BUDGET TIME and MONEY
Years after Napoleon Hill developed his philosophy of achievement, philosopher Buckminster Fuller coined a famous phrase, which later became the title of one of his books, Spaceship Earth. Fuller envisioned our entire planet as a kind of spaceship hurtling through the universe. Like a spaceship, he reasoned, our planet contains a finite amount of resources, and we have to manage and make the most of these resources if we are to survive, let alone prosper. Years before Buckminster Fuller developed the phrase Spaceship Earth, Napoleon Hill coined the sixteenth principle of Your Right to Be Rich: Budget Time and Money. Hill and Fuller are two great minds sharing the same idea: that there is only so much of anything to go around—time, money, the resources of our planet.
What do you do with the resources at your disposal? How well do you use the seconds, minutes, hours, days, years that are given to you? How much of your resource of time is wasted? The money that you earn, how well do you use it? How much goes to pay for your residence, your clothing, and the food on your table? How much goes toward recreation? How much do you save, if any? How much of your financial resources is wasted? If you answer those questions with absolute honesty, you may not like the answers, but answering them honestly may be the only thing that will lead you to make the most of your resources from now on. Simply because you’re human, your resources are, and must be, finite. If there’s only so much of you to go around, how do you apportion yourself? How can you best distribute yourself to make the most of what you have to offer your family, your occupation, your country, and your world? To these questions and more, Dr. Napoleon Hill offers some guidelines and answers.
If you ever want to have financial security in this world, there are at least two things you must do. You’ve got to budget your time (how you use your time) and budget your money (how you manage your expenditures and your receipts), according to a definite plan.
Let’s address time first. You have twenty-four hours divided into three eight-hour periods. You don’t have much control over the eight hours for sleep, because nature demands it. You don’t always have too much control over the eight hours that you put into work, either. Even if you’re working for yourself, you still don’t have too much control, because you have to be there to work. However, there are eight hours that are yours to do with what you wish, even waste them if you want to. You can play, work, enjoy yourself, relax, or develop yourself by taking courses of instruction, reading, or anything you want. Therein lies the greatest opportunity of the whole twenty-four hours.
In the days when I was doing my research, I worked sixteen hours a day, but it was a labor of love that I was engaged in. I reserved eight hours a day for sleep and the other sixteen I worked. I spent part of the time training salesmen in order to make a living, but most of the time I was doing research, getting this philosophy ready to give to the world. Had it not been for the fact that I had at least eight hours of free time of my own, I never could have done the necessary research. With those eight hours of spare time, you can practice developing all of those habits that you choose (through the law of cosmic habit force). You don’t necessarily have to follow my plans, but you’ll get some mighty good ideas in the lessons on applied faith, cosmic habit force, and mastermind. When you work out a plan of your own, it’ll be better than if I give it to you verbatim and you just follow what I tell you. Let’s return to the suggestions for budgeting of time, budgeting of income and expenses.
Consider your monthly or weekly amount of income. Use a budgeting book and make this your first entry. Whether you have a family or you don’t, life insurance is an absolute must—you cannot afford to be without it. If you brought five children into this world to whom you’re responsible for an education, it’s up to you to insure yourself so that if you pass out of the picture and there’s no longer any income, they’ll have enough money to educate themselves. If you’ve married a wife that’s dependent entirely upon you, it’s up to you to carry enough insurance to give her a down payment on a second husband if you should pass out of the picture.
Life insurance gives you such wonderful protection in case you are taken away from your source of production. This is important for a family man or a man that is in business where his services are a large portion of the assets. There are men who are considered “key” men if their being taken away would pose a tremendous loss to the business. Men like that should always be insured for a large sum of money, enough to fill the chasm that’s left after they are gone.
The next thing to budget is a definite percentage of income for food, clothing, and housing. Now, don’t go out and blow the works. By that I mean you can go down to the grocery store and spend five times as much as you actually need, if you don’t have a system to go by. Believe it or not, I do the shopping at our house, not Annie Lou. That way I get what I want. I learned a great deal about shopping by following the housewives that I knew. I found out who were good shoppers and asked them questions, and I can tell you there were a lot of things that I didn’t know about buying food and handling food after you buy it. When I go over to one of those big supermarkets in California, I always pick out the most likely housewife, follow along behind her, and start asking her questions. You’d be surprised at how cooperative they are, telling you what you should do and what you shouldn’t. For food and clothing, I must say we don’t have a budget for this. I buy whatever strikes my fancy, but I also happen to be in a position where a budget on food and clothing is not necessary. There was a time when it was necessary, and I imagine in the lives of most people, it is necessary to have a budget for these things.
