Buy Back Your Time: The Trap Nobody Warns You About

Let me ask you something before we start. What is your hourly rate?

Not your salary. Not your commission split. Not what you think your time is worth. Your actual hourly rate. Most people can’t answer that in under ten seconds, and that’s exactly the problem I want to talk about.

I just finished Dan Martell’s book Buy Back Your Time. Instead of giving you a book report, I want to walk you through what happened when I ran my own numbers. Because there’s a big difference between reading a framework and applying it to your real life, your real income, your real calendar, your real excuses. I did both. And honestly, I caught myself in something I wasn’t proud of.

The Math That Started It

Here’s the foundation. Take your annual income and divide it by the hours you actually work in a year. That’s your hourly rate.

Say you make $200,000 a year and work a normal 40-hour week with some time off. That comes out to roughly $100 an hour. Go run your own number. I ran mine, and I’ll be honest, it was lower than I wanted. Low enough that it stung seeing it written down.

But here’s the part that changes everything. Dan Martell calls it your Buyback Rate. You take your hourly rate and cut it to 25 percent. So if your hourly rate is $100, your Buyback Rate is $25 an hour.

That number is not aspirational. It’s a rule. Anything you’re personally doing that someone else could do for less than your Buyback Rate, you’re losing money by doing yourself. Not “I should probably delegate this one day.” Not “eventually, when I get more organized.” You’re losing money right now, every single time.

And that number is supposed to feel a little insulting. Because when you actually look at your week, the data entry, the scheduling, the CRM logging, the small admin tasks, the errands, the things you keep telling yourself only you can do properly, almost none of it clears that bar. Deep down you already know that. You just never had the number in front of you forcing you to admit it.

What I Actually Did About It

The concept means nothing until you act on it. My first move was hiring a virtual assistant.

I want to be honest about why I started there instead of doing something bigger. It wasn’t a grand strategic vision. It was the lowest barrier to entry: lowest cost, lowest risk, easiest first step. I wasn’t trying to build the perfect org chart. I was just trying to get one thing off my plate without blowing up my finances.

Here’s what nobody tells you about that first delegation. It’s not really about the task you hand off. It’s about what happens in your head once you see that things don’t fall apart. Once I saw I could let go of something and the business kept running, and honestly ran better, it opened something up in me. I started trusting delegation instead of just tolerating it.

That trust led to the bigger jump. Lara started as support. Over time I gave her full-time hours and made her my team leader. That’s a completely different level of investment than a VA. That’s not outsourcing a task, that’s handing someone real ownership over real parts of the business. And I only made that jump because the first small one proved delegation actually worked.

I learned something else the hard way, too. Virtual assistants can be incredible at what they’re built for. But at some point, certain roles need someone physically present, boots on the ground. That’s not a knock on VAs, it’s just a different role with different demands. And the skill a role requires is usually tied directly to what you pay for it. That’s not discouraging, it’s reality. You get what you invest in. The alternative is staying stuck doing $25 work forever while telling yourself you’re being frugal. You’re not being frugal. You’re being stuck.

The Cleaner: The Real Test

Let me tell you about the cleaner, because this one is smaller in dollars but bigger in meaning.

Around the same time, we hired a cleaner for our home. And I’ll be straight with you. There were months where that expense hurt. Times were tight, and paying someone to clean your house feels like the easiest thing in the world to cut when money gets uncomfortable. But we didn’t cut it. We kept paying, even when it stung, because the time we got back mattered more than the discomfort of the bill.

That’s the real test of whether you believe your own numbers. Anybody can apply the Buyback Rate when things are going great. The real proof is whether you still honor it when it feels uncomfortable. We did. And looking back, even a few hours a week of not scrubbing bathrooms gave us space to actually be present with each other. Not exhausted. Not resentful. Actually present.

The Part I Almost Didn’t Want to Say

Here’s the part of this that actually matters, and the part I almost didn’t want to say out loud.

The whole point of buying back your time is supposed to be freedom. Freedom to be with your family, build a skill, take care of your health, sit down without a task list running in the back of your mind. That was my stated goal the entire time. I said it to myself. I said it to my wife. I’ve said it on this podcast more than once. I’m buying back my time so I can be more present with my family.

But here’s the trap, and I fell into it completely. Once you free up hours, it’s so easy to fill them with more work. More deals. More content. More systems. More leverage. More hustle. And you tell yourself it’s okay because you’re doing it for your family. That’s the exact excuse I used. “This is for my family.” But if I’m being honest, a lot of the time it wasn’t. I was using the language of presence to justify the exact behavior I was supposedly buying my way out of.

I bought back 10 hours a week and quietly refilled 8 of them with more work. And I wore a mask that said it was all for the people I loved.

That’s the trap nobody warns you about in these business books. They tell you to buy back your time. They don’t always tell you that the version of you addicted to producing, achieving, and proving yourself will find a way to fill that time right back up if you’re not paying attention. Buying back time doesn’t automatically make you present. It just gives you the option to be present. Whether you take that option is a separate decision, and you have to make it on purpose, every single day.

So if you take one thing from this, take this. Delegation is not the finish line. Delegation is just the door. What you walk through that door to do, that’s the actual test. And I failed that test more than once before I caught myself.

This Applies Even If You’re Not an Entrepreneur

A lot of you may not be entrepreneurs. Some of you have a nine to five, a set schedule, a paycheck that doesn’t change just because you hustle harder. This still applies to you. Maybe even more.

What could you buy back? An hour of cleaning. An hour of yard work. An hour of grocery shopping. An hour of meal prep. An hour of something that drains you every week. It doesn’t have to be a business decision. It’s a life decision. The question isn’t just whether you can afford to buy back an hour. The real question is what you’d actually do with it, and whether you’d be honest enough to use it the way you say you would.

The Bottom Line

Run your own numbers. Find your hourly rate. Cut it to 25 percent. That’s your line. Anything below it, you’re already losing by doing it yourself.

But before you delegate a single thing, decide right now what you’re going to do with the time before it even shows up. Because if you don’t decide in advance, you’ll do what I did. You’ll fill it right back up and call it love. And that’s not freedom. That’s just a more expensive version of the same trap.

If this hit something for you, share it with somebody who needs to hear it. Not somebody who just needs a business tip. Somebody who needs the reminder that buying back your time only works if you’re honest about what you do with it.