Millionaires don’t just buy things––
they buy time.
And if you’ve ever felt like you’re constantly busy but somehow never getting closer to the life you actually want, this episode is for you. In our second installment of the millionaire mindset series, I’m breaking down what I call time wealth. The idea that real wealth isn’t just about how much money you make, but how much of your life you get to keep. I’m sharing exactly how millionaires think about time, the sneaky ways you’re leaking it without realizing, and the small but powerful shifts you can start making right now to buy back your evenings, your energy, and your future—even if you’re not rich yet.
Key takeaways:
Time is your greatest asset, not money.
When you stop treating money as the primary currency and start treating time as the real measure of wealth, your decisions change. Instead of asking, “How much does this pay?” you begin asking, “Does this give me more freedom, ease, and choice?” That shift alone can completely transform how you structure your career, spending, and boundaries.
Decision fatigue is one of your biggest time leaks.
Many people waste enormous amounts of mental energy overthinking choices instead of making them. Waiting to feel “ready” keeps you stuck, because readiness isn’t a feeling—it’s a decision. Moving faster, choosing imperfectly, and adjusting later gives you more momentum and far more time back.
You’re doing $10 tasks while chasing $100 or $1,000 goals.
If your day is dominated by admin work, errands, inbox cleanup, or low-impact tasks, it’s nearly impossible to move toward bigger goals. Millionaires constantly ask, “Am I the only person who can do this?” and then delegate or automate everything else so they can stay focused on high-impact work.
Reactive living steals your future.
When you let other people’s urgency, poor planning, or emotional spirals dictate your day, you lose control of your time. Learning to separate what’s truly your responsibility from what isn’t is essential for protecting your energy and building a life that feels calm, intentional, and aligned.
Unpaid emotional labor quietly drains your capacity.
Overexplaining, overaccommodating, and being overly available consume massive amounts of mental bandwidth. Saying no without justification, setting simple boundaries, and allowing discomfort to exist are key parts of building time wealth.
Millionaires ruthlessly audit their time.
A short-term time audit (like a 72-hour tracking exercise) reveals where your hours are actually going versus where you think they’re going. From there, you can identify leaks, misalignments, and opportunities to reallocate time toward what truly matters.
Delegation and automation happen before you feel ready.
Waiting until things are “perfect” keeps you trapped. Whether it’s hiring help for a few hours a week, automating bills, or outsourcing household tasks, buying back small chunks of time compounds into major freedom.
Time wealth ultimately equals self-respect.
Wanting ease, rest, and flexibility doesn’t mean you’re lazy, it means you’re thinking long-term. Every yes costs you something, so learning to say no early and often is one of the most powerful wealth-building skills you can develop.
Notable quotes
“Ready is not a feeling. Ready is a decision.”
“Someone else’s failure to plan is not your emergency.”
“Every yes costs you something. Make sure it’s worth it.”
Questions to ponder from this episode:
- What decisions have I been postponing because I’m waiting to feel “ready”?
- Where am I letting other people’s urgency dictate my schedule?
- What $10 tasks am I doing that could be delegated, automated, or eliminated?
- Which choices in my life are draining my time but not moving me closer to the future I want?
Visit https://herfirst100k.com/ffpod to get your free time audit worksheet!
Episode at-a-glance
00:00 Intro
00:44 What the millionaire mindset series is about
01:22 Time wealth: buying back your time
02:11 Time is your greatest asset, not money
05:15 Time leaks: where you’re wasting time
05:36 Decision fatigue – spending too much time deciding
10:00 Doing $10 tasks with $100 goals
12:43 Reactive living – letting others’ urgency dictate your day
14:26 Unpaid emotional labor
15:50 How millionaires audit their time ruthlessly
19:58 Delegating before you’re ready
25:23 Habit stacking to maximize your time
30:17 Saying no early and often
33:25 Time wealth is self-respect
35:14 This week’s wealth move
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Transcript:
Tori Dunlap:
Millionaires don’t just buy things, they buy time. Here’s how to prioritize, delegate, and protect your most valuable asset like a millionaire. I’m going to be teaching you in the next 30 minutes what it took me over a decade to learn, and it will transform your work, your time management, and your money. Hi, my name is Tori. I am a multimillionaire, I’m a financial expert, I’m a New York Times bestselling author, and welcome back to my series, millionaire mindset. Now, the first episode that we did in millionaire mindset was all about taking risks, and we got a ton of incredible stories, incredible feedback about how valuable that episode was.
