Financial freedom means a lot to us and hopefully you too if you’re reading this. When you venture down the path of financial freedom, you begin to see life on the other side looks like. When you decide to take charge of your time, it gets really fun.
Why pursue financial freedom?
When you begin the journey of pursuing financial freedom, you start to venture into a completely new perspective of earning an income. Simply put, life is way too short to NOT pursue financial freedom. While the journey might be longer for some, there are some ways you can expedite this path but 1. Reducing your largest expenses like housing by living with family (if possible) or downsizing to a more modest space (takes alot of humility to do) 2. Raising your income and 3. Staying consistent. It’s easy to say these things but we do it ourselves. We house hack to reduce our living expenses, work multiple jobs to earn more income, and have set a plan in place to see exactly where we are and want to go long term to get there!
What can you expect when pursuing financial freedom?
For starters, financial freedom often means many months of lower than ideal compensation. At least that’s the case if you’re following your “passions.” I’m all for chasing your dreams, but at least make sure there’s enough of a market for them! On the path to financial freedom, you’re likely to get a lot of resistance. Sometimes that’s the world’s way of saying you’re on the right path. A little backwards but look at it this way; how do you expect to grow if you never experience hardship? You grow through the trials and tribulations! If you think back to all the moments where you were really thriving, you likely went through a hardship right before that. Therefore, it’s fair to say that whatever you’re experiencing is temporary. It always rains before the rainbow so start creating the environment to reap what you sow during the down times!
More Time for us
Financial freedom allows you to do what you want, when you want, how you want. For many, it is THE focus for a lot of people as it will give them back their most important asset, their TIME. Being able to have control over their time is by FAR the best feeling about financial freedom. When it comes to financial freedom, it’s really important to know why and what you’re doing it all for. For us personally, apart from time, it allows us the ability to be more cohesive as a family because there are no financial challenges.
Far too often people push the idea of financial freedom down the road because they think it’s too distant in the future. There are a lot of ways to reach financial freedom faster and one thing I can tell you is it’s not done through traditional methodology. The Times where you work a corporate job for 40 years and maybe one day can retire off of your stocks and retirement funds has passed. People are realizing that continuing down that path is not one that is fruitful. Business owners and those that have created revenue streams for themselves have found a lot of prosperity when it comes to the long term financial benefits.
Ways to reach financial freedom faster
My favorite saying is If you can’t win the game, change the rules. If you can’t change the rules, ignore them. To me there’s a few ways that this can be interpreted. You can either add additional income sources on the side of your main fulltime job. Through side hustles or other business ventures that you’re doing. Personally our focus is on the vending machine business because it provides a low cost option for us to scale and increase revenue streams without having to take a lot of time to manage our machines.
The other way that we’ve viewed this quote is through geo arbitrage. Geo-arbitrage basically means getting paid in dollars, living on pesos, and compensating in rupees. Basically this means finding a cost effective way to live a more healthy lifestyle.
For example if you are fortunate enough to have a remote job, live in an international country outside of the US through your American dollars pay for your lifestyle through the international countries currency and higher workers to deal with your day to day tasks through a virtual assistant. This allows you to maximize your dollar value and reach financial freedom faster. Practical example is if you live in South America and work for a remote company you will immediately double or even triple how far your dollar can go.
For example, if you go to Colombia for an entire month and spend as much money as you realistically can on housing food and entertainment, you are likely going to spend half the amount that you would have spent in America. Just like that your quality of life goes up exponentially because you are not restrained financially. Then if you scale this up you can hire virtual assistants who can oversee your tedious tasks like emails and admin work then you pay them to do those tasks. When it’s all said and done the same $5000 a month lifestyle that you have in America will get you significantly farther to where you can live like a king in South America or countries like the Philippines.
Cut costs
The other way to reach financial freedom faster is by simply cutting your costs on things that don’t bring value to your life. Outside of necessities like food shelter and clothing, there’s really not a whole lot that we need as humans. So if you can conceptualize spending extravagantly on the things that you love and cutting costs mercilessly on the things that you don’t as coined by Ramit Sethy in his book I will teach you to be rich, that will allow you to have peace of mind knowing that you are spending money guilt free on things that you genuinely enjoy without feeling stressed financially about whether or not you can afford it.
The other way that you can reach financial freedom faster is by increasing your skills. Once you increase your skills, you increase your demand in the market which exponentially improves how much money you will make.
For example if you learn email marketing, copywriting, sales, consulting, or anything else in a relative or comparable space you will be able to dramatically increase your earning potential because there are a lot of people out there who need your services and if you learn them from courses, books, podcasts, youtube, networking or mentorships, you would be surprised at how much money is out there waiting for people to grab hold of a high income skill like the ones mentioned above.
Financial Freedom means Time to choose what we want
One of the best benefits of being financially Free is the ability to have complete freedom over what you do and when you do it. If you wanted to go play golf in the middle of the day you could if you wanted to go workout 3:30 in the afternoon on a Tuesday feel free everyone’s goals are different but the best part about being financially free is the ability to choose how often you do certain things and how long you do them for. When you decide to pursue financial freedom, the doors open as far as what you’re able to do with your time.
For us, we have hobbies that we’re able to spend more time on. When you reach financial freedom, it allows you to spend more time on those things that you truly enjoy. Life is more fulfilling when you spend time on your passions while also spending it with those you love. While reaching financial freedom is a tall task for most, it is achievable when you break it down to bite sized pieces.
Do you enjoy what you’re doing?
A lot of times, people exclaim they love what they do, and that’s great, but when you dig deeper, they likely value the status more than the actual job that they do. When it comes to living a life of purpose, it’s ideal to be in alignment with where you want to be long term, and match your environment to support that goal.
There’s too many people that are trying to follow the crowd. So how do you stand out in today’s world? By being you of course! If you’ve already heard the saying, follow your passion, great, it’s not any less true. Let this be a wake up call. When you finally decide to pursue an interest of yours that can provide a service to the world, you love, you can get compensated on, and you know really well, that’s where the magic happens.
On top of that, when you find a path that you can fully commit to, it allows you to stay energized when you would have typically been drained. When you are in alignment with where you would like to be long term anyway, that is how you both stay consistent and change your life because your much more happy on a consistent basis.
Lastly, when you decide enough is enough and you want to take control of your future, you start to see more opportunities open up for you and your future. The best part about being on a mission to follow your purpose is you give yourself the gift of clarity. Your life’s mission becomes more clear, where you are going in life is more defined, and you are happier on a daily basis. You’re much more likely to win when following a life of purpose.