One of the oldest cliches in personal finance advice – “pay yourself first” – is a cliche because it works. And, to put it bluntly, it works because you’re weak. If you take a portion of your pay the moment you receive it, and squirrel it away into savings or for paying off debts, you probably won’t feel its absence when it comes to buying groceries, paying bills, etcetera. But if you approach things the other way round and “pay yourself last” – spending on necessities first, and saving what remains – you’ll often find there’s nothing left to save, because you spent it without noticing. True, paying yourself first isn’t infallible: it may not work if you live on the poverty line, try to save too much or have a credit-card addiction. But paying yourself last is a recipe for disaster, because it demands both endless willpower (to prevent indulgent purchases) and long-range planning (so you can properly weigh the benefits of any potential purchase against the benefits of saving). And humans are terrible at both.
If you’re halfway decent with money, you probably knew this. But what you may not have realised – or I hadn’t, anyway, until I read a recent post by the cartoonist and creativity coach Jessica Abel – is that it works exactly the same with time. If there’s something you’re passionate about – from writing your novel to launching a business to spending more time with your kids – the only way to make it happen is to do a bit of it now, no matter how many urgent tasks are pressing in. “If you don’t save a bit of your time for you, now, out of every week,” Abel writes, “there is no moment in the future when you’ll magically be done with everything and have loads of free time.”
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