So I highly recommend if you are joining us in this series for the first time, you listen to that episode first because it’s such a good primer for everything we’re going to talk about today. The reason we started the millionaire mindset series here on Financial Feminist is because I fucking hate all of the content that’s out there talking about how to dream your big dreams and live your big life. Nobody tells you actually how to do it. Nobody gives you action steps. And you don’t have to be a millionaire to listen, but you can learn from one.
So the goal of millionaire mindset is to help you uplevel your career or your business, your brain, and all of the habits so that you can actually create a life that you not only love, but a life that allows you to do big, incredible things. And feel free if you’re on Spotify or YouTube to comment what millionaire mindset episode you want next. I would love to hear what you want me to cover. All right, let’s dive into this concept of time wealth. When you’re a millionaire, you are not just buying stuff, you are buying time. Millionaires buy back their evenings.
They buy back their days. They buy the ability to say no, to rest, to change their minds, and to walk away from something that no longer fits. And here’s the part that nobody tells you. This isn’t luxury, this isn’t laziness, this is about power. This is about control. This is about doing the things that you want to do and minimizing the things that you don’t. But it’s also about using time as your best resource. Because at the end of the day, time is the one resource we cannot create more of. Okay? We get a finite amount of time on this big, beautiful planet. Right?
And the people who understand that time is your greatest asset and your greatest resource, they stop trading it away for things that don’t actually move their lives forward and they start making more powerful decisions. So the first thing I need you to understand is that your greatest asset is not how much money you make. It’s not the money in your bank account. It’s not what your accounts look like. It is about how much time you have. And when you start approaching your decisions from that mindset, everything starts to shift. And I can tell you, as someone pre-millionaire status, I was driven by how much money I could make, because of course I was.
I wasn’t making a ton of money. Right? And so I was just thinking about how do I make the most amount of money possible for this specific thing? And then what would happen is I would get to the end of the day or the end of the week or the end of the month, and I would be exhausted. And yes, because I worked hard and yes, because I put in work, but also because I kept feeling like I was trading away my life to somebody else. I was trading away my life to a boss who didn’t really respect me and who I didn’t really respect.
I was trading away my life to the pursuit of something that didn’t make sense. And as soon as I started understanding, as soon as my brain switched from viewing money as my currency to time as my currency, everything changed. And the good news is you don’t need millions of dollars to do this. Okay? You don’t need to outsource your entire life or suddenly live like a Fortune 500 CEO. Right? You don’t need to track every second of your day for the rest of your life and do a million things with it. What you do need to do is think differently about money.
Not as something you hoard or you spend to impress other people. Right? But as a tool to create space, to create ease and to create choice in your life. That’s what we’re about here in Financial Feminist, is using money as a tool. So in this episode, we’re going to break down how millionaires actually think about time, including directly from my own experience of what I’ve learned, the small but powerful ways you can start buying your time back today, even if you’re working for somebody else, or even if you don’t have a ton of money right now. And why wealth building is not just about what you earn, it’s about how much of your life you get to keep.
So when we set expectations around time wealth, this is not about private chefs or jets, this is about systems, boundaries, and leverage. And yes, you can do this on a normal income. So we first need to discuss what I call your time leaks. These are the places you are spending time right now that you can almost immediately put back in your pocket. These are the places where you are wasting time and you don’t even know it. And no, the word Netflix is not going to come out of my mouth. I’m not going to victimize you watching TV. That’s not what this is about, right?
Instead, we need to understand where we’re spending all our brain power so that we can get that time back. The first time leak that you’re experiencing is decision fatigue. Not only do you have a lot of decisions, we all do. We’re busy people. But you are spending way too much time trying to make the right decision. I know this about you because I talk to you. Okay? I talk to the millions of women in our community and the biggest mistake I see with how women spend their time, the primary time leak I see is spending so much time thinking about a decision rather than just making it. Pick any decision in your life.