Set aside a definite amount for investment, even if it’s only as small as a dollar a week or even fifty cents a week. It’s not the amount that’s important, it’s the habit of being resourceful and frugal. It’s wonderful to be frugal and not waste things. I’ve always admired anybody that doesn’t waste things. My grandfather used to go around picking up old nails and strings and pieces of metal. You’d be surprised by the collection of things he had. My frugality never ran to that extent . . . it ran more to a Rolls-Royce and six-hundred-acre estates. No matter how much of this philosophy you have, if you don’t have a system for saving a part of what goes through your hands, it makes no difference how much goes through, does it? And, if you don’t have that system, it will all go through. Whatever amount remains after you have taken care of those three items should go into a current checking or spending account for emergencies, recreation, education, and etcetera that can be drawn upon. You might call it a petty cash account, for things you don’t budget. If you’re really frugal, you’ll let it get up to a pretty good size; you won’t keep it down too low all the time. It’s nice to know that you have a good nest egg lying in the bank, in your savings account. No matter what happens, you can always go down there and get the money. You may not need it, and the chances are it’ll put you in that frame of mind where you won’t have to go down and get it. But if you don’t have it there, believe me, you’ll have a thousand needs and you’ll be afraid.
Perhaps the thing that gives me the most courage to speak my peace, be myself, and demand that people keep off of my toes, is the fact that I no longer have to worry where my money’s coming from. I have no money worries. As a matter of fact, I don’t have any worries at all. People try to worry me sometimes, but it’s like Confucius says, “When rat tries to pull cat’s whiskers, rat generally winds up in honorable cat’s belly.”
Develop a system of trapping a little percentage that goes through your hands. It’s not the amount as much as the fact that you’re establishing frugal savings habits. If your wages or income is so low that you can’t cut your expenses any further and you can only take 1 percent off the top (that is, one cent out of every dollar), take that one cent and put it away in some place where it’s hard for you to get at it. I’m a great believer in having money invested in the investment trust where they represent a great variety of well-known stocks so that if one goes bad, it doesn’t affect your investment at all. There are a lot of those investment trusts, some good and some not so good, but if you want to invest in an investment trust, you ought to go to your banker or somebody that is acquainted with them. Don’t try to do an investment like that on your own judgment. As a rule, most individuals are just not qualified for doing that, but if you get some of your money working for you, you’d be surprised at what a nice game it is. You know that you’re setting aside a certain amount every month or every week, and that amount is beginning to work for you. This business of trapping the money is my way of telling you to get it into a place where you can’t reach down in your pocket and get it.
Whenever I go to the bank, I get some pocket money, and no matter what amount I get, I take a twenty-dollar bill, wrap it up, and put it in that little special pocket in my wallet. If I ever happen to run out of money, I’ll always have twenty dollars. The other day I needed it, too. It came in very handy. Otherwise, I’d have had to cash a check with somebody who didn’t know me too well and I wouldn’t have wanted to do that. Saving money is a very difficult thing for most people because they don’t have any system to go by.
First of all, on the choice of a profession or occupation, how much time are you giving to that? How much thought and time have you given to the question of getting yourself adjusted in an occupation or a business or a profession that can be a labor of love?
You can grade yourself on all of these, from zero up to one hundred. Of course, you’re not giving 100 percent of your time on this first item. But if you haven’t already found the profession or occupation that can constitute a labor of love, then you should put in a lot of time searching until you do find it.
How much time do you spend on the can-do sort of thinking and how much do you spend on the no-can-do? In other words, how much time do you put into thinking about what you desire or what you don’t desire? Have you ever stopped to take inventory and see how much time you put into things that you don’t desire in life: fear, ill health, frustration, disappointment, or discouragement? I’ll bet you’d be surprised. If you had a stopwatch, you could record the time that you put in every day worrying about things that might happen to you but never do.
You’d be surprised as to how much of your time goes a little here, a little there, and a little over to that other place. Next thing you know, a predominantly good portion of your time is being spent thinking about things you don’t want—unless you have a budgeting system, whereby you keep your mind definitely fixed on the things that you do want.
I have three hours set aside for meditation. Three hours for silent prayer and meditation. It doesn’t make any difference what hour. When I go home from these lectures, no matter what hour I get home, I usually put in three hours of meditation expressing gratitude for the marvelous opportunity that I have had to minister to other people. If I don’t get it in at night, I spend some time during the day expressing gratitude. Do you know that the finest prayer in this world is not to pray for something? Pray for what you already have. Divine Providence, I ask not for more riches but more wisdom with which to make better use of the riches that I already have. What a wonderful thing that is! All of you have so many riches. You have health, you live in a wonderful country, you have wonderful neighbors, and you belong to a wonderful class (to the class of students in these lessons by Napoleon Hill). Think of all the things you have to be thankful for.
