Time is a good friend.
In grade school I was a clock watcher. Morning recess, lunch recess, afternoon recess, and the end of the school day could never come fast enough. I’d look at the big hand every few minutes, always frustrated by how slow it seemed to move. 60 seconds felt like a day….and 180 days in a school year felt like a crime.
Then came high school and it got even harder. They took recess away. I remember feeling distraught as a freshman — realizing I had to do this for four more years.
For most of my education, a year was nothing more than a measurement for how many more cycles of suffering I had to endure until freedom. I carried that same anxiousness through college. I had a panic attack the first week of junior college. Did I really just start over? Another four years of waiting for the end? I did a lot more clock watching during that time.
But this past year time has really started to pick up. Lately I’ve stopped watching the clock. In fact, now when I look at the clock, I’m often surprised how much time has passed since the last time I looked. Weeks and months are flying by. It feels like time is going faster. Obviously the change isn’t in the clock though, it’s in my perception of time. The way I think and feel about time is totally changing. People a lot smarter than me say being young is a huge advantage when it comes to investing. Being young means time is your friend. That mental shift has been a slow one for me.
As a kid — time was always the enemy. Time represented how long I had left to play Call of Duty, how long I was grounded from Call of Duty, or how much of the school day was left until I could go home and play Call of Duty.
When the clock is your enemy and you’re without much extra cash, laying dollars at the alter of time is pretty hard. If time is the enemy then buying another 7$ pint on Friday is the better choice. If time is the enemy then an Audi is always a better choice than a Honda. If time is the enemy then retirement savings don’t matter because using that money to buy distractions from time does.
As a freshman in high school, if you’d a told me there were people in the world (grown ups) who got excited about earning an annual return on their investment, I would have thought you insane for using the words annual and excited in the same sentence.
In the summer of 2012 I was bored and wanted to kill time, so I searched Amazon for a good book. I did exactly what you’re not supposed to do and bought a book with the coolest cover. On the cover of this book was a wad of cash being suspended by a fish hook. I accidentally stumbled upon a book that would change the way I thought about time forever. Michael Lewis’ The Big Short seriously spiked my curiosity about time and money. The Big Short introduced me to a discipline that benefits more from time than maybe any other discipline…investing.
When I started sacrificing my immediate wants and started investing instead, the thought of waiting a year on average to earn a 7% return frustrated me. In exchange for driving a beater Corolla and packing lunches I felt like I should be earning 7% a day (as an entitled Millenial should). But I keep reminding myself of this → compounding interest is the eighth wonder of the world.
Over the years, greed has gotten the best of me several times, but I’m thankful for the wisdom of those who knew the power of time, and who taught me to make the most of it by investing young and staying humble. Now that I know time is my friend, I’ve got a lot less anxiety about the clock, and I’ve stopped feeding the greedy monster by cutting out click bait the markets are falling be bearish or lose it all garbage. I’ve stopped throwing away hundreds of dollars on penny stocks(R.I.P Sunedison), and I’ve stopped pretending like I know how to pick stocks because I listened to a few podcasts. Thanks to time, my homes value has appreciated 30%(see ya PMI!). Thanks to time, my pre-tax dollars are growing at historic rates. Aside from a few wrinkles, and an ever increasing difficulty in keeping weight off ...time has turned into a good friend.