Okay? It can be as big as the person you want to marry and it can be as tiny as like, “What shirt do I put on today?” I can imagine that depending on that decision, you are spending the same amount of time deciding what shirt you put on today as maybe not the person you’re going to marry, but as a bigger decision. Okay? You are doing more research, right? You’re like, “Oh, but I can’t make that decision yet because I haven’t looked up enough about it.” Okay? Or, “Oh yeah, I haven’t gotten to that thing yet.” And so what happens is psychologically in the back of your mind, it’s like a videotape that just keeps playing.
It doesn’t have an end, right? If you can remember the days of VCR, okay? It’s like the tape’s not popping out. It just keeps playing and playing and playing and playing. That’s what’s happening if you have things in your life, decisions that need to be made, and you’re just putting them off, either because you don’t feel ready or because you feel like, “Okay, this is a huge deal and if I make the wrong decision, it’s going to ruin my life.” Okay? Let’s first talk about ready. Ready is not a feeling, it’s a decision. Ready is not a feeling, it’s a decision. And the truth is, you will never feel ready. I did not feel ready to start my business. Okay?
It may shock you to learn that me, a very self-motivated multimillionaire, spent three years before I launched Her First 100K talking about how I was going to launch Her First 100K. And I got in my own way. “Oh, I don’t know what website I should pick or what website platform, and I don’t really know how to code, so I don’t really know how to produce a website, and I don’t know what my brand color should be, and I don’t know what to call it.” And I had a million excuses that felt productive, right? It’s like, “Oh no, of course you need a brand color.”
Guess what? One day I literally got up and I said, “You know what? I’m tired of saying I’m doing more research. I’m tired of saying I don’t feel ready” and I just did it. I launched Her First 100K as a blog. Now, does that website I launched in 2016 look anything like our website in 2026, a decade later? Absolutely fucking not. Because I learned, I grew. But you spend so much time waiting to feel ready because you’re afraid that maybe you won’t make a perfect decision, that maybe it won’t be absolutely perfect. And that leads me to the second point is that you’re putting off decision making because you’re worried that making the wrong decision will somehow ruin your life.
My friend Mal, who we’ve had on the show before, Mallory Rowan, she has this great quote that I think about all the time, which she says, “You’re way further from jail than you think.” And what she means by that is this decision that we’re so afraid of like, “Oh, I’m going to start a business and I don’t know how. I don’t have lawyers and I don’t know how to pay my taxes and…” The IRS are not coming for you. It’s fine. You’re going to figure it out. You’re going to make some mistakes. Right? Almost every decision in life is undoable, but you need to make a decision. Sometimes the only way you understand if it’s the right decision is by making the decision.
So the first time leak that we can immediately shore up and patch up is decision fatigue. I need you just making decisions and moving on. Done is better than perfect. I have adapted this in my own life and the moment I started doing this, my life got so much simpler. I got so much time back. Because I made the decision and only by making the decision did I realize if it sent me in the right direction. Most of the time it did, by the way, because my intuition’s really good, so is yours. And if it wasn’t perfect, I fixed it later and I spent way less time on it.
Let’s talk about the second time leak. Right now, you are doing $10 tasks with $100 goals. So what I mean by that is you’re doing a lot of the things that bog down your time when you have these big dreams and goals and aspirations for yourself. Now, off the bat, I need to be very clear, this is where I put my feminist hat on, that so many people who talk about time wealth are business owners that I hate. And they’re the ones who frankly demonize domestic labor and they act like it’s lower than them and that, “Oh, if I’m outsourcing this work, it’s to people who are beneath me.” I want to be very clear.
We’re going to talk about outsourcing and delegating our work today, but we are never considering our labor more valuable than somebody else’s. When we talk about some of these 10 hour tasks, what I mean by that is that if you have these bigger goals, these bigger dreams, these $10 tasks are valuable. Of course they are. We wouldn’t do them unless they were absolutely necessary to our life, right? But they are not the kind of tasks that relate to the goals we’re trying to achieve. When we think about some of these tasks that are not aligned with where we want to be, we’re talking about like inbox chaos. Okay?
