Buying Back Your Time: Ramit Sethi's Five Levels of the Convenience Dial
I Will Teach You To Be Rich
Most people handle every task themselves: groceries, cleaning, laundry, packing lunches, planning trips. Ramit Sethi asks what would happen if you spent a little money to buy some of that time back. He frames the answer as a "dial" you can turn gradually, from doing everything yourself up to a life where money is deliberately spent on convenience and the things you love. He walks through five points on that dial, levels one, three, five, seven and ten, and uses stories from his students and his own life to illustrate each one.
Level One: The Default of Doing It All Yourself
At level one, you run the errands, cook and clean yourself, and the answer to almost every problem is "I'll just do it myself." Sethi describes the trade-off as saving a little money while giving up huge amounts of time. Eventually, he says, you wake up and find your entire day booked with random to-dos and obligations.
He says he doesn't object to level one. It's fine if you choose it, and it's fine if you don't have much money right now and have no alternative. His complaint is that most people never choose it. They simply never consider using money to make their lives easier. His reframe is that you don't have to do everything yourself; you just have to cause it to get done. Once people see that their time is valuable, he argues, even a small shift of $50 can change how a Saturday feels.
Level Three: The First Experiment
Level three is a single experiment. You spend a little money to remove one annoying task. Sethi stresses that it doesn't have to be permanent. It's only a test.
His first example is Marina, a student who threw her child's second birthday party at a park. She was pregnant at the time, and she paid about $400 to cater tacos for the whole guest list. That meant she wasn't stuck cooking, cleaning, organizing and overseeing. Sethi notes that her family would never have done this. Her reasoning was that she cooks every night, but her child turns two only once. In his telling, the $400 bought her time, and more importantly it bought her a lasting family memory.
The second example is smaller. Another student had a pile of paperwork sitting on his table for three years. He bought a $45 shredder, and ten minutes later the pile was gone. Sethi uses this to show that the question should change. Instead of "Do I have to do this?" or "Can I do this for free?", you ask "What do I get back if I don't have to do this?"
He suggests a few other starter experiments: paying for a car wash instead of washing your own car, taking a Pilates class, or setting up grocery delivery. He says that doing this a few times makes life start to feel different.
Level Five: Making It Automatic
Up to level three, everything is manual and one-off. At level five you buy time back regularly and automatically. A cleaner comes on a fixed schedule, not only when the house is dirty or after a party. Groceries arrive the same day every week, and laundry goes out and comes back on a set day.
Sethi admits this feels strange at first. He says Americans have a "very fraught relationship" with spending money to buy back time: "We love the idea of buying our time back more than actually doing it." He addresses two common objections:
- "I could just do this myself." His response is that the pile of papers has been sitting there for years, so spend the $50. He adds that someone else can fold your laundry exactly how you want it if you show them how.
- "I could use that money for something else." He agrees this is true and says many people need to save and invest more. But if you have set aside guilt-free spending money, as he recommends, part of your "rich life" might be a very clean house twice a month.
His example here is Carlos and his wife. After comparing their bucket lists, they realized they no longer wanted to spend hours every week cleaning, so they set up recurring laundry pickup and cleaning. Before the service had even started, Sethi says, they told him they already felt richer.
He gives a concrete exercise. Open your calendar and find the most consistently chaotic moment in a typical week. It might be a Tuesday night when dinner falls apart, or a Sunday morning when you realize nothing is planned for the weekend and the house needs cleaning before the week starts. Then find the service that removes that moment, such as a cleaner, grocery delivery or a babysitter, set it up and put it on autopay. The point, in his words, is that once you make the decision you've given yourself permission never to make it again. After that, he says, people start asking what else they can remove and what else they can do more of because they enjoy it.
Why People Get Stuck
Before the higher levels, Sethi explains why people stall even after they understand the idea. We understand it intellectually, he says, but it's hard to actually use money to improve our lives. People are often unsure what they can really afford, and they lack a system that tells them where their next dollar should go. He points out that someone making 20 small money decisions a day, on gas, groceries, savings and snacks, has 20 chances to move the dial. He argues that more motivation isn't the answer, because if motivation were enough you'd already be spending Saturday mornings with your family instead of doing laundry. What's needed, he says, is a system that shows how much you have, how much you can spend, and sometimes that you can spend more on what you love. (He uses this point to pitch his paid coaching program.)
Level Seven: The Big Jump
At level seven, buying back time becomes a real priority built into your life. The cleaner might come every week, and you might have child care plus backup child care. In his words, your home "stops feeling like a to-do list."
