Individual well-being analyses rely on income as the prominent economic resource. We argue that time poor people may not reach the same level of individual well-being as the not time poor, though facing the same amount of income. The reason: genuine personal leisure time – a basic quality of life component – if restricted excludes social participation in the sense of Sen’s capability approach with its freedom of choice and social exclusion aspects. With microeconomic modelling as the background the crucial question is how to evaluate the interdependence between income and leisure time. Our answer: observe the people’s evaluation. So, with data from the German Socio-Economic Panel we estimate life satisfaction by genuine personal leisure and income with a CES-utility function to quantify the substitution/trade off between time and income. Given this quantification and further detailed time use diaries from the German Time Use Survey 2001/02 we are able to disentangle multidimensional well-being and in particular poverty regimes as pure income poverty, pure time poverty and in particular poverty in face of substitution; for instance, poverty while not income poor but having not enough genuine personal leisure time for social participation. In addition we quantify further socio-economic influences for each poverty regime by a multinomial logit approach.

Two striking new results for Germany: first, given individual satisfaction estimates substitution between time and income is significant, second, e.g. by 5,5% of all working we see an important fraction of time poor who are unable to substitute there time poverty by income. These poor people so far are ignored within the poverty and well-being discussion, though time crunch and time famine is overall aware and discussed.