Your inbox looking an absolute mess. We’re talking about a lot of the admin, the administration work that you get bogged down in very easily. Some of the emotional labor that ends up happening, right? This is where we’re going to talk about boundaries and we’re going to continue talking about them. Right? You have to analyze, “Am I the only person who can do this job?” This is a question that I asked myself running Her First 100K all the time. It transformed our business. I am the only one that can host Financial Feminist, okay?
And I don’t believe in like getting AI Tori in here to like host the show in place of me. Right? So I’m the only one who can do this, but I’m not the only one who can put together an incredible one sheet. Right? Or help book our guests for this show. Kristen does an amazing job. Her team do an amazing job of making this show happen. Right? But as soon as I started asking myself, “Why am I doing all of this? What are the things that only I can do and how do I outsource everything else?” The business got so much easier to run. It made so much more money.
I got to give people jobs and I also became better at the very work I said was important to me. Because I got to stay in the stuff that feels magical and I got to allow other people to do their magic too. So your second time leak is thinking about that mismatch between the tasks you’re doing and the goals you have. Our third time leak is all about reactive living. You are letting other people’s urgency dictate your decisions. I love the quote that says, “Someone else’s emergency is not your problem. Someone else’s like failure to plan is not your emergency.” Right?
And the thing I think about all the time that I just remind myself and sometimes say out loud is like, “Not my circus, not my monkeys. That is not my problem. That is their problem.” Oh, it’s somebody’s failure to plan is not your emergency. That’s what the quote is. There you go. But it’s true. And yet we spend so much time, so much of our day thinking about all of everybody else’s problems, right? That can be at work. The most obvious one I think is at work, of somebody’s failure to get something turned in on time, right? Sudsets into a complete spiral.
Not your problem. Not your problem. Now you might have to fix their problem, but great, you document it and you send it to your boss. Okay? But it’s also at home. It’s so easy when you’re an empathetic person, when you care about other people to absorb other people’s energy and to absorb other people’s problems as your own. And I’m not saying you be like a stone-cold bitch. Okay? It’s not what I’m saying, but I am saying that you are allowing people to spiral and to heighten your own homeostasis to the point where that dictates your entire day, that dictates your decisions, it dictates how you spend your time, and it dictates what’s going on in your brain that prevents you from being able to do the things that matter.
Our fourth time leak, unpaid emotional labor. You didn’t think we were going to not talk about this, did you? Overexplaining, overaccommodating, being overly available. Now, I wish I could come on the show and be like, “We’ve solved the emotional labor problem. Easy, we’re just not going to do it anymore.” Not realistic, unfortunately, because this very society is built on the back of women’s emotional labor, unpaid emotional labor. Okay? But there are some things that you can say, “You know what? I’m not going to do anymore,” or at least “I’m not going to do that to the fullest extent.”
Right? We’re talking about this stuff where you’re accommodating, again, everybody else’s fears and everybody else’s motivations and everybody else’s stress, but you’re also justifying your own decisions constantly. You feel like you cannot make a decision without justifying that decision. We’re going to talk more about this later, but I’ll give you an example. You can’t just say, “No, I don’t want to do that.” You have to give a crazy reason, “Oh, I’m so sorry. No, I can’t. I have this thing and this thing and this thing, but I really, really want to and blah, blah, blah.” Like, “No, I don’t really want to do that.” Or, “No, I don’t have the bandwidth to do that right now.” Period. End of sentence.
No, no is a full sentence. Okay? So this, especially for women, is such a time leak because all that justification, all that mental energy is going towards making somebody else more comfortable at the expense of your own comfort. No, we’re done with that. So how do millionaires actually start living their lives and spending their currency that isn’t money, but rather protecting their time? The first thing they do, they ruthlessly audit their time. And this is not a practice where I’m asking you to optimize every single minute of your day. Okay? Because that’s capitalism, that’s hustle culture at work.