He emphasizes that this doesn't mean outsourcing everything. He could outsource ironing his clothes, but he finds it relaxing, so he does it himself. If you love a task, keep it. His bet is that most people have plenty of tasks they don't love, and those are the ones to buy back. He states the underlying principle directly: the point of money is not to save it, and certainly not to hoard it, but to use it to live your rich life.
His examples at this level:
- Sharon set up a house cleaner years ago and even built that cost into her retirement plan. She told him her cleaner is "better than a psychiatrist."
- Jessica travels home once a quarter to help care for her grandmother. She started flying first class for those trips and told him she should have done it years earlier.
He runs a thought exercise: imagine your travel dial turned up to seven. He says many people struggle to imagine this and offer something like an extra serving of chicken at an airport Chipotle, an answer he dismisses as far too small. His version might be flying in a day early to arrive rested and having someone meet you at the airport to help with your bags, so the trip begins the moment you walk off the plane.
He addresses the "must be nice" reaction he often hears. His answer is that yes, it is nice, and he won't pretend otherwise to seem modest. He adds that everyone's rich life is different. If first class doesn't matter to you, don't buy it. But he expects most people have something in food, travel, fitness or health that they would love to turn up.
He acknowledges that this is where people get uncomfortable, because it's a lot of money. His answer is that yes, it is, and that means you're prioritizing your time. When he reviews someone's conscious spending plan, he likes to see big, focused amounts, whether for investments, a house, or even pens. What matters to him is having a focus. He also stresses that nobody starts at level seven; you build up to it.
How to Fund It
His method is to pull your last two months of spending and sort it into three groups: things you need, things you love, and things you barely remember buying. That third group is what funds moving up the dial. He says many people can easily find $200–$400 a month of random spending, usually on eating out and miscellaneous items, and can redirect it into something like a $500-a-month jump in the things that matter to them. He suggests trying a level for a month or two, and predicts many people will find it's "the best money I've ever spent." Then they can decide whether it belongs in their rich life.
Level Ten: The Maxed-Out Dial
At level ten the dial is turned all the way up. Sethi says money at this level "can become almost spiritual." That is why he considers it important to go on the journey and genuinely love your relationship with money. Otherwise, he says, you'll never move up the levels; you'll just resent money, yourself and your life.
He says people reach level ten because they had a focus. They increased their earnings and savings, and probably turned other dials down so they could turn this one up. His illustration is a three-week trip to Spain with private tour guides taking you to the places you love, with every detail arranged by a travel advisor before you pack, so all you do is show up. He concedes that very few people take trips like this and that the example may be out of many viewers' price range. He shares it anyway to show what's possible.
His own level ten is health. He has a personal trainer who works with a nutritionist, who in turn works with a chef who cooks his food. The three coordinate so that his life is, by default, as healthy as it can be.
He ends with his broader rule. If convenience isn't your dial, that's fine. Spend extravagantly on the things that matter to you and cut costs mercilessly on the things that don't. His closing challenge is to identify what isn't important to you and redirect that money to what is.
Right now, your life runs on one strategy. You're spending your time solving everything: groceries, cleaning, planning every trip. You do it all. If you wrote down all the things you do every single week, how long would that list be? Packing lunch for your kids, making your bed, vacuuming the floor, sweeping, doing the laundry. And on and on and on.
What if you could spend just a little bit of money to buy your time back? Can I show you how to do it? I'm talking about the levels to go from where you are right now—maximum effort, not a lot of time—to just spending a tiny amount more to move up those levels and buy back your time. Just imagine you could be sitting, taking a nap, playing with your kids, or just watching Love Island. I want to show you how.
Let's go through the levels starting at level one, the default. At level one, you're doing everything yourself. You're running the errands, you're cooking, you're cleaning. Is this anybody else? At level one, the answer to almost every problem is, "I'll just do it myself." So you save a little money, you give up huge amounts of time, and one day you wake up and your entire day is booked with random to-dos and obligations.
Now, I don't mind level one. It's fine if you choose it. It's fine if you don't have a lot of money right now and this is what you have to do. But most of us don't think like that. We simply never consider how to use money to make our lives easier. But once you realize that your time is valuable and you don't have to do everything, you just have to cause it to get done, you can start to move that dial, and even a small shift of $50 can completely change how your Saturday feels.
Let's turn the dial now from level one up to level three, the first experiment. And this is where you stop doing everything the hard way. It starts with one simple experiment: spend a little bit of money and remove one annoying task from your life. Remember, this experiment does not have to last for your entire life. It's just an experiment.
