financial independence retire early - The Live Life Project

14 financial freedom quotes we love to get your money mojo flowing

I once stood awestruck and alone at the the top of the incredible Gama valley in the Tibetan Himalayas. I was also slightly panicked that I may just be lost and about die in the Tibetan wilderness. “But what has this got to do with financial freedom quotes?” you ask.

Our values and beliefs, the decisions we make, and where they take us.

You see, what popped into my head in that moment with the trek into Mt Everest in front of me was “How did a 22 year old girl from Oz, come to be here in the Himalayas, doing this?”. (Figuratively speaking of course. I had been bouncing around in the back of early model Toyota troop carrier for days, across vast and dusty valleys with no roads to be seen…)

The answer? A combination of my values, beliefs and decisions I’d made, taken from everything I’d learned and experienced to that point.

The same question drifted into my head yesterday as I stood at the Cow Bar which rests on the back fence of my recent cash-purchased home. I contemplated the stunning Valley of Views that I now live in, and my new life. The answer this time was the same; 8 years worth of building new values and beliefs about wealth, and decisions taken from everything new I’d taught myself about money.

This is where the financial freedom quotes come in.

What are your beliefs about money?

If you think the wealthy are a bunch of greedy bottom feeders you’ll probably never be wealthy. Because what you think about money determines the role it plays in your life.

What if I told you that our beliefs about money are based on myths from another era and hold us back in life? Here are some examples:

Myth money mindsets	Millionaire money mindset
There is never enough money	There is always more money and more opportunities
You have to work really hard to make money	There are easier ways to make money
You can help people OR make money, but not both	Money gives people the opportunity to contribute to others and make a powerful impact.
Retirement is for when you’re old	Retirement is for when you want
The world is a zero sum game – if I get money I’m taking it from someone else	Remember, there is always more money (they’re printing it after all)

My advice on all of this is to explore your money mindset. And no, this is not not all rah, rah fairies and unicorns. Pay attention to the words that come out of your mouth when it comes to money. The things you say, like “Money doesn’t grow on trees you know”, reflect your values and beliefs about building wealth. Values and beliefs that can manifest and limit you to the status quo.

Write these things down. Then consciously challenge them.

One way to do this is to surround yourself with new values, new beliefs and different attitudes about money. Read books and quotes and re-educate yourself. The pay offs can be huge.

If you want to know more about how this works, ‘Chillpreneur” is a great, fun book to get your money mindset flowing.

Chillpreneur: The New Rules for Creating Success, Freedom, and Abundance on Your Terms

14 financial freedom quotes to live a wealthy life

The list you’ve all been waiting for! Here are the money beliefs and values that have guided us over the last 8 years, expressed in our favourite financial freedom quotes of all time.

I hung them on the fridge door, put them into my screen saver, read them on my daily commute and remembered them whenever I found a financial opportunity or saw a fork in the road. And things began to change for us.

These 14 evocative quotes reveal what we believe it takes to build wealth and get to financial freedom. They have provided us direction and driven our financial decision making every day for 8 years. We hope they do the same for you.

1. Time is our most valuable asset

“Everyday is a bank account, and time is our currency. No one is rich, no one is poor, we’ve got 24 hours each.” –-Christopher Rice

“Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did do.” —Mark Twain

Time is THE great leveller. We worked out 8 years ago that time is our most valuable asset. We were selling it so cheaply! So we went about putting our time to greatest use; spending it on building wealth to buy back our time in the future.

We also realised that each day what we did in the next 24 hours would determine the path of our future. The same for the day after that. Everyday we did SOMETHING that would help our financial future.

2. Life IS the goal

“The goal isn’t more money. The goal is living life on your terms.” –Chris Brogan

“Wealth is the ability to fully experience life.” –Henry David Thoreau

Our goal was born from a burning desire to take back control of our financial future after struggling to stay employed through an epic workforce slash and burn in 2012. We realised that life is the goal. And ours was passing us by in ways we were not happy with.