That’s not what I’m asking you to do. What this actually looks like is knowing where your time goes, not relying on just vibes or feeling busy, and also having your calendar reflect your priorities, not other people’s demands. Some of my favorite examples of this, early on when I was running HFK and especially it was starting to gain a lot of traction, we were launching my first book, “Financial Feminist,” and we were working with our publisher on the PR plan for the book. And one of the things that kept happening is they kept asking me to be on this podcast or do this interview and I would look and they were not huge interviews.
And in no way am I saying like, “Oh, I’m above that.” But I had a very finite amount of time. Right? My resource, especially during that time, was very finite. I had this moment where I was like, “Okay, I could appease the publisher and just say yes and what is it? An hour of my time. Okay, fine.” But I asked myself, “Okay, is it really an hour of your time?” Which by the way, would’ve been reason enough to say no. It’s like, “No, I got to prep for that interview. Me and my team have to coordinate the interview and work with schedules.
If I say yes to this interview, but something else comes up, I can’t say yes to that thing.” Right? Now I am unavailable for that period of time. And so the audit of my time was asking, is this valuable knowing that this is a finite resource. You have to treat your time like it’s so scarce. It is. It’s so scarce. It is such a scarce resource. And so when you start asking yourself, “Where’s my time going? Is this just me feeling busier?” Because that’s what I could have done. I could have gone on the show and like, “Okay, I got another podcast interview.
I feel busy. I’m doing a thing.” It’s not a valuable use of my time. So how do we ruthlessly audit our time? We do what’s called the 72-hour time audit. The first thing you’re going to do is track everything you do for three days. You are not judging yourself, you are not beating yourself up. This is just data. Okay? Similar to how we talk about tracking our spending using a money diary. Okay? We’re just seeing what’s going on in our lives, where we’re spending our time. And again, we’re not beating ourselves up. We’re not being like, “Oh, I have to get up off the couch and hustle more.” That’s not what this is. Okay?
We are just getting data. Then we’re going to start analyzing that data to see where our time leaks are. Are you scrolling on your phone and it’s not making you very happy? Are you running errands that do not actually get you to your goals? Right? You have big, audacious goals. Are you doing tasks that are not aligned with those goals? Are you overworking or not saying no just because you’re worried about not feeling busy? Are you agreeing to emotional labor in a way that is not helpful to the kind of person you want to be? Right? We are looking at our time as our best resource because the truth is you might not have a time problem.
Ultimately, we have a finite amount of time. Right? All of us do, but you do have a visibility problem. You do not know where that time is going. So we need to audit it so we can make different decisions based on the data we have. The second thing millionaires do, they start delegating before they’re ready. A reminder that ready is not a feeling, it’s a decision. So what this looks like, millionaires stop doing tasks that drain their energy, but do not grow their income or do not get themselves closer to their goals.
They are delegating before it feels comfortable. And what I mean by this is that they are starting to, again, think of time as their most finite resource and giving away tasks. You notice that they don’t have a control problem. That’s the big thing I hear from women. When I coach women business owners, when I talk to women about creating the lives that they want, one of the things I hear all the time is, “Oh yeah, I know I should hire somebody,” or “I know I should figure out, yeah, ways to do more of the work that I want to do, but…” And there’s always a but. The but is usually, “But nobody can do it as good as I can.”
Or, “But I have control issues.” That literally sometimes is the response. LOL, so funny. No, no. Get over it. I politely say that, but get over it. It’s not funny to not trust other people to do a good job. It’s not funny to feel like you and only you can do this correctly. That’s actually kind of an ego problem. You’re telling me that nobody else could do this to the minimum standard you have, that only you, you are so special that only you can do this thing. I just call bullshit on that. That’s not going to get you where you need to be. It’s just not. And millionaires understand the opportunity cost.
They understand that when they’re bogged down in tasks that don’t allow them to do the thing they’re really good at, they don’t make as much money, they don’t like their lives as much, and they’re not able to actually create a business or a career or a household that feels safe and easy. And I don’t mean easy, like not hard. I mean like ease, like peaceful. So let’s talk about delegation. We’re talking about like outsourcing administration tasks. We are talking about hiring help early before you feel ready. We’re talking about automating anything repeatable.