Let's take Marina. She's one of my students who threw her kid's second birthday party at a park. She catered tacos for the whole guest list, 400 bucks, and for the entire party she was pregnant with her two-year-old. She was not stuck cooking, cleaning, organizing, overseeing. Now, her family would never have done that. But she realized, "I cook every night. My kid turns two only once." So for $400 she bought that time. And more importantly, she bought a lasting family memory. And that's level three: one decision, just a little bit of money and a moment that you get to treasure.
This is where you test the dial. So instead of automatically assuming you have to do it, or even saying, "Can I do this for free?" ask, "What do I get back if I don't have to do this?" For another student of mine, it was a pile of paperwork that had been sitting on his table for three years. You know what he did? He bought a $45 shredder. Ten minutes later, pile is gone.
Now, just pause for a second because I want to ask, what is one annoying task that you have been procrastinating? If you've been at level one for your entire life, this is where it starts to click. You don't have to do it all yourself. You can use a little bit of money to solve the problem forever.
Here are some examples of how you can spend your money just to see how it feels. Instead of washing your own car, you can pay to get a car wash. You could go and take a Pilates class, or you could set up grocery delivery so you don't have to go do it yourself. Do this a few times and your life will really start to feel different. That's where you turn up the dial again.
Level five: making the dial automatic. Up until now, this all is pretty manual, but level five is where your life actually starts to feel different on an ongoing basis because you're not just buying the time back once, you're buying it regularly. In fact, automatically. For example, you have a cleaner that comes regularly, not when the house is dirty, not when you just had some kid's party, but regularly on a schedule. Groceries show up same time, same day every week. Laundry might go out and come back same time, same day. These small, annoying tasks start disappearing from your life, and at first this feels really strange.
Americans have a very fraught relationship with spending money to buy back time. We love the idea of buying our time back more than actually doing it. We tell ourselves, "I could just do this myself." My friend, that pile of papers has been sitting on your desk since 1989. Spend 50 bucks. Get rid of it. But trust me, there are people who can fold your laundry exactly how you want it. You just have to show them how.
We tell ourselves, "I could use that money for something else." And that is true. Many of us need to save and invest more. But if you have guilt-free spending set aside like I advise you to, maybe part of your rich life is having a very clean house twice a month. Once you set these things up, trust me, you are going to stop questioning it.
Take Carlos and his wife. After they compared their bucket list, they realized they did not want to spend hours every week cleaning anymore. So they set up recurring laundry pickup and cleaning. And before it even started, they said, "We already feel richer."
Let me show you how to do this. Go into your calendar right now. Find the most consistently chaotic moment in a typical week. Might be the Tuesday night when dinner falls apart, Sunday morning when you realize we haven't planned anything for the weekend and, oh my God, we got to clean and get everything ready for the rest of the week. Find the service that removes it. It could be a cleaner, grocery delivery, a babysitter. Whatever it is for you, set it up and put it on autopay. Because once you make that decision once, you are giving yourself permission to never have to make it again.
Once you realize you can do this every week, you start asking, "What else can I remove? What else can I do more of because I enjoy it?" And this next level is where we shift from nice to identity-level change.
Before I show you how, let me tell you why people get stuck even once they understand the value of buying back their time. We understand it intellectually, but it's tough to actually use our money to improve our lives. You might be confused about what you can really afford, and you might not have a system that tells you exactly where your next dollar should go. Sure, intellectually, we know how to turn the dial, but we don't know how to build that system in the first place.
So if you are making 20 small decisions a day about your money—gas, groceries, savings, Fruit Roll-Ups—those are 20 chances to make your life more convenient and move that dial in the direction of your rich life. Now you don't need more motivation. If that's all it took, you'd already be spending your Saturday mornings with your family, not doing laundry all day. That's why you need a system to know exactly how much money you have, how much you can spend, and sometimes even to show you you can spend more on the things you love.
This is why I built my Money Coaching program. Inside, we build your entire financial system together: your conscious spending plan, your yes and less dials, your automated transfers, all set up within 48 hours, matched to your numbers and your specific rich life. You're going to get live calls with me to answer your specific questions, and the next time you catch yourself saying, "I'll just do it myself," you'll have someone in your corner to say, "Maybe you do it yourself, but do you need to?" Money Coaching is where you can finally buy back your time. So scan the QR code on screen or click the link in the description below to join us inside Money Coaching today.
It's time to turn things up to level seven, the big jump. Level seven is where buying your time back becomes a real priority. It's actually embedded into your life. Maybe the cleaner comes every week. You have child care and even backup child care. Your home stops feeling like a to-do list.