3. To build wealth, you have to invest in yourself first

“An investment in knowledge pays the best interest.” —Benjamin Franklin

“If you fail to plan you are planning to fail.” — Benjamin Franklin

So we began to learn about how to build and keep wealth. We read books, we attended training courses, we invested in our own financial literacy. We still do this today. We also came across the Financial Independence Retire Early (FIRE) movement and the crazy idea that working until you are 65 is, well… crazy!

Mind. Blown.

We started to reprogram our brains. We learned all we could about FIRE, building passive income, tax effective investment structures, and how to build wealth. We learned do-it-yourself renovating, real estate investment, property styling, the share economy, blockchain technology, digital assets… We’re still learning.

4. Money comes in abundance if you just plant the seeds

“Someone’s sitting in the shade today because someone planted a tree a long time ago” — Warren Buffet

“If you approach the ocean with a with a cup you take away a cup full. If you approach the ocean with a bucket you take away a bucket full.” — Ramana Maharshi

In 2012 we started planting investment seeds that we could harvest the rest of our lives, and tending them with patience. We’re still planting…

5. Thinking like everyone else will get you where everyone else is

“Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They’re not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them. About the only thing you can’t do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.” —Steve Jobs

I’ve always been a contrarian and challenger of mainstream thinking so FIRE appealed to me. We started following the FIRE movement in earnest. I’ve also been in tech and innovation for much of my working career, and leveraged these skills to help build wealth.

We consciously kept thinking differently. We challenged mainstream investment advice and made up our own minds in our own heads.

6. Passive income comes from hard work and persistence, with little pay off at the start

“The only place where success comes before work is in the dictionary.” —Vidal Sassoon

We worked our butts off going to our full time wage earner jobs and then creating wealth building side hustles on weekends. We did this 7 days a week for a few years, with little reward. We stayed focussed on our goals and our new values and beliefs. We knew the wealth would come if we persisted.

7. No risk no reward

“the biggest risk of all is not taking one.“ — Mellody Hobson

We took financial risks. Sometimes we lost money. That didn’t stop us. Instead, we learned from it. We thought about how to do it better next time. We kept taking risks and slowly they began paying off. As did our hard work to build passive income streams.

8. Bring value that no-one else brings

“Help a million people and you’ll make a million dollars” – Matt and Liz Read

“What we really want to do is what we are really meant to do. When we do what we are meant to do, money comes to us, doors open for us, we feel useful, and the work we do feels like play to us.” —Julia Cameron

“If you always do what you’ve always done, you’ll always get what you’ve always got.” — Henry Ford

With passive income streams in place, it’s now time to reinvent ourselves again. Get some fresh blood flowing through our veins, new thoughts ticking in our brains.

Our new goal is to help a million people online. We’re going to do it by being round pegs in square holes and focussing on what we love.

We’ll know when we’ve got there using the analytics for our websites. We also know if we can do this, we’ll be wealth and financially free.

The Final Word – financial freedom is the feeling that you’ve made it

These financial freedom quotes may not resonate with you. But here’s the good news – you can go find your own!

Indeed, we hope this post inspires you to read some financial freedom books, plant some seeds, take some risks, help a million people. be trouble maker. Or even better – do your own version of all of these!

We promise, you won’t regret it. And it may just change your money mindset and your life.

Til next time have fun, be happy, do good!

Working too much? How to avoid the 24/7 work trap

Tara Achieving financial freedom, Financial Independence Retire Early August 1, 2021September 13, 2021Financial freedom, financial independence, financial independence retire early

Working too much was the biggest regret she had looking back at her life….

When I’m in my 80s, I don’t want to be this woman. I don’t want to feel like I missed out on my life because I slipped into the habit of working too much.

So I did some things to make sure this wasn’t going to be me and The Live Life Project was born.