Automating your savings, automating your bills transfer, automating your groceries getting delivered, okay? Cleaning, virtual assistance. And yeah, automation for your bill pay, your calendar blocks, all of that. Okay? I’m going to tell you another story. This is when I was making 70K a year. Okay? Decent salary, especially for me at 24, but not a crazy amount of money. I was living on my own one bedroom apartment in Seattle. I was paying like $1,500 a rent by myself. So this was me a couple years into my career, 2018, 2019. Okay?
And what I started realizing was I wanted Her First 100K to grow. I had dreams and aspirations for what this business could be, and I also knew I didn’t want to work for somebody forever. And my goal was to be able to quit my job, to run my own business at 30. And I was working a full-time job. So I was working my nine to five. I was working for somebody else. I had a commute. Right? I had all of the stereotypical things where you’re thinking, “Yeah, how am I going to outsource this? I have all of these things, Tori, that I have to do.” And I also had these goals, right?
And this is what I’m talking about where the life I was living and the way I was managing my time and all of the things that I told myself I had to do or that only I could do was not matching up with the kind of life I wanted. So even though I wasn’t making a ton of money, one of the things I did was I realized that if I wanted to scale Her First 100K, I needed help. I needed help. And there’s this belief that in order to get help, you either need to be rich or you need to pay somebody full-time income.
And what I did was I had met some people at networking events, including a woman who ended up working with us, I think for three or four years. Her name was Olivia. Olivia was in college. Olivia was not even at her career yet, but I saw potential in her and I was a couple years older than her, a couple years more ahead and I kind of became a mentor to her. And I loved the way Olivia’s brain worked and I realized, “Oh, I can hire Liv for five hours a week.” That’s all I can afford right now. Right? I can’t afford to pay her more than that. But if I want this business to grow, I need her doing things that she can do so I can do the things only I can do.
At the time I was doing one-on-one money coaching with people. Right? She couldn’t be that. She couldn’t show up as me, but she could help me create graphics in Canva and she could help me answer customer support emails. So that’s what she did. And let me tell you, it was so helpful. It was so helpful while Her First 100K was just a side hustle. And I did it before I was ready. Okay? And I see so many women bottlenecking their lives and their businesses and their careers because they’re like, “That seems like a lot of hassle. I’ll just do it.” And then they get bitter and resentful because it’s only them doing it.
That’s very easily fixable. You can hire somebody. You can think about delegating before it feels comfortable. How do we actually do this? We need to focus on the 10 versus 100 versus $1,000 rule. Okay? $10 tasks. I’m not saying this to devalue labor. I’m contextualizing this to show you that the current tasks you’re doing do not match your current goals. $10 tasks, your chores, your inbox, your errands. $100 tasks, these are skilled tasks, but trainable work. $1,000 tasks, these are like the thinking and the planning, the creating and the negotiating. Okay?
So what we can do this week is we can identify one $10 task to eliminate. Maybe that’s grocery delivery or going to pick up your groceries. Maybe that is hiring a cleaner once a month. How much time would that save you. Right? When we stop viewing money as the currency, we start using time as the currency. Well, I can pay a house cleaner $200-ish dollars once a month and I can save 10 hours of cleaning? Yes. I’m going to find a way to fit that in my budget. Okay? Maybe it’s batch cooking.
You hear this all the time, meal prepping, but because it works, because it’s saying, “You know what? I’m going to do all of these things at once.” Or it might be even delegating meals out to somebody else, ordering pre-made meals, figuring out ways that you can outsource that, and automating your bills, automating as many things as possible. When we think about delegation, just because you can do everything does not mean it’s smart too. And in fact, delegation is the only way you’re going to be able to get ahead, is the only way to get where you’re trying to go.
As we’re going through these, and we got a couple more, we have a free time audit worksheet to help you see where your time is going and how to get some of it back. We were talking about how important it is to do that time audit. So if you go to herfirst100k.com/ffpod, that is a free resource for you. I need you to do this homework. I need you to not just be a passive listener. I need you to actually implement what I’m teaching you today. So that worksheet, we’re making it super easy for you to do that, herfirst100k.com/ffpod.
