What is Life Energy

What is Life Energy, and are you spending yours wisely?

In the previous article, “What is your Real Hourly Wage?” we discussed the difference between what you make on paper and what you actually make when you factor in all of your expenses in time and money that go into your job or career. Now we’re going to relate this to the world around us, as consumers.

Life Energy

We define life energy as the amount of time you spend to get the things you want. It’s really that simple. For instance if you won the lottery and suddenly became a multi-millionaire, and you wanted a new car, how much work did you have to do to get that car?

The answer is none!

And this is what entices so many people to go buy lottery tickets and scratch-offs. Because every so often there is a lucky individual that ends up with tons of money that they didn’t have to work for.

But we will assume we’re working for our money here.

Things We Want

Time.com lists the following as the most sold items of all time in America, and their current prices:

While it may not be very straight-forward to price some of these items, these were the approximate prices as pulled from Google, Walmart.com, Amazon.com, and GoodRx.com. 

Life Energy Cost

I’m going to recall from my previous article, the hourly wage of a client of mine. This client receives a pay of $27.00 per hour that he works at his job, but as we calculated, he actually only makes $11.32 an hour after considering several factors. 

So how many hours of my client’s life would it take for him to buy those items we mentioned?

1. PlayStation ($500.00) ÷ $11.32 = 44 hours
2. Lipitor(~$6.00/month) ÷ $11.32 = 0.5 hours
3. Toyota Corolla ($20,175.00) ÷ $11.32 = 1,782 hours
4. Star Wars (from ~$80.00 for the DVD collection) ÷ $11.32 = 7 hours
5. Ipad (from ~$300.00)÷ $11.32 = 27 hours

The number of hours it really takes to make the money to buy the things we want is that item’s Life Energy Cost to us. 

How many hours do we have?

One month consists of, on average, 730 hours. That’s the hours that you sleep, eat, work, and enjoy life. Subtracting 8 hours from each day of that month for sleep leaves us with 486 hours each month to eat, work, and enjoy life. 

486 hours of waking life each month. 

And as we discovered in the previous article, although we maybe only “work” for 40 hours per week, some of us work much, much more than that. Which leaves us starving for hours to enjoy life 

Looking at those numbers, two things become apparent:

1. Acquiring some things require way more of our life that we may have thought.
2. If we want to maximize the amount of enjoyment we get out of life, we have to find a delicate balance between working for the things we want and finding work which makes our lives most manageable so we actually can enjoy life. 

Next Time

In the next article, I’ll guide you through a beginner’s activity to putting this information into practice. You’ll learn how to use this to better your financial future!