Spend Now or Spend Later: Why Buying Back Your Time Might Be Your Best Investment

Money only has one job: to be spent.

It's a slightly cheeky way to put it, but it holds up. Every dollar you earn gets spent now or spent later. Later might mean you in retirement, your kids, a charity or, for a good share of it, the government. Saving doesn't change that. It only changes when the spending happens and who does it.

That makes the real question a timing question. For a chiropractor, the right answer depends heavily on which part of the career you're in.

The arc most chiropractors follow

Most of the people we work with move through roughly the same stages. School, with debt and no income. Associate years. Then maybe buying or starting a practice, and usually more debt with it. After that come the building years, and eventually a peak, when you know the clinical job cold and you've finally learned how to run the business. Last comes the transition out, through a sale, retirement or both.

Every stage has a different trade-off between spending now and spending later. The trap is applying one rule to all of them.

The couple who are crushing it and don't feel like it

Chris described a couple he works with. One is the chiropractor, and the other runs the office. They got through the student years, started as an associate, opened their own practice, added a part-time associate, and have just moved into a bigger space they built out to grow into.

By any reasonable measure they're doing great. They tick every box.

And at nearly every meeting the question is some version of could we be doing more? Should they put more toward investments, or pay the debt down faster?

The constraint isn't money. It's them. They're two people running at the edge of their capacity, in the years when the practice needs them most.

We see this pattern constantly with clients in the early-to-middle building years. We can see where they'll be in fifteen or twenty years, and it's a good place. They live in the present, where it always feels like there's more they should be doing. Sometimes the most useful thing we can tell them is that they're going to be okay, and that the plan has room for more of a life right now.

What well-spent money looks like in the building years

In the building years it's hard to justify spending now. Everything says be disciplined: pay down the debt, start investing, let compounding work. Most of that is right, and we're not arguing against it.

But one category of spending earns its place even then: anything that buys back your time and energy.

A house cleaner. Help with the admin that follows you home. A virtual assistant for travel and the small tasks that eat an evening. A personal trainer, if that's what keeps your body able to do this job for another twenty years. A real holiday, where you actually rest, instead of three days you spend half-checking email.

The reason is specific to this profession. Your income depends on your body and your energy showing up at the table. If you grind through your thirties to push debt down and savings up, and you arrive in your fifties worn out, you've spent your future earning capacity to buy progress on paper. You also hit your peak earning years with less left to give them. That isn't a good trade.

There's a sale-price angle too. A practice run by an owner with the energy to keep systems tight and profitability strong in the years before a sale is usually worth more than one run by someone who has only enough left to show up and treat.

This isn't permission to spend

This part matters. It isn't a green light for the new vehicle or whatever you've been hoping someone would sign off on.

Money redirected from saving has a real opportunity cost. Chris ran the math on air on trimming a few hundred dollars a month from your investing, and over a thirty-year career the difference compounds into a lot. Buying back time is worth it when it genuinely buys back time and energy you'll use. It isn't worth it as a label on spending you'd have done anyway.

So it needs guardrails. Two we use with clients:

The 50% raise rule. When the practice lets you give yourself a raise, invest half of it straight away. The other half is yours to spend, on lifestyle or on buying back more of your time. Having saved the first half is what gives you permission for the second.

Guilt-free spending, built into the cash flow plan. Every personal cash flow plan we build includes an amount you can spend on whatever you like, with no justification needed. We'd argue students need this too. Having it defined in advance is what makes it guilt-free rather than something you feel bad about afterward.

Watch the goalposts

The other half of the balance is lifestyle creep. If you ease off on saving in your thirties, it has to be because you know income will grow and you've committed to your spending not growing at the same rate. Hold that line, and by your mid-to-late forties you can save a much bigger share of income and still live well. Let spending rise with every raise, and the target for retirement keeps moving further away.

That's why this belongs inside a plan and not on a whim. It works when someone can see the whole trajectory and say yes, this fits, or not yet.

The house cleaner test

Chris admitted he used to feel guilty paying someone to clean his house. He could do it himself, so why pay for it? Scott told a similar story. His wife was set on landscaping the front yard herself over the summer, and they decided a few thousand dollars was worth more than the weekends it would take.

Can I do this myself? is the wrong question. The better question is: What would I do with the time and energy instead, and is that worth more to me than what this costs?

At some stages the honest answer is no. At a lot more stages than most chiropractors assume, it's yes.

The one thing: Saving isn't the opposite of spending. It's spending later, so decide on purpose which later you're saving for.

Listen to episode 046 of The Chiro Money Show →

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