INTRODUCTION

"Is the jar full?" asked the teacher as she stood in front of her class displaying a glass container with rocks in it.

"Yes," replied the class in unison as the jar clearly looked chock full of rocks.

The teacher then poured dozens of pebbles into the same jar. Since these pebbles were smaller than the rocks, they found their way into different gaps in the glass jar. She continued to pour the pebbles and even shook the jar to be sure there was no free space left. The glass jar was now jam packed with rocks and pebbles all the way to the top. She then asked her class the same question: "Is the jar full?"

The class, starting to grow more interested, exclaimed, "Yes!"

She then took out another container with sand and began pouring that into the glass jar with the rocks and pebbles in it. Sand immediately filled the smallest spaces of the jar surrounding the rocks and pebbles.

One final time, the teacher inquired, "Is the jar full?"

Laughing and smiling, the students all agreed, "Yes!"

The teacher went on to explain, "The glass jar represents your life and the time you have on this planet. And the rocks represent the most important priorities of our lives. One rock represents your health, another might be your family, your spirituality and another represents your friends and community."

"The pebbles symbolize other priorities like work, school and hobbies."

"And finally the sand represents material possessions like clothes, cars or phones."

"By filling up the jar with rocks then pebbles then sand, we are ensuring our time is prioritized for the most important things in our lives."

"Now if we were to do this in reverse order, sand then pebbles then rocks, we would find that there isn't much space or time for your most important priorities."

"This is why it's so important to own your time and put the big rocks in first. Take care of your health and leave space for quality time with family and friends. The pebbles and sand will make their way into your life for sure, but they shouldn't be your top priority."

This story has been told dozens of times and in countless different ways. It is a parable that has resonated with me for years as I've navigated how I'm spending my time on this big blue marble.

While it has a beautiful message and can be easily understood, I believe it leaves out one key ingredient: money.

Many of us would love to spend more time focused on our health, family, and friends while working less, but we can't afford it. Our lifestyles are so expensive that making time for the most important things in life feels impossible.

Millions of Americans are living paycheck to paycheck, leaving little room for the prospect of financial freedom let alone financial security. And this isn't just those of us who aren't making enough money. Forty-nine percent of those surveyed making $100,000 or more are living paycheck to paycheck.1 This financial situation turns small mishaps into big anxiety-inducing emergencies. Instead of moving toward the things that matter, we're pushing ourselves further away from them.

Anxiety and uneasiness have seeped into the lives of parents as well. The US surgeon general released an advisory that points out that "41% of parents say that most days they are so stressed they cannot function, and 48% say that most days their stress is completely overwhelming compared to other adults ."2 Two major stressors that stood out in the surgeon general's advisory report are financial strain and time demands. According to the parents surveyed, there just isn't enough time available and not enough money to go around.

The feelings that these parents surveyed are experiencing isn't fiction. Mothers worked an average of 20.9 hours per week in 1985 compared to 26.7 hours per week in 2022. And fathers worked an average of 39.8 hours per week in 1985 compared to 41.2 hours per week in 2022.

While things have definitely changed over those decades, one thing that has not changed is the amount of time in a week. We got 168 hours in 1985, and we get 168 hours today. Not only are parents working more, they are spending more as well.

Even though wages have outpaced inflation over that same period, our lifestyles have inflated. The average home is getting bigger. What once was "enough home" isn't enough anymore. The average size of a home in 1985 was 1,650 square feet3 compared to 2,299 square feet in 2022.4 Larger homes require more upkeep, maintenance, and updates. In other words, they require more time and money, two resources parents don't have a lot of lately.

While we were expanding our homes over the past few decades, we also expanded our idea of the "ideal" engagement ring, wedding party, honeymoon, vehicle, outfit, phone, baby shower, children's after school activity, and family vacation at the same time. As the desire for these possessions and things (ahem, pebbles and sand) grew, our time and space for the important things (the rocks) became more difficult to fit into our life (jar).

I'm sharing these statistics and details with you because I'm a living, breathing embodiment of these statistics. I know what it's like to fill the jar with too much sand and pebbles and not enough rocks.

Straight out of college, I pursued what I thought was the "American Dream." I jumped right into my 40- to 50-hour workweek, bought a house, and leased a luxury car at the ripe young age of 22 years old.

In the beginning, I thought I was doing the right thing and making strides in my adult life. Quickly I realized that I was not only working for my employer for 40-50 hours a week; I was "working" for the mortgage company and the luxury car company too. When I wasn't working for my employer, I tended to my 60-year-old house. Paying bills, fixing my roof, cutting grass, meeting with appliance repair technicians, and visiting Home Depot way too often took up a lot of my spare time. This home truly felt like it owned me instead of the other way around. With the little money I had left over, I would send it to the luxury car company for their monthly payment. Evidently, looking good trumped feeling good in my twenties. The debt began to pile up. This was a period in my life where I did not own my time.

As I approached my thirties, I found some opportunities to increase my salary substantially. I went from earning an average of $42,500 in my twenties to earning $180,000 in my thirties. These pay increases definitely increased my quality of life overall, but they did come with massive trade-offs of my time. My workweek went up to 50-60 hours per week, and my physical and mental health started to become impacted. I went on medication for stress-induced acne. My cholesterol increased to the point where my doctor recommended additional medication to reduce the risk of heart issues. With more money came more pressure to improve my wardrobe, car, home, and even the restaurants I ate at.

This was all around the same time I met my wife and became a father. My mind and heart desperately wanted to spend most of my waking hours with my beautiful new family, but the realities of my workweek demanded something very different. My career in event marketing required long hours away from home either at the office or at events across the country. And if I wasn't hitting my sales goals at work, I wouldn't be earning the money I needed to keep up the lifestyle we were accustomed to. At least, that's how I felt at the time. The pebbles and sand were taking over. This too was a period in my life where I did not own my time.

In this era of young fatherhood, I started to become more interested in personal finance. My wife and I were good at making money as employees, but honestly, we lacked the knowledge on how to make our money work for us. One night I was watching The Suze Orman show. She had a segment called "How Am I Doing?" where she analyzed people's financial situations and gave them a letter grade A through F. One term that kept coming up was "net worth." Honestly, I had no idea what it meant, but given our six-figure combined income as a couple, I was unfoundedly confident that our net worth was huge and we were rich.

My wife and I decided to write out our net worth on a big whiteboard in our guest room. Assets (all the stuff we owned) on one side and liabilities (all the stuff we owed) on the other. After totaling our assets and subtracting them from our liabilities, we found out we weren't rich. We actually had a negative net worth of -$50,000. We owed more than we owned.

This epiphany moment made me realize that we were spending a lot of our time and money making other people rich. We were working too many hours in careers we both didn't enjoy and earning too much money to have nothing left to show for it. Something had to change.

Through some "spirited marital compromise," we agreed to utilize more of our money to create time freedom in our lives-for both of us. If money had the ability to change our lives for the better, then we were ready to make it happen.

This time freedom mission required some difficult changes in the beginning. Going from spending most of what we earned to spending less was challenging. Money fights, embracing new, less...