But the sad truth is, more and more of us are Googling this very thing. And it’s a world wide phenomenon. We are literally going to Google en masse to search for answers. In a clear upward trend over the last 15 years, we as humans are searching for more.

Well in this post we’re going to give you some answers. We’re going to share 10 legitimate ways to avoid the 24/7 work trap, win back your life, and put a smile on the dial of your 80 year old self.

Working too much? You’re not alone

Here’s a scary picture – the 15 year trend of Google searches for the words “working too much’. See the pronounced upward trajectory? And the data doesn’t even include the impact of global work-from-home changes during 2020. People in the US, Canada, the Phillipines, the UK and good old Oz are feeling the most overworked.

Google trends for the search term ‘working to much’

How much of your life is spent at work?

Have you ever wondered how much of your life you’re going to end up spending at work?

Take a look at this table we’ve pulled together. Try not to completely flip your lid about how much of your adult life you’re going to spend at work if you keep on doing what you’ve always done.

The average work week is around about 40 hours which means the average person is going to spend 10 years straight at work, during their adult life. If you’re working 70 to 80 hours, then be prepared to spend a total of 18 to 21 years (solid) of your adult life at work.

LIFE SPENT WORKING	TOTAL DAYS	TOTAL YEARS	% OF ADULT LIFE
20 hours per week	1875	5	10%
30 hours per week	2813	8	12%
40 hours per week	3750	10	17%
50 hours per week	4688	13	21%
60 hours per week	5625	15	25%
70 hours per week	6563	18	29%
80 hours per week	7500	21	33%

Based on a 45 year career, 80 yr life expectancy

Why are you working too much?

Before we get to how to avoid the 24/7 work trap, here are 10 common reasons people work long hours:

You love your work – this can be a legit reason you’re working long hours, but if you’re googling ‘working too much’ its unlikely to be why you’re here.
Systemic expectation – we are part of a system that educates that we have to work to live. We learn to believe that the more and the harder we work, the better off we’ll be. We at The LLP we don’t buy it. There are other options!
Workplace culture – your workplace rewards long hours over outcomes. You’ve got to fit in.
Expanding lifestyle – you’ve got more and bigger bills to pay. Most of us experience lifestyle creep as our earning capacity increases. But it can be a total trap. The more you earn, the more you spend, the more you have to work. Until you’re 80 and full of regret that you missed your life.
Your examples in life – your parents taught you to get a good job and work hard. So you did.
Your own notions of success – equating working long hours with doing a good job is common but it’s rarely accurate.
Avoidance strategy – you’re spending more time at work to avoid your life, and whatever is going on it.
Upward management – you’re not that great at managing the never-ending expectations of your boss, or you’re covering for them.
Poor work from home boundaries – you feel compelled (or obligated) to stay at work, even though its home time, because your work is at home with you.
To make more money – you’re paid by the hour and you want to increase your income (irrespective of your lifestyle) so you work more hours.

A recent UK study found the most common reasons for working longer hours is more pay, where overtime was paid. The Economist surveyed people in 65 countries during 2020 and found that people working from home were working longer days.

But would we totally blow your mind if we said this:

The 40 hour work week is a relic of the industrial age.

Because that’s where it comes from. Things have changed since 1817. Technology, lifestyles and ways to make money have changed. So why hasn’t our thinking changed with it?

How to avoid working too much

If you stand back and take a look it, most of the 10 reasons we’ve listed above relate back to three things; values, education and finances.

So we’re going to tackle the issue at its root cause. We’re not going to tell you to get another job or go home earlier. Instead we’re going to offer you a different perspective and some more choices! If any of those 10 reasons above sound like you, here’s some ‘hopium’ that there is another way!

10 ways to stop working too much and avoid the 24/7 work trap:

1. Re-frame how you think about work

I totally understand how your personal beliefs about your self worth can be attached to what you do for work. Mine was. Our DNA is coded to think this way. We’re educated to think this way. We even introduce ourselves and socialise based on ‘what we do’.

