Budgeting for Your Decades

How to Design Your Future with a Time Budget?

Budgeted Time – Part 5

Start by thinking of life in decades to create the large time-transactions for your life. You’ll have items like earning your degree, getting married, having your first child, and stuff like when you plan to retire. When you think about decades, these are long-term periods, huge blocks of time. In one’s life, one can experience on the average between 7-10 decades. For this lesson in time management let’s just round to 10. Ten decades gives you 100 years. With that out of the way, what will you do with your 100 years? Let’s place the big items on your calendar by looking at each decade respectively. When you think about creating a time-transaction for your decades, you have to think about what you want to see happen in your life in a 10-year time slot. With each decade to come, how do you picture your life? Keep in mind, when you have no picture for your life, then you waste time. There’s a Bible phrase that says it perfectly. “Where there is no vision [ability to plan what you’d like to see], the people [that person] will perish [not see anything that he or she would desire to see].” ^[1] 

Know Where You Want to Go
The greatest, most successful people I know, know where they want to go in life. What would you like to see in each of your decades? Ask yourself this question. When I’m thirty, where would I like to be in life? When I’m fifty, I’d like to have… As we physically begin plugging these items into our calendar, I want you to think of it with this question in mind. What would I like to see in each of my decades? 

The greatest people and most successful people I know have a plan for their entire life. This means they know where they want to go and where they want to be, before they get there. In order to be successful, or in order to go to the next level, one must be thoughtful enough to know what it is he or she would like to see throughout a lifetime. Where you’d like to be, where you’d like to go, etc. When you have a well-thought-out plan, it also tells you where you should not be at those strategic and specific times. Knowing where to go also tells you where not to go.

In order for us to do this particular topic justice, we’ll have to go through each decade to give you an idea. Let’s get started.

• Decade-1 (age 0-9): By the time you begin thinking about budgeting time, one is more than likely in decades-3 and beyond. Since this is the case, we have to look at the first two decades in a different way. We have to consider it from the perspective of our children, or even in some cases, our grandchildren. The goal is to set our decade-1 dependents up for success in their first decade.
  
  Think about what you can do for your age zero to nine dependent. How will you put them on a course for a life that’s greater than the course they’ve been living or heading. Where can you take them? Are they in the best school system you can provide? Are you placing them in an environment which encourages your principles and beliefs? What plays or shows do they need to see? In this timeslot, you make plans to place them in schools and organizations that will impact the development of your dependent. Is this type of transaction worthy of being on your calendar? What involvement in activities do they need? Can they get involved in sports? Do you see them as an athlete? Are there certain books that you need to read for them? 
  
  
• Decade-2 (Age 10-19): Decade-2 is good for mentoring teenage dependents. It’s a perfect time for you to figure out how to invest in their lives as they become adults. What would you want to do for your 10-year-old dependent all the way up to age 19? Go ahead and prepare a plan for how you will approach activities like learning to drive. . Our daughter is going to turn 16 as we were writing this content. We have it listed on our time budget. In preparation, I had calendar reminders to map out where and what locations I wanted to start her driver’s training. When you take the time to plan these activities out, the better it is for everyone involved. When you have vision, then you set yourself up for success. 
  
  When you make plans, you get to think, or better stated, see ahead. For example, if you already know when your dependent is learning to drive, you also know he or she will need a car next. Go ahead and put it into your plans that during this decade, whatever time it is for you, you need to plan for your child to have a car.  When you have a plan you can implement a process to go ahead and start paying for such things. Do so by adding the respective time transactions into your time budget.
  
  
• Decade 3 (Age 20-29): Decade-3 is one of the most difficult and challenging decades of them all because this is where you’re finishing up your education and beginning a career. You are at the point of obtaining your own assets, your home, and even buying a car. So in this decade, we really need to be very intentional. People get married and begin a family in this decade. With that in mind, a person in decade-3 needs to map that out. When does marriage occur? If we have children, how would that look? Can we be prepared for things like daycare and what does that look like? Go ahead and plug these transactions not only into your financial budget, but your time budget. It doesn’t have to be perfect, but you do need to see it all budgeted out so that you know what you’re up against. Because if you don’t, what will happen is you may put them off to decade number four, which changes things drastically. The goal is to make a plan for where we’re going in life. 
  
