Flickr image "Blue-domed church at sunset" by Marcelgermain

This article may be a bit depressing for those who are not mature enough to confront the inevitable facing us: that we are dying everyday.

What I mean is that from the day that we are born, we have a life expectancy till the day we die. We won’t know if we will die young or die old but we know our time will come some day.

I read this article referenced from Box of Crayons, “What’s your death clock read” where the author came up with a countdown widget to remind himself of the number of days he has left before his life expectancy is up. I’ve decided to compute my own based on Singapore’s statistics of average life expectancy for men at 78.4 years.

This translates for me at 14,000+ days left till the likely expected date for me to pass on from this world.

Why do you want to know our likely death date?

1. Knowing how much time you have

Knowing roughly when I am likely to pass on is not an exercise in being morbid and looking for death. It is about finding out how much of the most precious resource we have in life, that is, TIME.

Your financial freedom plans based on the principles of living within your means, saving and investing, growing and protecting your means will work only if you have sufficient time to accumulate the investible savings that generate passive income for you. If I expire before my 14,000 days is up, then I may not meet my goals towards financial freedom.

2. Injecting urgency into life

I’ve been in phases of my life where I was constantly involved in many many things. During my time as a toastmaster and competing for the Table-Topics contest, I was attending meetings almost every 3 days or so in the evenings while still doing my full-time job. The results paid off in that I won the Division contest that year for table-topics.

It was a period of time where I saw tremendous growth in my own skills as a off-the-cuff speaker. However, it took a lot of my time which I could spare then as my daughter was not born yet.

There’s also been phases in my life when it was very slack in both personal life and work. I spent evenings wasted on computer games and watching videos. It was a good time to unwind but did nothing for me in terms of personal growth and development.

Now that my daughter is growing up, I’m juggling between work and helping to look after her in the evenings and weekends. I have less time as a result to pursue hobbies such as toast-mastering.

I realise I need to again step up the pace and manage my time better to enjoy and participate actively in my daughter’s growing years and also developing my specific plans into actions towards financial freedom.

Putting down the specific number of days I have left each day helps to motivate me to make better use of my time.

3. Being clear about where you are in the journey of life

As I get older, I sometimes lose track of how far I am in this journey of life.  Going by the average life expectancy for males in Singapore, I’m approaching the half-way mark and have another half-way to go.

I want to learn from the lessons gained from the first half to help me live my second half in a better way. To work towards health, happiness and financial freedom. To work towards living a life of meaning and to touch lives for the better.

In many regards, I’ve become more focussed. I now know that the career I am in, internal audit, is where I want to be. It will be the main engine of growth as I move towards the phase of accumulating investible savings as my home has been fully paid and my car will be paid off by early next year.

Thus, I can embark more aggressively on making meaning in my life through the experiences as I’ve documented in my life-list to basically experience more of life through qualitative experiences that become part of me.

Tick-Tock

We have heard the phrase, “Time and tide waits for no man.” I’ve set up my daily Excel worksheet to tell me exactly how many days I have left based on the averages.

As the late Randy Pausch mentioned, “Time is the only commodity that really matters”.

How will you make use of your remaining time?

Tell Panzer in the comments section.

Be well and prosper.