But ponder it for just a second. Does working for 45 years so that you can live the life you want once you get to 65 even make sense to you? We’re here to encourage you to think your own thoughts. Tread your own path. Determine your own financial future.

2. Re-train your money brain (or at least read these books on your commute)

Money doesn’t have to come from a job. Only around 25% of our income is classed as ‘earned income”. So number 2 is about broadening your earning potential.That doesn’t mean heading back to university or doing a work sponsored training course. You need to swat up on your personal finance knowledge.

Learn the things about money that aren’t taught in school. Learn the things they don’t want you to know. Read these books. But be ready. These books will challenge what you think about work, life and money. They’ll also open doors to making money you couldn’t see before.

Our list if recommended personal finance books.

3. Work from home – with boundaries!

What if we said you’re working more hours just for the privilege of going to work? You can actually save a tonne of money – on things like coffees, transport, clothing, lunches – by working from home.

We saved $15,000 in one year working from home, which is the equivalent of a $20,000 pay rise (accounting for tax).

Just by working from home you can work one whole day less per week without impacting your financial situation.

Why? Because the cost of going to the office to work!

Check out this article where we show you how ….

But if you are going to work from home so you can work less, you have to set and stick to boundaries. Turn off the computer at home time. Make sure your boss understands this.

4. Cut your living costs

If you cut your living costs, you can cut your working hours.

Start with a budget and look at all of your monthly costs. For every expense over the last month, ask yourself: “How many more hours will I have to work to pay for this?”. Take the cost of any expense and divide it by your hourly wage to work this out.

This process makes me think about whether I really need that item or not and helps me pair back and stick to my budget each month.

Is a straight-off-the-showroom-floor SUV worth the extra 250 hours you’re going to have to work to pay for it? Or can you make do with a demo model? Do you really need Netflix and Stan and Amazon Prime?

Cutting your living costs will give you some breathing room so you don’t feel like you need to work all the time just to pay your bills.

“Normal is getting dressed in clothes that you buy for work and driving through traffic in a car that you are still paying for – in order to get the job you need to pay for the clothes and the car, and the house you leave vacant all day so you can afford to live in it.”

5. Prioritise living life

Our time goes where our priorities are. When you’re about to ascend the Pearly Gates or whatever you believe, you’re probably not going to reflect at that moment on what a great work life you had. You’re more likely to think back on the richness of your life. Your family. Your friends. Your experiences. When you were happiest. So prioritise those things with your time!

“We have two lives and the second begins when we realise we only have one.”

– Confucius

6. Stop buying in to the “time for money” trade

Working more hours is not the only way to make more money. In fact, overtime may just be the hardest way to earn more money if you understand the rules of the money game. The more you trade your time for money, the more tax you’ll pay. It’s just how the system has been set up.

Instead of working more hours or getting a raise, think about starting your own side hustle. And don’t earn as an individual. There are more tax efficient ways if you want to keep more of the money you make. If this has piqued your interest, take a look at this post that explains how to make money so you get to keep more of it.

7. Diversify where your money comes from

If you only earn your income from your job, then it’s understandable you’d feel trapped into working more to earn more. But there are lots of different income streams other than earned income.

The freedom of multiple income streams gives you a greater sense of financial security and helps you set boundaries and say ‘no’ at work when the inevitable overtime expectations begin.

We have 5 different income streams that we’ve built up over time specifically because we don’t want to feel beholden to a job and an employer for our security.

It’s not something that you can do overnight, but if you never start you’ll never get there. For the traditionalists, dividend income and rental income are pretty common secondary income streams. But there’s a whole new world of making money online that is open for the taking. It’s not the ‘trading time for money’ kind of income you’re looking for. Instead, it’s income that pays you multiple times for the one piece of work. It’s called ‘leverage’, and if you want some more ideas about how to make money this way, check out our page about it here.

