In this bad economy, millions of people lose their jobs and can’t find decent employment. Everyone wants to cut spending. I have heard a lot of ideas to save money like repairing your stuffs instead of buying new ones, cutting down unnecessary subscriptions, or stretching out grocery dollars. But I also heard someone mention the idea of saving money by doing your own hair. Yes, with the statement that it’s so easy anyone can do it!

Well, if you know how to cut your hair nicely and are happy with it, great. But if you’re like I, who would struggle for hours to trim the hair and it still looks like a caveman’s, then my advice is “forget about it.” If you can’t afford a fancy haircut, you still have the option of getting one at some Asian barbershop, which typically costs less than $15. Or if you can find a “barbers training school,” they would cut your hair for as low as $7 and it doesn’t look so bad. My point is, TIME is a very precious asset that you should never waste. Wasting your time and you won’t save anything.

The haircut above is just an example. There’re many saving ideas that just don’t work for the majority of people. A good saving strategy must be the one that creates little or no alternative cost. In other words, it should help you save money with little or no extra spending (in most cases, your time). For example, you have several options to buy a new car insurance. Choose the best deal among those options will save you money while not wasting any of your time. Another example is that if you spend $50 annual membership at a wholesaler, you’ll get everything discounted for the whole year (supposedly that will save you several hundreds dollars a year). That’s considered a good saving strategy.

So in my opinion, saving money is more like investing in business. Choose wisely and you’ll get the most money. And like in a good business, the one thing you should never invest is your time. Let me say that again, you should never invest your time in business! Why? Because once you spend your limited time, you’ll never get it back. “Wait a minute,” you may say, “what if I spend my time to work for money?” Well, I believe that’s called work, job, or employment. That’s not business. I would define business as some kind of activities that generate a profit or loss for you without your work. For example, you work for IBM as a computer engineer. You are an IBM’s employee, you don’t own any shares in IBM. In that case, you have a job, you don’t have a business. But let’s say, you own an apartment complex that rent out to residential tenants, that’s a business because you don’t work for it to make money. And yes, you can own a business and work for it at the same time. For example, you run a business of home improvement that hires several other people while acting as manager. But still your job and your business are two different concepts.

Let me explain further about the stark difference between a job and a business. In a job, you exchange your working time for a fixed pay (either per-hour wages or salaries). Since you can only have a limited number of hours each working day (like 8 hours), your pay is capped, even if you want more money, you can’t make more money out of your job. In a business, however, there’s no such limit. If you know how to operate your business efficiently, or how to invest your money wisely, you’ll make more profit. Unlike in a job where time is the limit, you can expand your business and multiply your revenues. On the flip side, you may lose money in a business, whereas in a job, your paycheck is guaranteed (by law).

With that in mind, your saving strategy should take into consideration the use of your time as well. If you have to spend a lot of time in order to save money, you shouldn’t do it, because that may not be a saving in the end.

Now comes the practical question, “how can I turn my time into money?” People say time is money, but if you can’t turn time into money, then that time is useless and all of my argument above is invalid. However, there’re many ways to make money with your time. If you have a job, then you may not have that much extra time to worry about. Suppose that you’re unemployed and have a lot of free time, there’re many ways to monetize it. You can turn to education or pick up some new skills that will help you get better job and better pay later. You can learn how to be a free-lance writer and make money out of your writing. Or you can simply make a good blog that can take in advertising income.

Most people who monetize their free time start out with a hobby. Once they’re good at what they do as a hobby, they can turn it into serious income. The Internet has provided good opportunities for everyone to turn free time into money, as long as they have the intention.