Work, Live What’s Most Important?

Some people work to live and some people live to work, which one are you?

I recently found an interesting study done by the OECD showing how many hours employees work per year and how many hours they spend for personal care and leisure per day. The working hour average is roughly 35-37 hours per week and people in most countries use 60% of their time for personal care and leisure (but that includes sleeping and eating). Here are the results by country:

Number of Working Hours Per Year

Hours For Personal Care & Leisure Per Day

I was surprised to find my country, Canada, to be among the countries that work the most and spend the least amount of time for personal care & leisure. I thought that Canadians were better at finding a balance between work & living! I was also surprised to see that Germans do not work that many hours. It’s maybe because they have more weeks of vacation? I was really under the impression they were working more than us!

When I look at these two graphs, I feel blessed with my own situation: I work 4 days a week and my wife doesn’t have to work. We have clearly found a great balance between work and living!

Here’s a little bit of my personal situation

It hasn’t been that easy for me and I used to work a lot. In fact, I worked 35 hours/week while doing my bachelor degree full time and then, once I got my first full time job, I kept a side gig on weekends for three years in order to build a strong personal finance base. Here’s what I have done so far:

I’m 31, married with three kids. I have a bachelor’s degree, a CFP license, a trading license along with an MBA in financial services. I’ve been working in the financial industry for the past ten years (you got that: I completed most of my studies while working full time).  You can tell that for a while, working was definitely more important than living. From 2003 to 2009, I completed all my studies and had two children at the same time.

Once I completed my MBA in 2009, I took a break and looked back at my life in general. I was happy with my job but the balance between work and life had been hit seriously. This is not really the life I wanted to have. Mind you, I had a new car, house and our kids weren’t missing anything. But still, we were working like crazy animals, rushing from 6am to midnight every day. This is was not I wanted for me and this is especially not what I wanted for my family.

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