Would you rather sacrifice time or money?

Good for you taking some time for yourself. What a tough choice. Money will come and go. But you cannot get time back. If you’re stable economically and you don’t love what you are doing? No-one can afford my time, unless I choose it to happen.

I’d give up money. Your health, and that includes your mental health, is more valuable than potential earnings. Time gives you the flexibility to do other things. Having more money might be nice, but it’s not much fun if you don’t have the time to do anything you really want to do with that money.

It depends. If I can afford life, I wouldn’t work 70 hours a week. I would give up the extra money from a second job. Especially, if I was feeling physically exhausted. Exhaustion shortens my life I think. Higher stress levels, I catch colds more, I just hate it.

In other cases I will give up a little time to save money, I weigh the cost benefit ratio. If I do something myself, like say mow the lawn, is it worth saving paying someone? Or, driving farther to buy something, because I will save money? It just depends on the amount of free time I have to go out of my way.

Unfortunately, money is important in our society. My advice is save as much as you can, and don’t spend on things like alcohol, cigarettes, manicures, many meals out, and Starbucks coffee. When you get a windfall, sock it away in the bank, don’t splurge on something. A windfall can be getting your tax refund. I know so many people who live check to check who take that money and spend it on something big. Don’t do it if you are in that situation. Once your savings account grows, you have more freedom. Freedom partly means more control over your time, but also more freedom to afford what you need and want.

I want to add avoid credit card debt at all costs, if you can. Pay your credit card every month in full. Allowing a balance to carry over means you will be working harder, longer, to pay for whatever you bought. A $50 item quickly becomes $90. Don’t do it.

For me, in the example of the OP, I would evaluate my budget and the two jobs – which job has a longer commute, which job is more stressful, which job I like better, which job is more rewarding. Does one job have a ball busting supervisor? Does one job have a greater chance for advancement?

In my life, I have not much free time but I am ok with money. If that were to change, I would very possibly be stressed from having less money but I have reserves I could live on and do ok, too, so it’s hard to say.

@jca That’s the key, the reserves. Money is freedom.

Right now I wish I had more free time but that’s life working a full time job. Everyone who retires from where I work looks very relaxed when they retire, and they all say they’re cleaning out their closets haha. Something there’s very little time to do while working full time. I just took a week off but I traveled on a little trip to Boston, so it’s always a tossup – recreation/leisure or doing something that needs to get done, like organizing stuff.

I’ve had jobs that I’ve hated, and for those, I always say if you’re really miserable, it’s worth a sacrifice in money in order to lessen your misery.

You’re tired.
You did the right thing in giving up some of the finances. You’ll save the costs associated with the second job (transport, etc.) and you can scale back a little on other things if it gives you a chance to rest and regroup. Perhaps you can spend a little more time at home cooking from scratch and doing other tasks that allow you to relax while cutting your budget?

Rest and regroup. Post-Christmas winter’s an excellent time to burrow in and cup your discretionary spending to near nothing. If you don’t have to spend a lot on fuel, bargain hunting is a really great hobby. :)

Time or money? There’s a trade-off that is adjusted by internal and external factors.
Start with a base of 100/hr. You pay me that much and I will give up time if I feel neutral about it.

If I am exhausted you might have to bump up the rate. If I like what I’m doing the rate will be much lower.
I’ll cut up and split wood and burn it for heat, effectively paying myself about $2 per hour.

Hey. I Fluther don’t I?

Right now in this point of my life I would say money, times means more to me, I used to just about live at work and found all it did was bump me into a higher tax bracket and ended up giving most of the extra money to the Government, not into that so I pick money let some one else learn the hard way and give their blood and tears to the damn Government.

I would prefer to sacrifice time as I have other ways to deal with both money and time. People say time never comes but that’s doesnt mean we don’t get more time for making big. Money is our essential need and so is time too but that can be adjusted even.

It depends. I’ve worked my share of 60-to-80-hour weeks. Time was precious then and I would have sacrificed a little money in order to buy some time. Now, I have more time and less money, therefore I would sacrifice more of my time for more money. I suppose. Actually, I’m getting used to this. But if a charity org were to ask, I’d rather donate my time than my money at this point. But that could change radically around 1930EDT tonight. Then, I expect to have a full time job managing my Powerball winnings—back to those 60-to-80-hour weeks of drudgery—and would probably gladly donate money instead of time. That is, until I can finally hand it over to a team of my own, then live like a human being again. Only this time, as a king.

“Dost thou value life? Then value time, for that’s the stuff life’s made of.”
– Benjamin Franklin