The third thing millionaires do, they habit stack. Habit stacking is magical. It is so great. It is one of my favorite things that I’ve done to buy back my time. There’s two versions of habit stacking. There’s habit stacking that is like, “I do this thing every day, so I’m going to add this thing that I want to do, but I’m not currently doing.” So what that looks like is like, okay, I am trying to get more movement in and I brush my teeth every day. So every time I brush my teeth, I’m going to do lunches. There’s that version of habit stacking.
That is applicable to anybody, right? I want to meditate. I’m also in my car every day for 20 minutes. I’m going to meditate while I take my drive into work. That is one version of habit stacking that anybody can implement today. My favorite version of habit stacking is I’m doing this thing that feels productive and I will couple it with another thing that feels productive. Okay? So I will listen to a podcast while I am on a walk or at the gym or cleaning my house. Hopefully it’s this podcast. Ding. You can also fold laundry while watching TV. I was the queen of this in college. I really wanted to watch Chopped.
Chopped was on Netflix. I love my cooking shows. I got super into it in college and I told myself that my break from studying could be Chopped, but that I also was going to fold my laundry and organize my room while I was doing that. It was a reward with the thing that I know was actually going to make my life better. Maybe while you’re driving to a store, you’re going to call a friend. I do this a lot. When I’m driving somewhere for like 10-ish minutes, I’m like, “I’ll call my mom. She’d love to hear from me. I got 10 minutes, I’ll call my mom.”
So how we can do this, how we can protect and get back our time so that we’re thinking more strategically about doing a productive thing and coupling it with another productive thing is create one habit stack right now. Again, listening to this podcast, a great start. So the easiest formula for this is during X, I will Y. So during my workout, I will listen to Financial Feminist. Or after cooking dinner, I will clean and listen to an audiobook. When When I run errands, I will call my best friend. You can see how this very easy formula allows you to immediately gain some time back and put things in perspective. Right?
I’m doing this thing that feels good with this other thing that feels good. Suddenly, we just got two for the price of one. This makes time your friend rather than your enemy. This allows you to double your time for half the effort. Let’s talk about the last thing that millionaires do that you are not doing right now. Millionaires say no early and often. What does this actually look like? They are making quick decisions. We discussed this already, but they are making quick decisions and then figuring out later if that was the right call. They are quickly saying no.
They’re doing fast nos. They’re setting clear boundaries and they’re not overexplaining. They are not waffling. This is the, “I don’t have the capacity for that right now.” Or, ‘Nope, I’m doing this other thing, but thank you so much for having me. Thank you so much for inviting me.” Right? So let’s talk about how you can do this. The first thing is I need you making quicker decisions. The perfect example, and yeah, I’m putting my financial expert hat on for this, is I know that it took you way longer than it should have. Let’s say weeks. That’s generous.
Let’s say it took you weeks to sign up for the high yield savings account that I’ve been talking about. And if you haven’t signed up yet, I already know what’s going on in your brain. You’re going, “I don’t have a lot of time.” Or like, “Oh, I have to do more research to figure out if that’s the right account.” And like, “Oh, I don’t really know.” Yes, you do. Yes, you do. First of all, it’s going to take you 10 minutes. I’ve already done the research for you. And if you want to do more research, it’s literally a two-minute Google. Best high yield savings accounts. And then you do a little bit of reading and then you make a God damn decision.
You don’t say, “Oh, I did the reading and I’m not really sure yet. And I’m scared of losing my money, blah, blah.” No, make a God damn decision. No more waffling. No more deciding. “Oh, do I like that person that I went on a date with? I don’t know. They seem nice, but I didn’t really get good vibes and I don’t really think that they’re somebody I could see myself with, but maybe, but they were kind of sweet.” No. You know already that that is not a person you want to see again. Make the decision. You can always message them in two months. If you decide later, “Oh shoot, I actually really like that person.” Great. This literally happened to me.
I really liked this person. This was like my previous relationship before my now partner. I realized, “Oh, this person was really sweet, but we don’t want the right things in dating right now.” But then that changed for me because I thought I would be traveling. I messaged them. We dated. We had a whole love story. It was great. Here’s the deal though. Quick decisions. You can almost always go back in the decision later, but you have wasted so much time making the right decision that you’ve done nothing at all. Please, please stop researching and thinking that’s beneficial.