8. Divert your overtime hours into investing

If you’re tempted to work overtime for the extra money, spend this time on your next investment instead. I’ve refused opportunities for promotion at work because I knew they came with the expectation that I’d spend more of my time at work. Or they came with an ‘on call’ expectation. We say don’t give your time away so freely and easily – it’s the most precious thing you have! The one thing you can’t buy more of.

Instead of spending more time at work, spend it research investments and on investing. Use the knowledge you’ve learned from the books and resources we recommend here, and elsewhere. You don’t need to start with a fortune. But the sooner you do it the more you’ll benefit from the compound nature of investing.

Have you thought about joining an investment club or personal finance group? You can find them online and many are free. It may sound unrelated but if you’re surrounded by wage earners all working long hours, then maybe it’s catching. Just kidding. But it could be all you really see in front of you. Find some people who are doing things differently and hang out with them. Virtually or in real life. See how they make their money and what they do with their time. You might be inspired and you might find opportunities to work less that you could never have dreamt up yourself!

9. Resist the upsell on upsizing

Upsizing your lifestyle feels like the natural thing to do when you get a raise or a better job. The desire for more, for bigger for better – you earned it after all! It’s what your friends are doing; getting larger mortgages and fatter credit cards to buy bigger houses, better cars, more toys. But it’s also the very thing that is keeping a lot of high income earners working longer and longer hours. The question you might ask yourself if you’re working too much is: is bigger and flashier worth it?

“Desire is a contract you make with yourself to be unhappy until you get what you want.”

– Naval Ravikant

Every time you upgrade your life, you’re committing to working more.

The desire to upsize your life is the modern version of indentured servitude in our view. Except your servitude is not to the middleman recruiter, it’s to your bank!

Earning more but keeping your lifestyle at the same level means you’ll have money left over to save and invest. Over decades, you’ll save hundreds of thousands of dollars in mortgage and car loan interest. This is money you can use to invest in assets that put money in your pocket so in the future you can work less!

10. Make finance a family affair

Let’s face it, your children are not going to learn anything useful about money at school. They’re just going to learn that the way to make money is to get a job. So it’s all going to come from you! We’d say, teach your children about the rules of money as you learn them yourself. This is what the rich do! Make saving and investing a family affair. Get everyone involved. Practice delayed gratification in front of your children. Explain why you’re doing what you’re doing. You may just face less friction when it comes to applying these steps so you can escape the 24/7 work trap. And chances are the ‘working too much’ cycle that you probably learned from your parents may just stop with you.

We bought a new home with cash!

Tara House hacking, Our story, Real estate, Sustainable living July 29, 2021February 27, 2022Financial freedom, financial independence, financial independence retire early

Here’s the first of our updates on our personal assets, income and savings. Our big news for July? We bought a new home with cash!

So here we are in July 2021…we’ve pulled it off!

When we decided to sell up in Brisbane move to Tasmania in mid 2020 we had one thing on our mind. Financial freedom. We cooked up a plan during the lockdowns of 2020 to pimp our home with some clever DIY renovations and sell up. Our aim was to take our profit and our savings and buy a house for cash.

It’s a strategy called geo-arbitrage and you can use it to bring forward your financial freedom date, just like we have.

We worked out that Tasmania was a viable option for us to pull off some crafty geo-arbitrage. Tassie also provided the sustainable living, self-reliant lifestyle we were after. We wanted no neighbours, a spectacular view and some room to grow food. Most of all, we wanted to lower our living costs.

After three months of careful searching, we’ve pulled it off!

Views to the mountains over our back fence

How geographic arbitrage smashed our housing costs

In many cases homes are not assets (an asset puts money in your pocket at the end of the month). This is generally dependent on the type and cost of housing. When we moved to Tasmania we wanted to buy a home that we could count as an asset. Let me explain how we’ve found exactly that.

