse.
Related Blogs:
Work-at-Home Parents Get the Best and Worst of Both Worlds
Quick and Easy Weeknight Dinners
Family Fitness: Stress and How It Affects the Family