As we build businesses and seek to create various income opportunities, we are always confronted with the challenge of pricing. It’s a challenge because all of our situations are different.
Those with qualifications and experience often charge more for their time. But it’s not a sure way to work out billing and costs; sometimes people feel very confident in the value they’re bringing, so rather than looking at the time and experience they bring to their hour of work, they look at the value it brings to the consumer.
Another differing factor is how much money we all need to make each month to provide for our families and responsibilities.
Regardless of how we reach that “golden number”, the underlying view of all of these approaches assumes we will work out our billing based on a finite amount of hours in the day. So – if I need to earn forty grand, I need to earn x-amount per hour. The problem with this approach is that we lock ourselves into a certain amount of billable hours to cover our costs and make a profit.
The flip side of this coin is that we could say that if we work more hours, then we can earn so much more. If we’re not disciplined, we can become caught in a situation where we become overworked and unbalanced.
So – perhaps, instead of asking how much time we have or how much money we want, we can set a baseline of determining what our time is worth to us. It’s a simple change in perspective that places value on our time rather than how much money we can make.
This immediately places us in a position to start asking new questions about how we perceive and assign value. We start to think about other things that we would rather do with our time if we didn’t need to earn off each “working hour”.
It separates us from the spreadsheet of hourly rate vs hours worked and looks at questions of physical, mental, relational and spiritual health. Instead of weighing up the value of an hour against how much money we earn, we can consider how it has benefited our overall well-being.
As we open ourselves to these different questions, it’s much easier for us to start creating a life and financial plan to which we can feel fully committed. We can set metrics that are independent of market performance, intuitive to our goals and in line with the journey we’ve chosen.
So – how much time is your money worth?
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