It's the matter of balance. Thank you for this topic. How smart! You have waken me up!

What I really miss is the point where it comes to the money you need to survive. In fact, if you earn hardly enough to survive, you don't have the chance to decide earning less money and spending the time on important things like love. You must push yourself through the whole life, never enough to life nor to little to die. I sadly could not get a solution for this problem yet. Maybe I'll come up with one on my blog.

As you can see just the babysitter costs as much as going out (kind of like how our daycare costs just as much as our mortgage). On one hand, I can see how scrimping is a good thing. It's like sucking it up and studying hard in college since your GPA will open a lot of doors, whether it be for grad school or employment (I didn't get good grades, so I know first-hand). On the otherhand, I also argue with my wife that if we don't enjoy life a little now, there may be no relationship to enjoy when it comes to retirement.

Thanks for listening,
Eric

Prashant: one of the most innovative companies in the US has been doing something like this with buses.

(NY Times article) http://preview.tinyurl.com/33opbz

For example, what if (btw this is not me) I love love love my high paying, high demand job, that takes up lots of time and get much reward and satisfaction from it? Well…then that's a good use of my time.

Separately, re: buying services to give myself more time, one needs to look at their true motive here.

If I hire a cleaning service, a gardener, a financial salesperson, am I doing it to get more "time" for relationships etc. or am I doing it because I am lazy?

Am I hiring financial salesperson to avoid educating myself financially and thus make my own financial decisions?

Am I hiring cleaning service/gardner to avoid getting some good exercise ?

In my case I'm happier, and my wife is certainly happier, because we have a certain minimal level of financial security. We're not rich, and ok with the idea that we will never be rich, but having been poor and in debt we take great psychic satisfaction from knowing that if we are prudent and careful we will probably never be really poor again. In our case, no matter what the studies say for other people, happiness is related to not worrying about money (which is very different from happiness being related to how much money you have), which we achieve by keeping our style of living pretty low and having just enough savings to feel protected.

What I tell my kids is that money is like water – when you don't have enough to meet minimum needs, it can seem like the most important thing in the world, when you have enough more is not going to improve your life, and when you have too much it can actually be a bad thing. Me, I think if you don't have enough of a nest egg to allow you to relax a little, it makes sense to spend a couple of years getting to where you can feel secure, but if a different strategy works for you, fine. I will admit that it is, as noted in a comment above, hard to know when you have hit "enough."

The Rehnquist quote above is, I think, a great one. When I "knew" Rehnquist (me as a pipsqueak passing him in the halls, him as a Supreme Court justice), he walked the walk in putting family ahead of work even though he had a pretty impressive day job. He was not the first guy in the door, he took time off mid day most days to play tennis with his clerks, and he was out the door in late afternoon before almost anyone in the building. With all that, he got his work done faster than any other justice, on average, and had an impact on the course of American law unmatched by anyone else in the last third of the 20th century (you may not like the impact he had, but the point is that he did world-changing work in a short work day). While he had lifetime security in his job and couldn't have been fired even if he had spent all day every day at Kelly's Bar, I'm betting he would have been the same way if he were living off billable hours. It helped that was way smarter than the smart people around him, and it helped that his views on the law didn't require him to spend time agonizing over issues that he found clear, but mainly he just wasn't neurotic about pretending to work harder than he needed to in order to get the actual work done. It is amazing how much time people can spend pretending to work, and Rehnquist just didn't do that.

I've been to the US once, so I know the bus thing does not work there – but could it be applied to car pools? Or would it be considered too rude to sleep in someone else's car?