  
• Decade 4 (Age 30-39): Decade-4 is where your children are growing up and becoming self-sufficient individuals. Your career has taken off and you’ve been a serious adult. What do you need in this decade to benefit your kids and two, how can you set yourself up for your next stage of life, when your kids are no longer with you?
  
  One of the things that Pamela and I have done with a time budget is become very intentional. We’re specific about our holidays and family time. Our goal is to make the most of these fleeting opportunities because our children and their children only get to be young once. We want to make these events as remarkable and as enjoyable as we possibly can. Therefore the strategy is to instill these concepts in our family to help take them to the next level.
  
  
• Decade 5 (Age 40-49): That brings us to decade-5, where our focus is on how we are going to make a contribution to society at large. This is where we get to make sure we already – if we haven’t started that business or organization, we do so. If you haven’t written that book, write that book. If you haven’t started teaching that class, teach the class. If you haven’t done the things that have been in your heart to do, this is the time that you want to go ahead and begin maneuvering, executing, and not just planning but putting your plans into motion. Place these transactions into your time budget. You want to place all your projects’ activities into your calendar. 
  
  
• Decade 6 (50-59): Here’s where you want to set plans to solidify the mark you want to leave in your life. You don’t want to play around with not having done something significant.
  I’m working with a close friend of mine who has challenged me to be a kind of mentor for him in this area. When you get to 50 you begin to evaluate, “have I made a difference?” Have I lived my life to the fullest? If you have that feeling that you have not, what then can you do? One, you can start mapping out the years. Put a timeline together now on how you can achieve the greatness that you desire to achieve.
  
  In order to begin mapping out a timeline and a project plan for one’s life, you need to be able to describe what it is you want. For example, if you say you want to be successful, jot down what success means for you so that you can tangibly and specifically start putting a plan together that gets you to that desired picture or image of who you want to become. That’s what makes your own time budget that much more important.
  
  
• Decade 7+ (60-69): Decade-7 and beyond is what I call  your time. In your time, this is the area where you do your bucket list things. They call it a bucket list because you put them off throughout the other decades only because they just didn’t fit. They didn’t work in the time you had budgeted. You know, you couldn’t do these things when you were in decade one, two, or in your 20s, because you didn’t have the resources that you have in decade-7+. You couldn’t do them in your 30s because you’re raising a family. You couldn’t do them in your 40s because you’re still trying to get things together. During these earlier decades, one spends most of that time working. In your 50s you’re trying to make sure you’re making a difference. But when you get to 60+, it is your time if you budgeted your time properly. Your investments, things that you’ve put in place, investments made in yourself are now paying off. You’re now able to do those dreams, those big things that you couldn’t do when you didn’t have the resources nor the time. 
  
  Don’t let society dictate the day and time in which you want to retire. Instead set the time you desire and live by a plan that impacts how you want to see your life unfold. That way you end up not someplace by accident, but someplace on purpose.  

Thinking with a decade-perspective, you want to say to yourself, “what do I want the end of my life to look like?” Then work backward to get you there. Each decade is your opportunity to plan out how you will get to this final destination. This is the secret to why we have a time budget.

In going back to the purpose of this topic, one creating a time budget is no different than creating a financial budget. If you were developing a financial budget for your life, a part of that would be centered around how much money you need to save. Saving for such things as your retirement, what you need to place in a college fund, how much you want to spend on a home or selling of a home, purchasing a new home or property you want to own, or some type of dream vehicle that you have. In the same way that you have these aspirations, have aspirations as huge, that big, for your time. Start entering those into your time budget. Start planning for those ambitions. It doesn’t matter how old or how young you are, go ahead and start mapping it out so that when you get to that certain decade, you know what it is you’re trying to achieve. If you do so, those great people I was telling you about, the greatest people I know who live on purpose, will be saying the same about you. You will be able to show others how to take their lives to the next level by budgeting their time and using a time budget. 

Question: how is it and what can you do today to begin setting up your decade transactions for your specific time budget?

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[1] ‭‭Proverbs 29:18 KJV, Bible.com, accessed September 27, 2022, https://www.bible.com/bible/1/PRO.29.18.KJV

All Scripture references used by permission, see our Scripture copyrights.