To quickly jog your memory, I had asked this question last week.

Let’s say you have to pick one of these 2 things –

1. Run out of Money

OR

2. Run out of Time

Which one would you choose?

As promised, I am sharing the findings below.

Any guesses (Hint – the responses were almost unanimous).

28 people responded to this one (Considering the theory of sample size, this is indeed pretty good). A sincere thank you to everyone who responded.

26 readers said they would prefer to run out of money.

2 readers chose they would prefer to run out of time. I was curious about these 2 responses and wrote back to them asking their reason for choosing this option.

1 Gentleman wrote back that he misunderstood the question, and he would choose running out of money any day.

Another gentleman, Aryan (name changed) wrote back saying based on his experience – “Running out of money is very painful. We will all run out of time and if my time were to run out at least right now, I would be happy that it was a good ride till then. Somehow more inclined to step away at a good time than prolong one’s suffering.”

This is certainly a point of view. There is nothing right or wrong about it. We all live our lives according to what’s truly important to us.

Besides the readers of this blog, I have also asked (hundreds of) people globally from all walks of life the above question. The answer has always been the same. People prefer to run out of money.

The reason too is always the same – we can always earn money, but we will never be able to earn time. No one can. Even the richest man can’t.

One key takeaway then is “Time is the most precious capital that we have. Our money exists to serve that capital and not the other way around”.

Are we then aligning the use of our money with what’s truly important to us?

My personal thoughts on this are as follows.

How about not running out of either (wouldn’t everyone want that)?

While we can be fairly certain of not running out of money (if we plan well), we can’t be so sure of not running out of time. Because we will at some point of time. Therefore, saying ‘I will do this vacation later’ is not a great answer.

The essential point is “We must plan for our future but never in a way that we forget to enjoy the present”. This is the essence of our philosophy – Live HappyRich.

P.S.This leads me into a very important topic (creating some suspense around it) that I will be writing on shortly.