I have reached a strange point in my financial journey where I spend a lot of time wondering exactly what I’m saving for.

I mean, I have goal amounts I set for retirement and my emergency savings (knock on wood, please don’t make me regret this sentence, universe) are in a really good place.

And as someone who has been pretty hyper focused on saving for years and still lives with the knowledge that I picked a real unstable career path (though joke is on many of you because I expected this nonsense but a lot of the workforce who thought they were making solid career choices have found themselves in the same boat), I find it kind of hard to spend.

But I’ve been reading a lot about life balance. I just read Discounted Life Flow: No Time Like The Present! and I agree with a lot of things in it about trying to find some more balance.

I first noticed this when I was working on cruise ships. It was very lucky to get paid to travel the world and go to top tourist spots in the world from 23-28 (and I also have a few posts on how much WORK that job was too). I worked for a cruise line that catered very heavily to older retirees and I was struck by how differently the cruise staff experienced the ports versus the passengers.

Not just because those ports were kind of extended homes for us that we went to every week, but the amount of energy we had to explore, the types of things we wanted to – it was wildly different.

Being in Alaska every summer in my 20s included some amazing hikes. I never once saw a passenger out on a single one.

To be fair, this doesn’t apply to everything. The Colosseum is Rome was hopping with people of all ages. Laying out on a beach in the Bahamas is just laying out on a beach.

I’m also sure that some of those older passengers had the means that I didn’t to enjoy some cool, bougie experiences when I was hailing cabs in the rain or eating at a questionable food cart.

My grandparents were also big travelers in their retirement and for many years my grandma and I would exchange travel stories and they were constantly a Venn diagram with a solid overlap of big things we both saw but other things that either totally didn’t appeal to the other person or were just too expensive for me to do.

Some of my travel memories are bouncing in a back of a sketchy pickup truck to get to a remote beach on the other side of a Caribbean island, clubbing on an overnight at 4 AM in Quebec City, or being pretty wasted and laying on the bow of a ship days from land and watching the stars. I could be wrong, but I don’t know how appealing any of those situations are likely to be in 40 years. Well… maybe that last one.

And I guess I go to travel because I know it well. So much of my career has involved traveling.

On the flip side, I’ve been struggling with quitting a low paying side gig (though over the last 8 months of doing it, it has added up) in favor of some free time and the ability to hang out with friend. Just the other weekend, I dragged my laptop along to catch up with friends two weeks in a row and sat sipping cocktails while I babysat the murder mysteries. It was a bit ridiculous. But I did it.

All of this feels a bit like another post I read recently: I hustled like mad in my 20s. Here’s what it cost me.

What if I could just focus fully on being in one place at one time and enjoy it?

It always seems like money is such a hard resource to come by but in reality, it’s time, isn’t it?

And you can totally use money to buy some time. Don’t let anyone sell you on the idea that you can’t. Having money in the first place gives you the cushion to do things like take time off, put intentional breaks between jobs, take the Uber instead of waiting for the next train, order takeout instead of cooking – literally any massive number of ways that money can buy you time.

But even that only goes so far because time is still the only thing that’s finite.

I think that something I really didn’t expect on this financial journey from broke – – > rich was that the it’s not like a clear switch you flip one day. There’s this whole mess in the – – > that becomes heavily psychological once you’re not just battling to get your financial feet under you. How much is enough? How do you tone down what started out as good and necessary habits once they aren’t anymore?

The Rolling Stones were full of it. Time isn’t really on our side. We have to use it or lose it.

(Which could also be a whole ‘nother post on the power of compound interest, but we’ll save that for another day.)