Let me give you some scripts you can steal for those clear boundaries, the no overexplaining. “That doesn’t fit my capacity right now.” You notice I didn’t justify it. I didn’t say, “Oh my God, I’m so sorry. I would really love to.” That doesn’t fit my bandwidth right now. And if that sounds rude to you, you can add, “But thanks for inviting me” or “Thanks for thinking of me.” Okay? I am protecting my time this season. Period. End of sentence. That’s not in my budget right now, but we can do this other thing. You can say, “Oh, thank you so much for inviting me out to eat.
That’s not in my budget right now, but I would love if you came over and cooked. We can cook together.” Great. “I can’t commit to that right now, but thank you for thinking of me.” Or, “I don’t know what my schedule’s going to be like. Let me get back to you.” You do not have to say yes when you want to say no. Every yes costs you something. Make sure it’s fucking worth it. Time wealth at the end of the day is self-respect. Wanting time doesn’t make you lazy. Wanting time does not mean that you can’t hack it. Okay? Outsourcing doesn’t mean you’re better than someone else.
Wanting help doesn’t make you bad with money and wanting ease, wanting joy, wanting more time means you’re actually thinking long term. So when we stop viewing our currency as money, but as time, every decision gets filtered through that lens and your entire mindset starts to change around the way you schedule yourself, around where you are putting your energy, but also who is allowed in your circle, who’s allowed to have that energy.
What I need you to repeat, every time you try any of the things we talked about, anytime you’re looking at that time audit worksheet, anytime that you feel your brain trying to operate in the currency of money, of cash and not time, you need to say to yourself, “I treat my time the way wealthy people do.” Because that is how you become wealthy. So this week’s wealth move, this Millionaire Mindset resource. You’re going to go to herfirst100k.com/ffpod to get that free time audit worksheet, and you’re going to identify one task, one boundary, or one purchase that actively buys back your time.
You’re going to do it without any sort of guilt or justification or explanation, and you’re going to notice what you do with that reclaimed time. I am so excited for you to buy back the most precious resource you have to start thinking and behaving and treating your time like millionaires do. And I will see you back here for the next episode of Millionaire Mindset.
Thank you for listening to Financial Feminist produced by Her First $100K. If you loved the show and want to keep supporting feminist media, please subscribe or follow us on your preferred podcasting platform or on YouTube. Your support helps us continue to bring this content to you for free. If you’re looking for resources, tools, and education, including all of the resources mentioned in this episode, head to herfirst100k.com/ffpod.
Financial Feminist is hosted by me, Tori Dunlap. Produced by Kristen Fields and Tamisha Grant. Research by Sarah Sciortino. Audio and video engineering by Alyssa Midcalf. Marketing and Operations by Karina Patel and Amanda Leffew. Special thanks to our team at Her First 100K, Kailyn Sprinkle, Masha Bakhmetyeva, Sasha Bonar, Rae Wong, Elizabeth McCumber, Daryl Ann Ingman, Shelby Duclos, Meghan Walker, and Jess Hawks. Promotional graphics by Mary Stratton, photography by Sarah Wolfe, and theme music by Jonah Cohen Sound. A huge thanks to the entire Her First 100K community for supporting our show.
Tori Dunlap
Tori Dunlap is an internationally-recognized money and career expert. After saving $100,000 at age 25, Tori quit her corporate job in marketing and founded Her First $100K to fight financial inequality by giving women actionable resources to better their money. She has helped over five million women negotiate salaries, pay off debt, build savings, and invest.
Tori’s work has been featured on Good Morning America, the New York Times, BBC, TIME, PEOPLE, CNN, New York Magazine, Forbes, CNBC, BuzzFeed, and more.
With a dedicated following of over 2.1 million on Instagram and 2.4 million on TikTok —and multiple instances of her story going viral—Tori’s unique take on financial advice has made her the go-to voice for ambitious millennial women. CNBC called Tori “the voice of financial confidence for women.”
An honors graduate of the University of Portland, Tori currently lives in Seattle, where she enjoys eating fried chicken, going to barre classes, and attempting to naturally work John Mulaney bits into conversation.