Think of the things that I have to be thankful for. As I stand here and tell you that I have everything in this world that I want, there would be something wrong with this philosophy and me if I weren’t rich. Wouldn’t there? I’d have no right to teach it to you whatsoever, if I couldn’t say that about myself. I can be the master of my fate and the captain of my soul because I live my philosophy. I designed it to help other people, too, because under no circumstances would I do anything to intentionally hinder, bend, harm, or endanger another person.
How much time do you put into business and personal relationships? How much do you spend on public relations or goodwill-building in your relationships with other people, whether in your business or in your job? You must spend at least some time cultivating people, because if you don’t, you’re not going to have the friends you really want. Out of sight, out of mind. I don’t care how good the friend is, if you don’t keep contact he’ll forget about you. You’ve got to keep contact.
One of these days, I’m going to make up a series of postcards that only take two cents each to mail. I’ll have a beautiful motto of friendship on each one. That way, my students can mail one a week to each of their friends, just to keep in contact. That wouldn’t be a bad idea for a business or a professional man, either. Nothing would hinder a professional man from building up a wonderful clientele by doing that very thing. He wouldn’t violate the ethics of his profession by doing it, and there’d be no commercial angle to it, either. All he has to do is to send one a month (that’s twelve cards a year), with the right kind of message on the back of it, and sign it himself. Believe me, that would the best way to build up his practice.
How much time are you putting into the physical and mental health habits that build a health consciousness? A health consciousness doesn’t just grow without some effort.
How much time do you put into living your religion? I’m not talking about believing in it. I’m not talking about going to church and putting a quarter in the basket now and then (anybody can do that). I’m talking about living it—in your bedroom, your drawing room, your kitchen, at your place of business, and in your office. That’s what I mean about how much you’re living your religion. When you grade yourself on that, that’s the place to grade yourself, not by how much you go to church, because chances are you go to church once a week or maybe more (with some religions you have to go more), because it’s not how many times you go that counts. It’s not how much you contribute to the church in the way of money. It’s what you do to live that religion. That’s the thing that counts every day of living. Any of the religions are wonderful if people live by them instead of just believe in them. I don’t know of a religion on the face of this earth that wouldn’t be wonderful if only people would live by it.
It may seem trite to ask you to grade yourself on how much time you’re spending on living your religion, but unless you’re very different from most people I know, you need to reflect on this subject.
How do you use your spare time? There’s where you really need to examine yourself and give an honest account. How much of that eight hours of spare time do you devote to some sort of advancement of your interests, improvement of your mind, or benefiting by (joining a professional or civic) association?
A Definite Plan. Do you have a budget system for how you spend your money? If you haven’t got a system, work one out. You can make that system flexible if you want, so you can cheat a little bit one week and pay it back the next week.
Accurate Thinking. In budgeting your resources, how much time do you spend learning how to think accurately and put your thoughts into action? How much are you doing to put the principle of accurate thinking into actual practice? Remember, that principle is about thinking accurately, doing your own thinking, and making use of the power of thought (whether controlled or uncontrolled). Are you controlling your thoughts or are your thoughts uncontrolled? Are you letting the circumstances of life control you or are you trying to create circumstances that you can control? Remember that you can’t control all of them, nobody can, but you certainly can create some circumstances that you can control.
Have you thought about the privilege of voting? “I guess I’ll not go to the polls today; the crooks are going to run the country anyway and my little vote’s not going to count.” Do you say that or do you say, “I have a responsibility and I’m going to go to the polls and vote because it’s my duty to do that.” Put a little time in on what you do? A lot of people don’t and that’s why there are so many crooked politicians and others in public office that shouldn’t be there. Too many decent people don’t vote.
Improving Relationships. Are your family relationships harmful or are they harmonious? Have you set up a mastermind relationship or are you letting that principle slide by? How much time do you budget to develop and improve your family relationships? Do something to get started. Sometimes, somebody has to give in. If the wife won’t give in and start something, why don’t you gentlemen? And vice versa. If your husband doesn’t start a little masterminding, why don’t you? Why not make it interesting for him? I’m sure you made it interesting for him before you married him, or he wouldn’t have married you. Why not start over and renegotiate your marriage relationship? Imagine what wonderful things this could do to your relationship. Improving relationships will pay off in peace of mind, dollars and cents, friendships, and in any way you measure it.
Going the Extra Mile. In your job or business or your profession, are you going the extra mile and do you like your work? If you don’t like your work, find out why. If you’re going the extra mile, how much are you going the extra mile? Are you doing it in the right mental attitude? I don’t care who you are or what you’re doing, if you always make it your business to go the extra mile with everyone, you will have so many friends that when the time comes for whatever it is you want to carry out through them, they’ll be at your beck and call.
I’ll never find a better relationship than I have with the people in my classes. I work at it, I want to earn it, and I want to deserve it. The result is that people don’t just applaud with their hands, they applaud with their hearts, and that’s the kind of applause I appreciate.