If I've learned a thing or two from my parents and their rich-asss friends. There's one single important lesson when it comes to money.
Time=/=Money
TIME is worth so much MORE than money because that's the one thing money definitely can't buy. You'd always have 24hrs in a day. What you can do, it's either do more within that 24hrs, or buy time from other person to do it for you.
It sounds simple, but if you really CRACK the code behind this, you will never have to work ever again in your life.
We get so many things wrong when it comes to money. And the worse of them all is to use time to trade for money. Take a good paying job... foreman just mentioned, accountant... heck, even a lawyer or a doctor... you know what's the problem of them? In all those professions, you can only trade time for money.
Example in spoiler
Spoiler!
Take my f&f as an example. She used to get paid quite well I'd say. But she still needed to work in order to get paid. If she didn't work, she got 0. And it shocked me that she was doing her own invoices to bill all the agencies she worked at every month.
With 3 kids and both of them working full time, they were really struggling to find work/life balance. So I asked her, why doesn't she hire an assistant? She told me, it's so expensive. I can't afford one... bla bla... Then I asked her, how much did she make in an hour and how much did she think she'd have to pay per hour for an assistant. I can't remember the exact figure, but it worked out something like 1/5 of her hourly wage.
Then I asked her how long did it take her to do the bills every month, and her reply was astonishing to me at the moment: 5hours MINIMUM on average (she'd do it last week of a month and an hour per day) per month between prepping the bills, organizing expenses, calculating mileages... and sending those to the agencies and accountant.
I told her, why don't you just hire a pt assistant to do all that for you. By the simple math, she could hire an assistant for 25hrs every month already if she ONLY took care of those tedious routines.
She was resistant at first but ultimately gave in to the idea as she really wanted to spend some time with kids.
Fast forward a few years, she now has a team of 8 and she works about 1/3 of what she used to. She basically hired another person to do her job.
And now makes about 3-4x what she used to after all the expenses.
This is called investing in self-improvement. Too often people lock their minds of "investment" into assets like stock, RE... etc. But unless you have a lot of liquidity to work with, none of those investments would make as big of an impact of an investment ON YOURSELF. Say you make 100k a year and maybe you can squeeze 10k after tax to invest. WTF does 10k gets you in big assets like RE? Nothing. Stocks? Say you are lucky and you get a great return of 10% annually over time (between purchase to sell). That's 26K in 10yrs. And what does that get you? Still not much.
But if you could make a small change to your work habit, and you can make another hour worth of work, assuming a simple 8hr/day work schedule, that's a 12.5% return from the getgo.
We are in a difficult time. But I also think it's a great time to spend it organizing your life and really see what's important for you. If you want more time with family after the whole outbreak is done, find ways to reduce your work while making the same amount of money. If you want more money, find ways/strategies/tools that would improve your productivity or whatever measurement. Something as simple as reading a good book can improve yourself. If you really think you don't have time... let me give you a simple challenge: 30min. Use it EVERY DAY on something that would make yourself better for tomorrow. Say trim yourself up to be nice and tidy. Practice
Don't try to just SAVE. That, IMHO, is the secret of many self-made millionaires in my parents' generation. You might have saved purchasing power, but the impact is too little unless great sacrifices are made. If you are into a career, see how to get yourself better and whatever needed to be at the top of the hierarchy. Then when you have some liquidity, put those to work FOR you. Whether it's a property with cashflow, stock with dividend/growth potential, hiring people to earn money for you... etc. And you can divert your attention... hence your time onto things that you really care about; Be it your family or your hobby... but never ever trade time for money once you are past the minimum wage job stage.