Our cost of housing in Tasmania will be around $3500 per year.

Here’s the breakdown.

Typical housing costs	Our new home
Mortgage	$0 – owned outright
Water	$0 – two tanks and pumped creek water
Sewage	$0 – Septic
Grey water	$0 – pumped grey water system
Power	$1900 – grid but soon to have solar PV
Heat / cooling	$800 – daytime from solar + wood heater
Council Rates	$874

The way we’ve wrangled it, as long as our home appreciates in value by >$3500 per year, we can count it as an asset. We figure that’s likely given the strapping pace of inflation, at least in the near term. We also calculated our Brisbane housing costs by way of comparison. Here’s what that looks like:

Housing cost	Brisbane	Tasmania
Mortgage	$22,600	$0
Water	$1040	$0
Sewage	See Rates	$0
Grey water	See Rates	$0
Power	$1400	$1900
Heat / cooling	See power	$800
Council rates	$1420	$874
TOTAL	$26,460	$3,574

What this means for us is that we have to make $23,000 less in income each year to live in Tassie. And that’s just housing costs. It’s not living costs.

Geo-arbitrage is an underrated weapon in the arsenal of any financial freedom seeker because you can use it to cut one of your biggest living costs – housing.

Our net worth

As at July 2021, our net worth is north of $1.5M. Just goes to show you don’t need millions to be financially free! You just need to kick ass crafty about it. 🙂

Our good debt position

Our net worth is calculated after debt is deducted.

We hold (indirectly) good debt on our investment properties. I say indirectly because we have company and trust structures in place. So the debt is not on our personal balance sheet. These mortgages are paid by other people, through the property investment and management company we run. These investment properties are assets not liabilities because they put money in our pocket each week as you’ll see when we get to “Income’ down below.

Our bad debt

$10,000

We have zero bad debt at the end of each month (bad debt takes money out of your pocket). That’s right. Zero. The only bad debt we carry is credit card debt, which is cleared in an auto sweep of the card. Every. Single. Month.

We do use our credit card to give us free stuff. We direct all of our expenses through the credit card to earn cash rewards, which we use to buy groceries. So far this year we’ve earned roughly 77,000 points or $350 worth of free food.

Credit cards can make you money if you use them the right way.

Our July income

About half our income this month was rental income. We worked 4 to 5 hours a week for this income. We’re still keen to save and invest so we had earned income in July as well. Our capital gains is mostly from shares we own. We also had a small bit of income from cryptocurrency. Our profit income covers things we like to do on the side – retail arbitrage (reselling), cash rewards, and other online income. We’re working on diversifying our income streams further in the medium term.

Our July savings rate

75%. Huzzah!

Our next asset investment?

A solar PV system.

We’re still a bit too heavy in cash so we are looking for new investments. (Cash is trash). We’ll likely buy a solar power system, which we expect will produce an ROI of 23% year-on-year, with a payback of 4.25 years. Not a bad outcome.

We’re also busy building digital assets that will pay us an income in the future. More about that later….

Financial freedom – 3 simple concepts to get started now!

Tara Achieving financial freedom, Financial Independence Retire Early, Financial literacy April 8, 2021January 16, 2022financial independence, financial independence retire early, how to achieve financial freedom

So, you’ve googled ‘how to achieve financial freedom’ and landed here. Huzzah! Our website is all about exactly what you want to know – how to become financially free and stay there. It can seem like an impossible task at first – overwhelming with no starting line in sight, let alone finish line. In this post we explain the key steps you need to know and take to get started on your financial freedom journey.

What does financial freedom mean – to you?

Technically, financial freedom is when your return on investments covers 100% of your expenses. But when you ask this question on a personal level most people have to think really hard because they just haven’t even contemplated what financial freedom would look like for them. So this is the first thing you should do.

Ask yourself, How would you spend your days if you didn’t have to work? Get comfortable with that. It’s where we are headed.

