Strategy to Financial Freedom

The ultimate goal of of the individuals in the corporate rat race is financial freedom. Freedom to do what your hearts desire without worrying about the monthly bills or debt that kept us working day in and day out. Freedom to enjoy your time with your family and freedom to travel as often as you like. It may seems like a dream, but it is achieveable. Below are some strategies that can be used for us to obtain financial freedom.

1. Start a side business as soon as possible.
The strategy is to create as many sources of income as possible. If you depend on just one stream of income only, the possibility of reaching financial freedom will not be as quickly as you want. Making money out of your hobby is the best way to start.

2. Buy at least one property.
Peter Lynch once stated in his book One Up on Wall Street "Before you do invest anything in stocks, you ought to consider buying a house, since a house, after all, is the one good investment that almost everyone manages to make. I'm sure there are exceptions, such as houses built over sinkholes and houses in fancy neighbourhood that takes a dive, but in 99 cases out of 100, a house will be a money-maker."

3. Knowledge is everything.
To win a war, you must know the enemy inside out. To win a game, you must know the rules of the game inside out. To win the game of life, you must know the rules that govern our everday life. By reading books, and I mean real books, not newspaper, magazines and etc. you will gain the advantage of shortcutting your life experience by learning other people's experience who have gone through life before us. By knowing and learning other people's success and mistakes, we can make the right judgement beforehand and therefore leaping ahead successfully.

Knowing the strategies to financial freedom only gives you potential power. You can only be on the road to financial freedom and achieve it when you put knowledge to action. So, to achieve financial freedom, TAKE ACTION !

Going with the flow .. or Making the flow ?

Going with the flow? or making the flow as you go along? Successful people tend to have an attitude of delayed gratification. Every action they made takes into consideration of short term and long term gain. Think wisely of any actions you made as some actions would lead to instant gratification but in the long term will cause negative outcome. For example, the attitude of buying the latest brand new car or the latest gadget available in the market. This are in the short term gratification as you only can enjoy it in a short term duration only. The misery of losing a huge chunk of money will cause negative consequences in the long run. The money spent can eitherwise be invested in a long term gain that will last much more longer. Learn the attitude of the rich so that in return you will become one.

Plug the holes

Imagine that you are set to begin a new era of your life by embarking a journey towards financial freedom. Imagine that you have set sail and ready than ever to begin on the voyage of your life. You lift the anchor and cruised towards the open sea heading the destination that you dream of. But suddenly, hard fact hits you back as you realized that your ship is not moving as fast as you wanted it to be. Even worse, the ship starts to sink as you embark from the port. Why does this happen? As you check your ship, you then realized that your ship is full of holes and water is fast flooding your ship. Your exciting journey comes to an abrupt end as more and more water floods the ship.

How can this story related to your journey to financial freedom? The hole in the ship can be analogous to debts that you have acquired in life. A life with a lot of debt will either slow you down or cripple you to the ground. So, if you have a dream of living a life of financial freedom, the first thing you must do is to eliminate your debt or analogous to plugging the holes in your ship. A ship with no holes will cruise faster and better than a ship with even one hole. You will arrive to your destination even faster.

Sunken Ship

How to know that you are already in heavy debt? These are some indicators stated on the book by Azizi Ali, Millionaires are from a different planet!

1) Missing payments
2) Paying less than the agreed amount
3) Paying the minimum due
4) Busting your credit limit on the credit card
5) Having to borrow more money to settle old debt commitments
6) Not able to handle minor financial emergencies
7) Avoiding calls of creditors
8) Wondering how on earth are you going to get out of this mess

So, if you are having some or all of the symptoms as stated above, you are in big trouble. Having debt is like cruising the sea in a sunken ship. The more holes the ship have, the more deeper the ship will sank. Therefore, the first immediate step you should do is to try to find the biggest hole in the ship and plug it quickly. In the financial world, it means try to identify which debt carries the highest interest and eliminate it quickly.

Strategy for Financial Freedom

1. Start a side business as soon as possible.
The strategy is to create as many sources of income as possible. If you depend on just one stream of income only, the possibility of reaching financial freedom will not be as quickly as you want. Making money out of your hobby is the best way to start.

2. Buy at least one property.
Peter Lynch once stated in his book One Up on Wall Street "Before you do invest anything in stocks, you ought to consider buying a house, since a house, after all, is the one good investment that almost everyone manages to make. I'm sure there are exceptions, such as houses built over sinkholes and houses in fancy neighbourhood that takes a dive, but in 99 cases out of 100, a house will be a money-maker."

3. Knowledge is everything.
To win a war, you must know the enemy inside out. To win a game, you must know the rules of the game inside out. To win the game of life, you must know the rules that govern our everday life. By reading books, and I mean real books, not newspaper, magazines and etc. you will gain the advantage of shortcutting your life experience by learning other people's experience who have gone through life before us. By knowing and learning other people's success and mistakes, we can make the right judgement beforehand and therefore leaping ahead successfully.

Your Boss is the last person who wants you to be rich

There are many path for us to achieve financial freedom, but the majority of us choose the path of job security. How can we blame them. The education system was shaped to produce workers and not entrepreneurs. Many people realised that as the company their working with starts to prosper, the owner of the company is the one who eventually benefits and the employees usually are not much richer compared to the first day they started working there. The reality is that the boss is not responsible to make you rich, but their responsibility is just to make sure you got your paycheck by the end of the month. It is your responsibility to make sure that you will end up rich and not somebody else.

Either you control money, or it will control you

Actually, it does not matter how much you own, but it is really on how much do you spend. One critical step in your journey to financial freedom is to know your current status of money spending. How much do you pay yourself and how much do you pay others? How much do you save and how much do you spend it on debts? You can only know these information if you track your spending daily and summarise it all monthly. By doing this, you will have greater control on your money and be more alert on where did your money go. Get control of your money first before you can even think of becoming financially free.