Everyone likes spending money. The problem is that most of us don't enjoy doing the jobs that produces the money we spend. TimeBucks strives to create an environment where people are rewarded for the types of activities that we actually like to do.

By creating a community where people enjoy earning as well as spending, we improve our relationships with the world around us. Every transaction is a gift so people begin to treat each other with more respect and dignity. Since TimeBucks doesn't earn any interest, members don't have an incentive to collect more TimeBucks than they need. The result is a more just and equitable distribution of wealth.

Communities all over the world are forming with different rules being applied to how goods and services are exchanged. We hope that you will take part in what is becoming a very exciting movement.

About Me

My name is Steve Van Dyke. I created TimeBucks because I believe in the power of local economics to improve the way we work and live. I've been fortunate enough to pick up the skills that allowed me to create this site, which I work on from my bedroom in Seattle. If you're curious about more of what I think, you can read Why I Care which I wrote to try to help people understand why I work so hard to build and improve this site.

My Heroes

The following people have devoted immeasurable time and resources to promote alternative currencies for a better world. They are the founding fathers of a movement to change the world through responsible currency design.

Edgar Cahn -- Founder of Time Dollars

Thomas Greco -- Author, community activist

Michael Linton -- Founder of LETS, he first helped me understand the potential of local currency

Bernard Lietar -- Euro currency architect, alternative currency proponent

An excerpt from CommunityCurrency.org.

Money can be created by banks or governments to serve their interests, or it can be created by people in a community to serve their needs. Local currencies help communities to recognize their inner strengths, the gifts of their members, and the value of cooperation. Local currencies inspire people to live in accordance with their values, to follow their inner passion rather than chase after an obsolete notion of "success." They enable people to make a contribution to their community and receive what they need or desire in return. They nurture relationships and demonstrate how local production for local needs benefits the community, as well as reducing the stress upon distant communities who have been forced into near slavery and starvation to provide resources and services to the world's wealthy. Creating community currencies encourages participatory democratic processes and shows how non hierarchical systems empower people, and nurture hope, creativity, respect, and compassion. In a perfect world, money would become obsolete, and the gift economy would flourish.

An excerpt from Bernard Lietar's The Future of Money.

I submit that those aspects of our monetary system that met the objectives of another time and age are now inadequate for the challenges facing us during an Information Age. This is particularly true in light of the fact that working solutions are already underway, with thousands of communities around the world taking their own money initatives.

They are creating new wealth, while solving social problems without taxation or regulation. They are empowering self-organizing communities, while increasing overall economic and social stability. Finally, they enable the creation of very necessary social capital without attacking the established capital formation process.

Bernard Lietaer in Beyond Greed & Scarcity

The origin of the word "community" comes from the Latin munus, which means the gift, and cum, which means together, among each other. So community literally means to give among each other. Therefore I define my community as a group of people who welcome and honor my gifts, and from whom I can reasonably expect to receive gifts in return.