Financial independence means different things to different folks. For us, it’s the freedom to do what we want when we want. And that takes resources. Money for bills, food, water, power, health care and fun. So how do we solve for money, to get the rest of the equation? We’re all about keeping it simple and actionable. Here are the three things to focus on for financial freedom when you’re starting out:

What is financial independence?

In the interest of keeping it as simple as possible, we’ve broken down down financial independence into three primary steps:

Make sure your income is greater than your expenses
Invest the difference (your savings)
Maximise your assets so the income from them covers your expenses.

Financial independence retire early Australia

What is the ‘financial independence retire early’ movement?

Financial independence retire early (or FIRE) is about applying the three key concepts above… aggressively. The aim is to retire in your 30s or 40s instead of your 60s. So what’s the theory? Well, average personal saving rates are about 10 to 15 %. But that’s not enough for financial freedom. You just have to look at when Joe average retires (65) to know that. On the other hand, hard core FIRE starters aim for savings rates closer to 50 – 70% – either through frugality or by increasing their income. The FIRE movement proves that savings rates are critical to financial freedom.

FIRE investing is other big part of the FIRE journey. Actively making your money work for you. With inflation and negative interest rates one thing is for sure – sitting on your money will not get you to financial freedom any time soon. If you have your stash in cash it’s time to pick up your freedom game.

Your starting point and how aggressive you are with the three key concepts above will determine how quickly you get to freedom. That’s the beauty of FIRE – you can dial it up or down depending on where you’re at in life. You can also choose to focus on the income or the spending side of the equation, depending on what’s right for you. Although, take heed. There is a school of practice that says cutting your spending is way more powerful than upping your income because it has a tailing effect – it lowers the amount you need to live on every month for the rest of your life.

We at The Live Life Project are not here to argue one or the other. We do both, along with some clever independent wealth management strategies around the treatment of income, tax and debt. We’re certainly not about never eating out or holidaying again – life’s too short for that! We’re about finding ways to have fun and still make smart decisions every day in the right direction.

How to achieve financial freedom – knowing your numbers

If this sounds boring to a lot of people, that’s because it’s boring to a lot of people. I get it. Math was never my jam either. But with the same certainty as death and taxes I can say if you don’t know your numbers you’ll never be financially free.

E.V.E.R.

Financial independence is where you control your money not the other way around. This starts with the numbers. Savings/assets, income, expenses, residual. Put these numbers in a spreadsheet or write them down. There’s also apps for this of course, but we’ll get to those later.

Next, check out this awesome calculator. Put in your numbers. Be honest. It’s not gospel, but I put in our numbers for the last few years and it’s a pretty accurate reflection.

Our freedom

So here comes the big reveal. This is what did to get to financial independence, without revealing all of the juicy details in one post…

We saved from 30% to 65% of our net income each year for the last 7 years
We invested everything but our buffer money, mostly in property
We kept saving and invested this in maximising our assets
We also changed the way we earned our income so that we got to keep more of it – we’ll cover this in a later post so stayed tuned
We’ve recently made big life choices specifically to reduce our cost of living
Our income from our assets cover our living costs 100%.

Once you’ve put in your numbers look again at your income and your expenses. Making your way to financial freedom is about jigging these numbers – income up, expenses down.

Read through some of our posts on saving, borrowing, investing, digital assets and passive income ideas. These will help you gradually move up the dial on your money management. And this is where the magic begins.

Where to learn more about financial freedom

We have published a bunch of articles that step out the different pathways that you could take to financial freedom depending on where you are in life. Take a read and we hope you can learn something from our experience.

The final word – financial freedom is about how to eat an elephant (figuratively of course)

When something seems massive and unobtainable just break it down into bite sized chunks. You’re already on your way. Make sure you understand the 3 key steps to financial freedom and get to know your numbers. We know these things have worked for us. Stick with it. We know they can work for you too.