Time is money as the saying goes. That very rule is the essence of our labor force. Most of us sell our time, and some of us buy other people’s time and resell it. The real value of money is that it buys time. Think about the convenance economy. Services like our pet sitting and dog walking business, lawn care, house cleaning, food delivery, and on and on. It is all buying time.
Yesterday I had two instances coming face to face with the value of time. The first was a realization on my investment strategy. I had discounted the value of time and mistaken the value of safety as being more important. Time creates its own safety.
I have mentioned before my plan of selling covered calls to partially fund my investment account and it is working, but I allowed the plan to get a bit fragmented and decided yesterday to bring it closer to where I wanted it. I did that by rolling a couple options back and down. That brought them to in the money.
The danger is that someone exercises the contract, but that has a roughly 7% chance of happening before expiry. It is highly unlikely that that will happen. So while these contracts are in danger if I allow them to reach expiry they are also not that in danger as the value of time is greater than anything else. Options contracts decay a little every day and if they are brought close enough to their expiry date that decay will be even faster. I ran several tests and looked at lots of information and came to the conclusion that I hadn’t fully accounted for the value of time.
That brings me to the second instance. I have been slowly making my way through the business book The Gap and the Gain. First off it is a really weird book. It is ghost written, is honest about being ghost written, it is highlighted as an advantage of how industrious the listed author is that he paid someone else to write his book, and it is utterly confusing as to who’s personal anecdotes I am reading.
Last night I got to a chapter on the most important hour of the day, and it mentioned it is our last hour. I do not know when my last hour is. I go to bed when I get tired and that typically happens sometime between 9:00-10:00 each evening. It also mentions that the last hour should be spent in quiet reflection recounting the positives from your day.
I am a big believer that we’re all different, and the last hour of the day isn’t the most important for me, but the first hour is. That is why I am writing this in the morning and then spend the next few minutes checking in on a variety of things. I count my victories, acknowledge my defeats, and plan my day. The biggest win for today is it doesn’t require much of a plan. It is a day where I get to spend most of it at home with my children, and that is all the win I need from it.
David Huzzard Writes 