And I want to emphasize something here: you don't have to outsource everything. There are things that I really enjoy and I still do it. I could outsource ironing my clothes, but actually find it very relaxing, so I do that myself. If there are things you love, keep them. But I bet you there are a bunch of things you don't really love. And those are the things that, if you can set your money up correctly, you can buy your time back and enjoy your life. The point of money is not to save it. It's certainly not to hoard it. The point of money is to use it to live your rich life.
Let's take Sharon. She set up a house cleaner years ago and she even built that into her retirement plan. She told me that her cleaner is, quote, "better than a psychiatrist."
Let's do a little thought exercise. Let's imagine that you are traveling and you have turned your money dial all the way up to seven. What would that look like? Think about it. A lot of people struggle with this. They go, "I'd probably get an extra serving of chicken at the Chipotle in the airport." Okay, first of all, there's no Chipotle in an airport. And second of all, you got to dream bigger than freaking chicken and guac. Stop with that stupid example. Let's play it out.
Maybe you fly in a day earlier because you want to arrive rested. And when you land, you think you're lugging around a bunch of suitcases yourself? No, you have somebody waiting there to greet you. They help with your bags. You walk out of the airplane. The trip has already begun. One student of mine, Jessica, travels home once a quarter to help care for her grandmother. She started flying first class for those trips. And when she told me, she said she should have done it years earlier.
People say that a lot of times to me, "Ramit, it must be nice." And I'm like, "Yeah, it is. What do you want me to say? Oh no, I would like to play small. It's actually, I got this sweater for sale, though. Please don't look at me." I don't need it. Yeah, it is nice to be living my rich life. And that's what I want for you too. Your rich life is yours. My rich life is mine. So if flying first class is not important to you, then don't do it. But I'm sure there are examples, whether it's food, travel, fitness, health, where you could turn that dial up and actually love it.
I find that this level is where people start to get really uncomfortable, because the first thing they think is, "This is a lot of money." Yes, yes it is. That means you are prioritizing your time. When I see somebody's conscious spending plan, I love seeing big, focused amounts. It could be focused amounts for investments. It could be focused amounts for their house. It could be focused amounts for freaking pens. I don't care, but I want you to have a focus in your rich life.
And remember, nobody starts at level seven. You build up to it. So here is how you fund it. Pull out your last two months of spending. Sort it into three groups: things you need, things you love, and things you barely remember buying. I want to show you how to actually spend more on those things. Now, if we take that third group, the things you barely remember buying, that's actually what funds your ability to turn that dial up.
Many people can easily find $200 to $400 a month that they are just randomly spending. Usually it's on eating out and just miscellaneous. They don't even think about it, and they can redirect it into a $500 a month or so jump in the things that matter for them. I want you to adapt this lesson to your situation, and feel the connection between your money and moving up a level. So try this level for a month or two. Pretty quickly, I think you will discover, "Oh my God, that's the best money I've ever spent." And then you can decide if it's part of your rich life.
Now we're going to turn the dial even further, way up where your money dial starts to truly shape your entire life. Level ten: the maxed-out dial. Level ten is a dial turned all the way up. Money at a certain level can become almost spiritual, so it is important to go on the journey. It's important to actually love your relationship with money because if you don't, you will never move up the levels. You will simply resent money. You will resent yourself and your life.
Now, how do you get to level ten? You got there because you had a focus. You obviously increased your earnings and your savings, and you probably turned other dials down so you could turn this more up. Imagine an incredible three-week trip to Spain, private tour guides taking you to the places that you love. You're going to Spain for the things you love, and best of all, every detail handled before you even pack. You've communicated with a travel advisor. They plan it all. You just show up. That is how we really start to think about the dial turning way up.
Now, if you hear these examples and you think, "That's way out of my price range," or, "There's no way I would pay for that," okay, you may be right. Actually, very few people get to take a three-week trip to some international country with a bunch of people with them, but level ten shows you what's possible. That's why I love to share these examples in my own life.
One of my level tens is spending a lot of money on health. That means that I have a personal trainer. They also work with a nutritionist who then talks to a chef who helps cook food. These three people work together and they help my life by default be as healthy as I can be. That's my health and wellness dial. But I think it's also about convenience.
If convenience isn't your dial after all, great. Spend extravagantly on things that are. Cut costs mercilessly on the things that are not. That's my challenge to you. What's not important to you? Take that money and redirect it to the things that are.
If you want to use your money to start making your life easier, you could join my Money Coaching program. We will show you step by step how to build that system for you. And if you want to learn what things you can adjust right now to start getting more from your money, check out this video next.
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